Chapter IX: Part 9

This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere, they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a Nightingale_.

It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_ as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men. We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.

That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One. All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon, declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:

thou wast the deep glen--
Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonised tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.

Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought, and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia. Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow, and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the question,

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

And he answers:

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.

He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of passion, 'agony,' and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'

Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What, then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to Shelley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find, I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of Shelley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in 'Godwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him. Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human nature is finer';[19] and the passions and actions of man are finer than his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_ is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in _Prometheus Unbound_. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in a word, they are less beautiful, and

'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.

But the Titans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in _Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of strife.

Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather

that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst;

and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to _King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all 'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all; for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a worshipper of Beauty.

When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty. The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of passages would readily show, has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_ sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole, the gist of his attitude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as follows.

He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after truth.'[22] He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth 'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,' and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means, to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.[27]

We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the _Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness, perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is _his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound doctrine.

Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the words, 'If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel';[31] and in the words, 'When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess'; and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and of his description of the poetical character; 'It has no self; it is everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation.[32] A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He is continually in, for, and filling some other body.'[33] That is not a description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit of Shakespeare.

Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of Wordsworth's age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies, and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long as Wordsworth's or even as Byron's? It would be more than hazardous, I think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long poems.

1905.

NOTE

I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, and it would be easy to extend the list. These resemblances are largely due to similarities in the minds of the two poets, and to the action of a common influence on both. But I believe that, in addition, Keats was affected by the reading of _Alastor_, which appeared in 1816, while his own poem was begun in the spring of 1817.

The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and especially of the _Excursion_, published in 1814. There is a quotation, or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface to _Alastor_. The _Excursion_ is concerned in part with the danger of inactive and unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of course in Shelley's own way, is the subject of _Alastor_, which also contains phrases reminiscent of Wordsworth's poem. Its Preface too reminds one immediately of the _Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle_; of the main idea, and of the lines,

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.

As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how great, though qualified, was his admiration of the _Excursion_. These thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to 'dream,' and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the sorrows of others. They may have been suggested _only_ by Wordsworth; but we must remember that _Alastor_ had been published, and that Keats would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with _Endymion_ I am obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.

_Alastor_, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of a young poet, who is 'pure and tender-hearted,' but who, in his search for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge, keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. 'So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.' But a time comes when he thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his 'self-centred seclusion' now avenges itself. The 'spirit of sweet human love' vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly seeking the 'prototype' of the vision until he dies.

In _Endymion_ the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it, and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision, has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive, or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself; and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but for _Alastor_.

The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the descriptions in _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, Book I., of the dreamer's feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has fallen on the landscape, and of his 'eager' pursuit of the lost vision. Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious recollection of the passage in _Alastor_; but the conception is the same.[34]

Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of _Endymion_, Book III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon; and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon's beauty. The passage continues thus:

On some bright essence could I lean, and lull
Myself to immortality: I prest
Nature's soft pillow in a wakeful rest.
But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss--
My strange love came--Felicity's abyss!
She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.

In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the 'wakeful rest' here corresponds to the condition of the poet in _Alastor_ prior to the dream. 'So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed'; but when his 'strange love' comes these objects, like the objects of Endymion's earlier desires, no longer suffice him.

There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the effect of _Alastor_, and especially of its Preface, on Keats's mind. In the revised version of _Hyperion_, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him the reason (I italicise certain words):

'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade,
'But those to whom the _miseries of the world_
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
_All else_ who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'
'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,
Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
'Who _love their fellows_ even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good?'

If the reader compares with this the following passage from the Preface to _Alastor_, and if he observes the words I have italicised in it, he will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of the Preface was at work in Keats's mind. Shelley is distinguishing the self-centred seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish souls:

'The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. _All else_, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting _misery_ and loneliness _of the world_. Those who _love not their fellow-beings_, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.'[35]

I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the quotation on p. 236 from Keats's reply to Shelley's letter of invitation to his home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats puts the word "self-concentration" in inverted commas. He is not referring to anything in Shelley's letter, and he is not in the habit in the letters of using inverted commas except to mark a quotation. Without doubt, I think, he is referring from memory to the Preface to _Alastor_ and the phrase 'self-centred seclusion.' He has come to feel that this self-centred seclusion is _right_ for a poet like himself, and that the direct pursuit of philanthropy in poetry (which he supposes Shelley to advocate) is wrong. But this is another proof how much he had been influenced by Shelley's poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to conjecture that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why he had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might 'have his own unfettered scope.'[36]

If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory to Keats, either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ from him entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to conjecture that Shelley had read the _Ode to a Nightingale_ before he wrote the stanzas _To a Skylark_.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub. Gowans
& Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the initial of
the editor's name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of
punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually
without interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader
in making changes.

[2] Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year
as Carlyle.

[3] These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times,
but they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he
begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only 'Here lies
one whose name was writ in water,' he was thinking not merely of the
reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of
those unwritten poems, of which 'the faint conceptions' in happier
days used to 'bring the blood into his forehead.'

[4] LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV,
XVII, XVIII, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth's lines, 'The
cock is crowing.'

[5] LXI, C., LXVI, F.

[6] LVI, C., LXI, F.

[7] LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have
thanked Keats for his bishopric.

[8] From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C.,
CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV, F.

[9] 'Pain had no sting and pleasure's wreath no flower.'

[10] XCII, C., CVI, F.

[11] XIX, C., XXI, F.

[12] LIV, C., LIX, F.

[13] CXXXI, C., CLII, F.

[14] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word 'turn' in the last sentence but
two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads 'have.'

[15] Keats's use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton's
'pure intelligence of heaven.'

[16] XCII, C., CVI, F.

[17] CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a
passage ending with the words, 'they are able to "_consecrate
whate'er they look upon_."' Is not this a quotation from the _Hymn_:

Spirit of BEAUTY that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?

If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from
Shelley's poetry in the letters of Keats. The _Hymn_ had been
published in Hunt's _Examiner_, Jan., 1817.

[18] The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to
investigate Keats's mind, and the ideas that were trying to take
shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose _John Keats, a
Study_ (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the
attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges's treatment of these ideas is
masterly. To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was
dissatisfied with _Endymion_ even before he had finished it, he did
not at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too
much meaning into the myth. On _Alastor_ and _Endymion_ see further
the Note appended to this lecture.

[19] A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic
genius of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in
the rendering of Nature.

[20] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

[21] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F.

[22] XIX, C., XXI, F.

[23] XXXII, C., XXXIV, F.

[24] He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.

[25] L, C., LIII, F.

[26] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

[27] Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure
letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and
not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps
that if Keats's position, as formulated above, is accepted, the
question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a
beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether
it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.

[28] CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
the lecture.

[29] An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI,
F.

[30] I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn
the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage
in the revised _Hyperion_, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de
Selincourt's edition.

[31] XXII, C., XXV, F.

[32] That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.
235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a
reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that
great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of
the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.

[33] LXXVI, C., LXXX, F.

[34] The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well
be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:

She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.

Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.

[35] It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop
before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read 'the
world,--those who,' etc., so that the last two clauses would be
relative clauses co-ordinate with 'who love not their fellow-beings.'
Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting
because of the comma after 'fellow-beings,' and because the paragraph
is followed by the quotation ('those' should be 'they'),

The good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
Burn to the socket.

The good who die first correspond with the 'pure and tender-hearted'
who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet
in _Alastor_. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the
torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Shelley meant
this; but as he was in England when _Alastor_ was printed, he
probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that
he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the serious
misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.

[36] XVIII, C., XX, F.

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF[1]

Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff, Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters. All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds, suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar. But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this, that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But it no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.

The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?

1.

Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation. He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors open and the procession streams out.

FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!

PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!

FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!

KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.

CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?

FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But being awaked I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
Set on.

The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain. He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds, and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John, returns, and gives the order to his officers:

Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
Take all his company along with him.

Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the scene closes, and with it the drama.

What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when, without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story, as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died, and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,

Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
His heart is fracted and corroborate,

assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy love.'

Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff, having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3] But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow. Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.

Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations. You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth. And it succeeded. Henry _always_ succeeded.

You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff. For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_ disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_ disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II. was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say indignantly to Shakespeare, 'Why, you told us he was a sheep'; whereas, in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.