Life of John Keats Part 12

The gold had almost all fallen: in the pa.s.sage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:--

The Carian No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan, Into the vallies green together went.

Far wandering, they were perforce content To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree; Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

and again:--

At this he press'd His hands against his face, and then did rest His head upon a mossy hillock green, And so remain'd as he a corpse had been All the long day; save when he scantly lifted His eyes abroad, to see how shadows s.h.i.+fted With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary, Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose, And slowly as that very river flows, Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament: 'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall Before the serene father of them all Bows down his summer head below the west.

Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest, But at the setting I must bid adieu To her for the last time. Night will strew On the damp gra.s.s myriads of lingering leaves, And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'

That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow to the river's edge.

Opposite the last line in the ma.n.u.script of _Endymion_ Keats wrote the date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they started. _Endymion_ was not published until the following April, but inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain, experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Sad stories' in the original text of _Richard II_. The allusion is to the well-known incident of Sh.e.l.ley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.

[2] 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] _Paradise Lost_, viii, 288-311.

[5] _Ibid._ viii, 452-490.

[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard, in _Essays and Studies_ (Cambridge, 1912).

[7] If it is objected that _The Handful of Pleasant Delites_ is an excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in _Heliconia_, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his circle.

[8] Crewe MSS.

[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in _The Gem_, a periodical of the _Keepsake_ type then edited by Thomas Hood, and in Galignani's collective edition of the poems of Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are altered and read 'In a drear-nighted December,' and the fifth line is made to run, 'To know the change and feel it.' The first line thus gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress, giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and f.a.n.n.y Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to someone (conceivably, in the case of _The Gem_, Thomas Hood) editing him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version the poem is headed _Pain of Memory_, an apt t.i.tle, and while the first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs quite differently, as follows:--

But in the Soul's December The fancy backward strays, And darkly doth remember The hue of golden days, In woe the thought appalling Of bliss gone past recalling Brings o'er the heart a falling Not to be told in rhyme.

This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats himself. The 'Fallings from us, vanis.h.i.+ngs' of Wordsworth's _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_, may be responsible for the 'falling' in the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a common-place phrase little in Keats's manner, it is worth noting that the word occurs in Bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very pa.s.sage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).

CHAPTER VI

_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Invention and imagination--What the moon meant to Keats--Elizabethan Precedents--Fletcher and Drayton--Drayton's two versions--Debt of Keats to Drayton--Strain of allegory--The Soul's quest for beauty--Phantasmagoric adventures--The four elements theory--Its error--Book I. The exordium--The forest scene--Confession to Peona--Her expostulation--Endymion's defence--The ascending scale--The highest hope--Book II. The praise of love--Underworld marvels--The awakening of Adonis--Embraces in the Jasmine Bower--The quest renewed--New sympathies awakened--Book III. Exordium--Encounter with Glaucus--Glaucus relates his doom--The predestined deliverer--The deliverance--Meaning of the Parable--Its machinery explained--The happy sequel--Book IV. Address to the Muse--The Indian damsel--An ethereal flight--Olympian visions--Descent and renunciation--Distressful farewells--The mystery solved--A chastened victory--Above a.n.a.lysis justified.

Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of _Poems_, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:--

As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to talk until _Endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circ.u.mstance, and fill them with poetry--and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--G.o.d forbid that I should be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked--why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails--and Imagination the rudder.--Did our great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales.

This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence--But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till I shall have finished _Endymion_, and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made a Mockery at Hunt's--

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,--'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.'

But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest pa.s.sages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration of _Endymion_. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-G.o.ddess Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion[1] as made known to him through the earlier English poets.

The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply their trade by sea, river, or ca.n.a.l, also of wanderers and vagabonds generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her trans.m.u.ting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early poetry, and we have seen, in '_I stood tiptoe_,' what a range of beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to work on _Endymion_, we shall find her, by reason of that special glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself--what he calls in a letter 'the principle of Beauty in all things,' the principle which binds in a divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the moon-G.o.ddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of essential Beauty.

As to the literary a.s.sociations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the _Endimion_ of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with

--that night-wandering, pale, and watery star, When yawning dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky, Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits.

So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call--

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, And would not be awaked,

uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser's _Epithalamion_, or the reference to 'pale-changeful Cynthia' and her Endymion in Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_;[2] or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the _Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion pa.s.sage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats's ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?

Or whither go'st thou? Here be Woods as green As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet, As where smooth _Zephyrus_ plays on the fleet Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any; Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells, Arbors o'rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells, Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing, Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love, How the pale _Phoebe_ hunting in a Grove, First saw the Boy _Endymion_, from whose Eyes She took eternal fire that never dyes: How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light, To kiss her sweetest.

In regard to Drayton's handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called _Endimion and Phoebe_. This he never reprinted, but introduced pa.s.sages from it into a later piece in the same metre called the _Man in the Moone_. The volume containing Drayton's earlier _Endimion and Phoebe_ became so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton's poems in Smethwick's edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The _Man in the Moone_ is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superst.i.tions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediaeval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton's earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere.

The particular points in Keats's _Endymion_ where I seem to find suggestions from Drayton's _Man in the Moone_ are these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,--but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his G.o.ddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following pa.s.sage in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse):--

Endymion now forsakes All the delights that shepherds do prefer, And sets his mind so gen'rally on her That, all neglected, to the groves and springs, He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers The silver Naides bathe them in the brack.

Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back, Amongst the blue Nereides; and when, Weary of waters, G.o.ddess-like again She the high mountains actively a.s.says, And there amongst the light Oriades, That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort; Sometimes amongst those that with them comport, The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; And there she stays not; but incontinent Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, And with Endymion pleased that she saw, Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye, Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,--

the sequel is irrelevant, and the pa.s.sage so loose in grammar and construction that it matters not where it is broken off.

Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in Keats's third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and dilate before the beholder's eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment in a dozen lines[3] which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long pa.s.sage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and s.h.i.+pwreck and sea-birds and of men fis.h.i.+ng and fowling (crafts supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has been guessing in vain which among the Olympian G.o.ddesses is Endymion's lover.[4]

Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite pa.s.sages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats was beyond all his contemporaries,--and it is the cardinal fact to be borne in mind about him,--the lineal descendant and direct heir of the Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much it may revel in cla.s.sical ideas and a.s.sociations, of the cla.s.sical instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this time most familiar--Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne and practically all the Spenserians,--were men apt to conceive alike of Grecian myth and mediaeval romance as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself familiar with the details of cla.s.sic fable; and Sandys, in the fine Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs conform to a fixed mediaeval and Renaissance tradition by 'mythologizing'

his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of ill.u.s.trative parallel pa.s.sages but of interpretations half rationalist, half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten that among Keats's own contemporaries Sh.e.l.ley had in his first important poem, _Alastor_, set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme, and one shadowing forth, as we shall find that _Endymion_ shadows forth though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic soul in man.

The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail in _Endymion_ are obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic meaning harder to detect. Keats's letters referring to his poem contain only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it, and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon them wherever we can.

For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the fundamental idea of treating the pa.s.sion of Endymion for Cynthia as a type of the pa.s.sion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions, inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a pa.s.sion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with the pa.s.sion for that transcendental and essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.

In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out 'the one bare circ.u.mstance,' to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is something of Oriental bewilderment--an Arabian Night's jugglery with s.p.a.ce and time--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected.

Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de Selincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero's probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book being a.s.signed to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of the first book pa.s.ses on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,--the st.i.thy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the d.a.m.ned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics a.s.sumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.[5]

Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind him and

wander far In other regions, past the scanty bar To mortal steps,