Chapter XIX: Amiel 432 (14)

“It would be strange if I should find fault with you for reading
Isocrates; I did so myself twenty years ago, and in an edition at
least as bad as yours. The Panegyric, the De Pace, Areopagitic, and
Advice to Philip, are by far the noblest remains we have of this
writer, and equal to most things extant in the Greek tongue; but it
depends on your judgment to distinguish between his real and
occasional opinion of things, as he directly contradicts in one place
what he has advanced in another; for example, in the Panathenaic and
the De Pace, on the naval power of Athens; the latter of the two is
undoubtedly his own undisguised sentiment.”

After hearing Gray on Isocrates and Aristotle, let us hear him on Froissart:—

“I rejoice you have met with Froissart, he is the Herodotus of a
barbarous age; had he but had the luck of writing in as good a
language, he might have been immortal. His locomotive disposition (for
then there was no other way of learning things), his simple curiosity,
his religious credulity, were much like those of the old Grecian. When
you have _tant chevauché_ as to get to the end of him, there is
Monstrelet waits to take you up, and will set you down at Philip de
Commines; but previous to all these, you should have read
Villehardouin and Joinville.”

Those judgments, with their true and clear ring, evince the high quality of Gray’s mind, his power to command and use his learning. But Gray was a poet; let us hear him on a poet, on Shakespeare. We must place ourselves in the full midst of the eighteenth century and of its criticism: Gray’s friend, West, had praised Racine for using it in his dramas “the language of the times and that of the purest sort”; and he had added: “I will not decide what style is fit for our English stage, but I should rather choose one that bordered upon Cato, than upon Shakespeare.” Gray replies:—

“As to matter of style, I have this to say: The language of the age is
never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse,
where the thought does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.
Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to
which almost every one that has written has added something. In truth,
Shakespeare’s language is one of his principal beauties; and he has no
less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those
other great excellences you mention. Every word in him is a picture.
Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern
dramatics—

‘But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass’—

and what follows? To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the
case, our language is greatly degenerated.”

It is impossible for a poet to lay down the rules of his own art with more insight, soundness, and certainty. Yet at that moment in England there was perhaps not one other man, besides Gray, capable of writing the passage just quoted.

Gray’s quality of mind, then, we see; his quality of soul will no less bear inspection. His reserve, his delicacy, his distaste for many of the persons and things surrounding him in the Cambridge of that day,—“this silly, dirty place,” as he calls it,—have produced an impression of Gray as being a man falsely fastidious, finical, effeminate. But we have already had that grave testimony to him from the Master of Pembroke Hall: “The thoughts I have of him will last, and will be useful to me the few years I can expect to live.” And here is another to the same effect from a younger man, from Gray’s friend Nicholls:—

“You know,” he writes to his mother, from abroad, when he heard of
Gray’s death, “that I considered Mr. Gray as a second parent, that I
thought only of him, built all my happiness on him, talked of him
forever, wished him with me whenever I partook of any pleasure, and
flew to him for revenge whenever I felt any uneasiness. To whom now
shall I talk of all I have seen here? Who will teach me to read, to
think, to feel? I protest to you, that whatever I did or thought had a
reference to him. If I met with any chagrins, I comforted myself that
I had a treasure at home; if all the world had despised and hated me,
I should have thought myself perfectly recompensed in his friendship.
There remains only one loss more; if I lose you, I am left alone in
the world. At present I feel that I have lost half of myself.”

Testimonies such as these are not called forth by a fastidious effeminate weakling; they are not called forth, even, by mere qualities of mind; they are called forth by qualities of soul. And of Gray’s high qualities of soul, of his σπουδαιότης, his excellent seriousness, we may gather abundant proof from his letters. Writing to Mason who had just lost his father, he says:—

“I have seen the scene you describe, and know how dreadful it is; I
know too I am the better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless
things, and have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that
sad impression lasts; the deeper it is engraved the better.”

And again, on a like occasion to another friend:—

“He who best knows our nature (for he made us what we are) by such
afflictions recalls us from our wandering thoughts and idle merriment,
from the insolence of youth and prosperity, to serious reflection, to
our duty, and to himself; nor need we hasten to get rid of these
impressions. Time (by appointment of the same Power) will cure the
smart and in some hearts soon blot out all the traces of sorrow; but
such as preserve them longest (for it is partly left in our own power)
do perhaps best acquiesce in the will of the chastiser.”

And once more to Mason, in the very hour of his wife’s death; Gray was not sure whether or not his letter would reach Mason before the end:—

“If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon me; but if
the last struggle be over, if the poor object of your long anxieties
be no longer sensible to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow
me, at least an idea (for what could I do, were I present, more than
this?) to sit by you in silence and pity from my heart not her, who is
at rest, but you, who lose her. May he, who made us, the Master of our
pleasures and of our pains, support you! Adieu.”

Seriousness, character, was the foundation of things with him; where this was lacking he was always severe, whatever might be offered to him in its stead. Voltaire’s literary genius charmed him, but the faults of Voltaire’s nature he felt so strongly that when his young friend Nicholls was going abroad in 1771, just before Gray’s death, he said to him: “I have one thing to beg of you which you must not refuse.” Nicholls answered: “You know you have only to command; what is it?”—“Do not go to see Voltaire,” said Gray; and then added: “No one knows the mischief that man will do.” Nicholls promised compliance with Gray’s injunction; “But what,” he asked, “could a visit from me signify?”—“Every tribute to such a man signifies,” Gray answered. He admired Dryden, admired him, even, too much; had too much felt his influence as a poet. He told Beattie “that if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet;” and writing to Beattie afterwards he recurs to Dryden, whom Beattie, he thought, did not honor as a poet: “Remember Dryden,” he writes, “and be blind to all his faults.” Yes, his faults as a poet; but on the man Dryden, nevertheless, his sentence is stern. Speaking of the Poet-Laureateship, “Dryden,” he writes to Mason, “was as disgraceful to the office from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses.” Even where crying blemishes were absent, the want of weight and depth of character in a man deprived him, in Gray’s judgment, of serious significance. He says of Hume: “Is not that _naïveté_ and good-humor, which his admirers celebrate in him, owing to this, that he has continued all his days an infant, but one that has unhappily been taught to read and write?”

And with all this strenuous seriousness, a pathetic sentiment, and an element, likewise, of sportive and charming humor. At Keswick, by the lakeside on an autumn evening, he has the accent of the _Rêveries_, or of Obermann, or Wordsworth:—

“In the evening walked down alone to the lake by the side of Crow Park
after sunset and saw the solemn coloring of light draw on, the last
gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene of the
waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till
they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At a distance heard the
murmur of many waterfalls, not audible in the daytime. Wished for the
Moon, but she was _dark to me and silent hid in her vacant interlunar
cave_.”

Of his humor and sportiveness his delightful letters are full; his humor appears in his poetry too, and is by no means to be passed over there. Horace Walpole said that “Gray never wrote anything easily but things of humor; humor was his natural and original turn.”

Knowledge, penetration, seriousness, sentiment, humor, Gray had them all; he had the equipment and endowment for the office of poet. But very soon in his life appear traces of something obstructing, something disabling; of spirits failing, and health not sound; and the evil increases with years. He writes to West in 1737:—

“Low spirits are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me,
go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, pay visits
and will even affect to be jocose and force a feeble laugh with me;
but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid
company in the world.”

The tone is playful, Gray was not yet twenty-one. “Mine,” he tells West four or five years later, “mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather _Leucocholy_, for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state.” But, he adds in the same letter:—

“But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then
felt, that has something in it like Tertullian’s rule of faith, _Credo
quia impossibile est_; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything
that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and on the other hand
excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything
that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us! for none but he
and sunshiny weather can do it.”

Six or seven years pass, and we find him writing to Wharton from Cambridge thus:—

“The spirit of laziness (the spirit of this place) begins to possess
even me, that have so long declaimed against it. Yet has it not so
prevailed, but that I feel that discontent with myself, that _ennui_,
that ever accompanies it in its beginnings. Time will settle my
conscience, time will reconcile my languid companion to me; we shall
smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together, we shall have our
little jokes, like other people, and our long stories. Brandy will
finish what port began; and, a month after the time, you will see in
some corner of a London Evening Post, ‘Yesterday died the Rev. Mr.
John Gray, Senior-Fellow of Clare Hall, a facetious companion, and
well-respected by all who knew him.’”

The humorous advertisement ends, in the original letter, with a Hogarthian touch which I must not quote. Is it Leucocholy or is it Melancholy which predominates here? at any rate, this entry in his diary, six years later, is black enough:—

“_Insomnia crebra, atque expergiscenti surdus quidam doloris sensus;
frequens etiam in regione sterni oppressio, et cardialgia gravis, fere
sempiterna._”

And in 1757 he writes to Hurd:—

“To be employed is to be happy. This principle of mine (and I am
convinced of its truth) has, as usual, no influence on my practice. I
am alone, and _ennuyé_ to the last degree, yet do nothing. Indeed I
have no excuse; my health (which you have so kindly inquired after) is
not extraordinary. It is no great malady, but several little ones,
that seem brewing no good to me.”

From thence to the end his languor and depression, though still often relieved by occupation and travel, keep fatally gaining on him. At last the depression became constant, became mechanical. “Travel I must,” he writes to Dr. Wharton, “or cease to exist. Till this year I hardly knew what _mechanical_ low spirits were; but now I even tremble at an east wind.” Two months afterwards he died.

What wonder, that with this troublous cloud, throughout the whole term of his manhood, brooding over him and weighing him down, Gray, finely endowed though he was, richly stored with knowledge though he was, yet produced so little, found no full and sufficient utterance, “_never_,” as the Master of Pembroke Hall said, “_spoke out_.” He knew well enough, himself, how it was with him.

“My _verve_ is at best, you know” (he writes to Mason), “of so delicate a constitution, and has such weak nerves, as not to stir out of its chamber above three days in a year.” And to Horace Walpole he says: “As to what you say to me civilly, that I ought to write more, I will be candid, and avow to you, that till fourscore and upward, whenever the humor takes me, I will write; because I like it, and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much, it is because I cannot.” How simply said, and how truly also! Fain would a man like Gray speak out if he could, he “likes himself better” when he speaks out; if he does not speak out, “it is because I cannot.”

Bonstetten, that mercurial Swiss who died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven, having been younger and livelier from his sixtieth year to his eightieth than at any other time in his life, paid a visit in his early days to Cambridge, and saw much of Gray, to whom he attached himself with devotion. Gray, on his part, was charmed with his young friend; “I never saw such a boy,” he writes; “our breed is not made on this model.” Long afterwards Bonstetten published his reminiscences of Gray. “I used to tell Gray,” he says, “about my life and my native country, but _his_ life was a sealed book to me; he never would talk of himself, never would allow me to speak to him of his poetry. If I quoted lines of his to him, he kept silence like an obstinate child. I said to him sometimes: ‘Will you have the goodness to give me an answer?’ But not a word issued from his lips.” _He never spoke out._ Bonstetten thinks that Gray’s life was poisoned by an unsatisfied sensibility, was withered by his having never loved; by his days being passed in the dismal cloisters of Cambridge, in the company of a set of monastic bookworms, “whose existence no honest woman ever came to cheer.” Sainte-Beuve, who was much attracted and interested by Gray, doubts whether Bonstetten’s explanation of him is admissible; the secret of Gray’s melancholy he finds rather in the sterility of his poetic talent, “so distinguished, so rare, but so stinted;” in the poet’s despair at his own unproductiveness.

But to explain Gray, we must do more than allege his sterility, as we must look further than to his reclusion at Cambridge. What caused his sterility? Was it his ill-health, his hereditary gout? Certainly we will pay all respect to the powers of hereditary gout for afflicting us poor mortals. But Goethe, after pointing out that Schiller, who was so productive, was “almost constantly ill,” adds the true remark that it is incredible how much the spirit can do, in these cases, to keep up the body. Pope’s animation and activity through all the course of what he pathetically calls “that long disease, my life,” is an example presenting itself signally, in Gray’s own country and time, to confirm what Goethe here says. What gave the power to Gray’s reclusion and ill-health to induce his sterility?

The reason, the indubitable reason as I cannot but think it, I have already given elsewhere. Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul. As regards literary production, the task of the eighteenth century in England was not the poetic interpretation of the world, its task was to create a plain, clear, straightforward, efficient prose. Poetry obeyed the bent of mind requisite for the due fulfilment of this task of the century. It was intellectual, argumentative, ingenious; not seeing things in their truth and beauty, not interpretative. Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining and fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not fully educe and enjoy them; the want of a genial atmosphere, the failure of sympathy in his contemporaries, were too great. Born in the same year with Milton, Gray would have been another man; born in the same year with Burns, he would have been another man. A man born in 1608 could profit by the larger and more poetic scope of the English spirit in the Elizabethan age; a man born in 1759 could profit by that European renewing of men’s minds of which the great historical manifestation is the French Revolution. Gray’s alert and brilliant young friend, Bonstetten, who would explain the void in the life of Gray by his having never loved, Bonstetten himself loved, married, and had children. Yet at the age of fifty he was bidding fair to grow old, dismal and torpid like the rest of us, when he was roused and made young again for some thirty years, says M. Sainte-Beuve, by the events of 1789. If Gray, like Burns, had been just thirty years old when the French Revolution broke out, he would have shown, probably, productiveness and animation in plenty. Coming when he did, and endowed as he was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose full spiritual flowering was impossible. The same thing is to be said of his great contemporary, Butler, the author of the _Analogy_. In the sphere of religion, which touches that of poetry, Butler was impelled by the endowment of his nature to strive for a profound and adequate conception of religious things, which was not pursued by his contemporaries, and which at that time, and in that atmosphere of mind, was not fully attainable. Hence, in Butler too, a dissatisfaction, a weariness, as in Gray; “great labor and weariness, great disappointment, pain and even vexation of mind.” A sort of spiritual east wind was at that time blowing; neither Butler nor Gray could flower. They _never spoke out_.

Gray’s poetry was not only stinted in quantity by reason of the age wherein he lived, it suffered somewhat in quality also. We have seen under what obligation to Dryden Gray professed himself to be—“if there was any excellence in his numbers, he had learned it wholly from that great poet.” It was not for nothing that he came when Dryden had lately “embellished,” as Johnson says, English poetry; had “found it brick and left it marble.” It was not for nothing that he came just when “the English ear,” to quote Johnson again, “had been accustomed to the mellifluence of Pope’s numbers, and the diction of poetry had grown more splendid.” Of the intellectualities, ingenuities, personifications, of the movement and diction of Dryden and Pope, Gray caught something, caught too much. We have little of Gray’s poetry, and that little is not free from the faults of his age. Therefore it was important to go for aid, as we did, to Gray’s life and letters, to see his mind and soul there, and to corroborate from thence that high estimate of his quality which his poetry indeed calls forth, but does not establish so amply and irresistibly as one could desire.

For a just criticism it does, however, clearly establish it. The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul. The difference between the two kinds of poetry is immense. They differ profoundly in their modes of language, they differ profoundly in their modes of evolution. The poetic language of our eighteenth century in general is the language of men composing _without their eye on the object_, as Wordsworth excellently said of Dryden; language merely recalling the object, as the common language of prose does, and then dressing it out with a certain smartness and brilliancy for the fancy and understanding. This is called “splendid diction.” The evolution of the poetry of our eighteenth century is likewise intellectual; it proceeds by ratiocination, antithesis, ingenious turns and conceits. This poetry is often eloquent, and always, in the hands of such masters as Dryden and Pope, clever; but it does not take us much below the surface of things, it does not give us the emotion of seeing things in their truth and beauty. The language of genuine poetry, on the other hand, is the language of one composing with his eye on the object; its evolution is that of a thing which has been plunged in the poet’s soul until it comes forth naturally and necessarily. This sort of evolution is infinitely simpler than the other, and infinitely more satisfying; the same thing is true of the genuine poetic language likewise. But they are both of them also infinitely harder of attainment; they come only from those who, as Emerson says, “live from a great depth of being.”

Goldsmith disparaged Gray who had praised his _Traveller_, and indeed in the poem on the _Alliance of Education and Government_ had given him hints which he used for it. In retaliation let us take from Goldsmith himself a specimen of the poetic language of the eighteenth century.

“No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale”—

there is exactly the poetic diction of our prose century! rhetorical, ornate,—and, poetically, quite false. Place beside it a line of genuine poetry, such as the

“In cradle of the rude, imperious surge

of Shakespeare; and all its falseness instantly becomes apparent.

Dryden’s poem on the death of Mrs. Killigrew is, says Johnson, “undoubtedly the noblest ode that our language ever has produced.” In this vigorous performance Dryden has to say, what is interesting enough, that not only in poetry did Mrs. Killigrew excel, but she excelled in painting also. And thus he says it—

“To the next realm she stretch’d her sway,
For Painture near adjoining lay—
A plenteous province and alluring prey.
A Chamber of Dependencies was framed
(As conquerors will never want pretence
When arm’d, to justify the offence),
And the whole fief, in right of Poetry, she claim’d.”

The intellectual, ingenious, superficial evolution of poetry of this
school could not be better illustrated. Place beside it Pindar’s

αἰὼν ὰσφαλὴς
οὐχ ἔγεντ’ οὔτ’ Αἰακίδᾳ παρὰ Πηλεῖ
οὔτε παρ’ ἀντιθέῳ Κάδμῳ ...

“A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor
of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all
mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses
sing,—on the mountain the one heard them, the other in seven-gated
Thebes.”

There is the evolution of genuine poetry, and such poetry kills Dryden’s the moment it is put near it.

Gray’s production was scanty, and scanty, as we have seen, it could not but be. Even what he produced is not always pure in diction, true in evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he is alone, or almost alone (for Collins has something of the like merit) in his age. Gray said himself that “the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.” Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray’s may be said to have reached, in style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution also of such a piece as his _Progress of Poesy_ must be accounted not less noble and sound than its style.

IV.

JOHN KEATS.[36]

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Footnote 36:

Prefixed to the Selection from Keats in Ward’s _English Poets_, vol.
iv. 1880.

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Poetry, according to Milton’s famous saying, should be “simple, sensuous, impassioned.” No one can question the eminency, in Keat’s poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” There is the thesis, in another, “that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” There is Haydon’s story of him, how “he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory—his own expression.” One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. “He had no decision of character,” Haydon adds; “no object upon which to direct his great powers.”

Character and self-control, the _virtus verusque labor_ so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon’s portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon’s anecdotes. The editor of Haydon’s journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_ I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.

“You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as
though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the
hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far
from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will
it? I have no limit now to my love.... Your note came in just here. I
cannot be happier away from you. ’Tis richer than an Argosy of
Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that
Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder
no more—I could be martyred for my Religion—Love is my religion—I
could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are
its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist;
and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you
I have endeavoured often ‘to reason against the reasons of my Love.’ I
can do that no more—the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I
cannot breathe without you.”

A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who “is passion’s slave.” Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats’s love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained sort. That many who are themselves also badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their “lovely and beloved Keats,” does not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of

‘Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast.’

This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his poetic powers could not, whatever his strain, but show his talent in it. But he has something more, and something better. We who believe Keats to have been by his promise, at any rate, if not fully by his performance, one of the very greatest of English poets, and who believe also that a merely sensuous man cannot either by promise or by performance be a very great poet, because poetry interprets life, and so large and noble a part of life is outside of such a man’s ken,—we cannot but look for signs in him of something more than sensuousness, for signs of character and virtue. And indeed the elements of high character Keats undoubtedly has, and the effort to develop them; the effort is frustrated and cut short by misfortune, and disease, and time, but for the due understanding of Keats’s worth the recognition of this effort, and of the elements on which it worked, is necessary.

Lord Houghton, who praises very discriminatingly the poetry of Keats, has on his character also a remark full of discrimination. He says: “The faults of Keats’s disposition were precisely the contrary of those attributed to him by common opinion.” And he gives a letter written after the death of Keats by his brother George, in which the writer, speaking of the fantastic _Johnny Keats_ invented for common opinion by Lord Byron and by the reviewers, declares indignantly: “John was the very soul of manliness and courage, and as much like the Holy Ghost as _Johnny Keats_.” It is important to note this testimony, and to look well for whatever illustrates and confirms it.

Great weight is laid by Lord Houghton on such a direct profession of faith as the following: “That sort of probity and disinterestedness,” Keats writes to his brothers, “which such men as Bailey possess, does hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this world.” Lord Houghton says that “never have words more effectively expressed the conviction of the superiority of virtue above beauty than those.” But merely to make a profession of faith of the kind here made by Keats is not difficult; what we should rather look for is some evidence of the instinct for character, for virtue, passing into man’s life, passing into his work.

Signs of virtue, in the true and large sense of the word, the instinct for virtue passing into the life of Keats and strengthening it, I find in the admirable wisdom and temper of what he says to his friend Bailey on the occasion of a quarrel between Reynolds and Haydon:—

“Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard
of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting
forever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is
unfortunate; men should bear with each other; there lives not the man
who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The
best of men have but a portion of good in them.... The sure way,
Bailey, is first to know a man’s faults, and then be passive. If,
after that, he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no
power to break the link. Before I felt interested in either Reynolds
or Haydon, I was well read in their faults; yet, knowing them, I have
been cementing gradually with both. I have an affection for them both,
for reasons almost opposite; and to both must I of necessity cling,
supported always by the hope that when a little time, a few years,
shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, I may be able to bring
them together.”

Butler has well said that “endeavoring to enforce upon our own minds a practical sense of virtue, or to beget in others that practical sense of it which a man really has himself, is a virtuous _act_.” And such an “endeavoring” is that of Keats in those words written to Bailey. It is more than mere words; so justly thought and so discreetly urged as it is, it rises to the height of a virtuous _act_. It is proof of character.

The same thing may be said of some words written to his friend Charles Brown, whose kindness, willingly exerted whenever Keats chose to avail himself of it, seemed to free him from any pressing necessity of earning his own living. Keats felt that he must not allow this state of things to continue. He determined to set himself to “fag on as others do” at periodical literature, rather than to endanger his independence and his self-respect; and he writes to Brown:—

“I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in
all difficulties. This very habit would be the parent of idleness and
difficulties. You will see it is a duty I owe to myself to break the
neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence—make no exertion. At the
end of another year you shall applaud me, not for verses, but for
conduct.”

He had not, alas, another year of health before him when he announced that wholesome resolve; it then wanted but six months of the day of his fatal attack. But in the brief time allowed to him he did what he could to keep his word.

What character, again, what strength and clearness of judgment, in his criticism of his own productions, of the public, and of the “literary circles!” His words after the severe reviews of _Endymion_ have often been quoted; they cannot be quoted too often:—

“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of
beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My
own criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what
_Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could possibly inflict; and also, when
I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my
own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is
perfectly right in regard to the “slip-shod Endymion.” That it is so
is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it
is as good as I had power to make it by myself.”

And again, as if he had foreseen certain of his admirers gushing over him, and was resolved to disengage his responsibility:—

“I have done nothing, except for the amusement of a few people who
refine upon their feelings till anything in the un-understandable way
will go down with them. I have no cause to complain, because I am
certain anything really fine will in these days be felt. I have no
doubt that if I had written _Othello_ I should have been cheered. I
shall go on with patience.”

Young poets almost inevitably overrate what they call “the might of poesy,” and its power over the world which now is. Keats is not a dupe on this matter any more than he is a dupe about the merit of his own performances:—

“I have no trust whatever in poetry. I don’t wonder at it; the marvel
is to me how people read so much of it.”

His attitude towards the public is that of a strong man, not of a weakling avid of praise, and made to “be snuff’d out by an article”:—

“I shall ever consider the public as debtors to me for verses, not
myself to them for admiration, which can I do without.”

And again, in a passage where one may perhaps find fault with the capital letters, but surely with nothing else:—

“I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the public or to
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty,
and the Memory of great Men.... I would be subdued before my friends,
and thank them for subduing me; but among multitudes of men I have no
feel of stooping; I hate the idea of humility to them. I never wrote
one single line of poetry with the least shadow of thought about their
opinion. Forgive me for vexing you, but it eases me to tell you; I
could not live without the love of my friends: I would jump down Etna
for any great public good—but I hate a mawkish popularity. I cannot be
subdued before them. My glory would be to daunt and dazzle the
thousand jabberers about pictures and books.”

Against these artistic and literary “jabberers,” amongst whom Byron fancied Keats, probably, to be always living, flattering them and flattered by them, he has yet another outburst:—

“Just so much as I am humbled by the genius above my grasp, am I
exalted and look with hate and contempt upon the literary world. Who
could wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous, who
are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?”

And he loves Fanny Brawne the more, he tells her, because he believes that she has liked him for his own sake and for nothing else. “I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

There is a tone of too much bitterness and defiance in all this, a tone which he with great propriety subdued and corrected when he wrote his beautiful preface to _Endymion_. But the thing to be seized is, that Keats had flint and iron in him, that he had character; that he was, as his brother George says, “as much like the Holy Ghost as _Johnny Keats_,”—as that imagined sensuous weakling, the delight of the literary circles of Hampstead.

It is a pity that Byron, who so misconceived Keats, should never have known how shrewdly Keats, on the other hand, had characterized _him_, as “a fine thing” in the sphere of “the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical.” But indeed nothing is more remarkable in Keats than his clear-sightedness, his lucidity; and lucidity is in itself akin to character and to high and severe work. In spite, therefore, of his overpowering feeling for beauty, in spite of his sensuousness, in spite of his facility, in spite of his gift of expression, Keats could say resolutely:—

“I know nothing, I have read nothing; and I mean to follow Solomon’s
directions: ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ There is but one way
for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will
pursue it.”

And of Milton, instead of resting in Milton’s incomparable phrases, Keats could say, although indeed all the while “looking upon fine phrases,” as he himself tells us, “like a lover”—

“Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of
ease and pleasure, poetical luxury; and with that, it appears to me,
he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his
self-respect and feeling of duty performed; but there was working in
him, as it were, that same sort of thing which operates in the great
world to the end of a prophecy’s being accomplished. Therefore he
devoted himself rather to the ardors than the pleasures of song,
solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine.”

In his own poetry, too, Keats felt that place must be found for “the ardors rather than the pleasures of song,” although he was aware that he was not yet ripe for it—

“But, my flag is not unfurl’d
On the Admiral-staff, and to philosophize
I dare not yet.”

Even in his pursuit of “the pleasures of song,” however, there is that stamp of high work which is akin to character, which is character passing into intellectual production. “_The best sort of poetry_—that,” he truly says, “is all I care for, all I live for.” It is curious to observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate poet’s regard, love and women. He speaks of “the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time.” He confesses “a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats—they never see themselves dominant;” and he can understand how the unpopularity of his poems may be in part due to “the offense which the ladies,” not unnaturally “take at him” from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can write “a flint-worded letter,” when his “mind is heaped to the full” with poetry:—

“I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should
have so unsoftened, so hard a mind as to forget them; forget the
brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain.... My
heart seems now made of iron—I could not write a proper answer to an
invitation to Idalia.”

The truth is that “the yearning passion for the Beautiful,” which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion, of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. It is “connected and made one,” as Keats declares that in his case it was, “with the ambition of the intellect.” It is, as he again says, “the mighty _abstract idea_ of Beauty in all things.” And in his last days Keats wrote: “If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory; _but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things_, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.” He _has_ made himself remembered, and remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be; and he has done it by having “loved the principle of beauty in all things.”

For to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. “What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,” he says in prose; and in immortal verse he has said the same thing—

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have deep need to know it. And with beauty goes not only truth, joy goes with her also; and this too Keats saw and said, as in the famous first line of his _Endymion_ it stands written—

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

It is no small thing to have so loved the principle of beauty as to perceive the necessary relation of beauty with truth, and of both with joy. Keats was a great spirit, and counts for far more than many even of his admirers suppose, because this just and high perception made itself clear to him. Therefore a dignity and a glory shed gleams over his life, and happiness, too, was not a stranger to it. “Nothing startles me beyond the moment,” he says; “the setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” But he had terrible bafflers,—consuming disease and early death. “I think,” he writes to Reynolds, “If I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox’s, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to the height; I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.” He had against him even more than this; he had against him the blind power which we call Fortune. “O that something fortunate,” he cries in the closing months of his life, “had ever happened to me or my brothers!—then I might hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a habit.” So baffled and so sorely tried,—while laden, at the same time, with a mighty formative thought requiring health, and many days, and favoring circumstances, for its adequate manifestation,—what wonder if the achievement of Keats be partial and incomplete?

Nevertheless, let and hindered as he was, and with a short term and imperfect experience,—“young,” as he says of himself, “and writing at random, straining after particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion,”—notwithstanding all this, by virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry, that in one of the two great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare. “The tongue of Kean,” he says in an admirable criticism of that great actor and of his enchanting elocution, “the tongue of Kean must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless. There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice; in _Richard_, ‘Be stirring with the lark tomorrow, gentle Norfolk!’ comes from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns.” This magic, this “indescribable _gusto_ in the voice,” Keats himself, too, exhibits in his poetic expression. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. “I think,” he said humbly, “I shall be among the English poets after my death.” He is; he is with Shakespeare.

For the second great half of poetic interpretation, for that faculty of moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare, and is informed by him with the same power of beauty as his naturalistic interpretation, Keats was not ripe. For the architectonics of poetry, the faculty which presides at the evolution of works like the _Agamemnon_ or _Lear_, he was not ripe. His _Endymion_, as he himself well saw, is a failure, and his _Hyperion_, fine things as it contains, is not a success. But in shorter things, where the matured power of moral interpretation, and the high architectonics which go with complete poetic development, are not required, he is perfect. The poems which follow prove it,—prove it far better by themselves than anything which can be said about them will prove it. Therefore I have chiefly spoken here of the man, and of the elements in him which explain the production of such work. Shakespearian work it is; not imitative, indeed, of Shakespeare, but Shakespearian, because its expression has that rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master. To show such work is to praise it. Let us now end by delighting ourselves with a fragment of it, too broken to find a place among the pieces which follow, but far too beautiful to be lost. It is a fragment of an ode for May-day. O might I, he cries to May, O might I

“... thy smiles
Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,
By bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan!
O, give me their old vigor, and unheard
Save of the quiet primrose, and the span
Of heaven, and few years,
Rounded by thee, my song should die away,
Content as theirs,
Rich in the simple worship of a day!”

V.

WORDSWORTH.[37]

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Footnote 37:

The preface to _The Poems of Wordsworth_, chosen and edited by Matthew
Arnold, 1879.

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I remember hearing Lord Macaulay say, after Wordsworth’s death, when subscriptions were being collected to found a memorial of him, that ten years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone, to do honor to Wordsworth, than was now raised all through the country. Lord Macaulay had, as we know, his own heightened and telling way of putting things, and we must always make allowance for it. But probably it is true that Wordsworth has never, either before or since, been so accepted and popular, so established in possession of the minds of all who profess to care for poetry, as he was between the years 1830 and 1840, and at Cambridge. From the very first, no doubt, he had his believers and witnesses. But I have myself heard him declare that, for he knew not how many years, his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his shoe-strings. The poetry-reading public was very slow to recognize him, and was very easily drawn away from him. Scott effaced him with this public, Byron effaced him.

The death of Byron, seemed, however, to make an opening for Wordsworth. Scott, who had for some time ceased to produce poetry himself, and stood before the public as a great novelist; Scott, too genuine himself not to feel the profound genuineness of Wordsworth, and with an instinctive recognition of his firm hold on nature and of his local truth, always admired him sincerely, and praised him generously. The influence of Coleridge upon young men of ability was then powerful, and was still gathering strength; this influence told entirely in favor of Wordsworth’s poetry. Cambridge was a place where Coleridge’s influence had great action, and where Wordsworth’s poetry, therefore, flourished especially. But even amongst the general public its sale grew large, the eminence of its author was widely recognized, and Rydal Mount became an object of pilgrimage. I remember Wordsworth relating how one of the pilgrims, a clergyman, asked him if he had ever written anything besides the _Guide to the Lakes_. Yes, he answered modestly, he had written verses. Not every pilgrim was a reader, but the vogue was established and the stream of pilgrims came.

Mr. Tennyson’s decisive appearance dates from 1842. One cannot say that he effaced Wordsworth as Scott and Byron had effaced him. The poetry of Wordsworth had been so long before the public, the suffrage of good judges was so steady and so strong in its favor, that by 1842 the verdict of posterity, one may almost say, had been already pronounced, and Wordsworth’s English fame was secure. But the vogue, the ear and applause of the great body of poetry-readers, never quite thoroughly perhaps his, he gradually lost more and more, and Mr. Tennyson gained them. Mr. Tennyson drew to himself, and away from Wordsworth, the poetry-reading public, and the new generations. Even in 1850, when Wordsworth died, this diminution of popularity was visible, and occasioned the remark of Lord Macaulay which I quoted at starting.