Classic Poem

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been
discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations;
by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.
Bridges. Lord Houghton's Life and Letters and Mr. Colvin's biography
both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no
further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume
invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its
author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he
has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats's
attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas
set forth in previous lectures on Shelley's views and on the age of
Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to
prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the
poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge
from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am
sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to
listen to quotations from them.


The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without
extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost
necessary to the understanding of Endymion and of some of the earlier
or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind
and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the
fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an
article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery
blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and
his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died
at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his
faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the
whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of
that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic
genius.

Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.
While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to
Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that
Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large
sense of the word.' And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the
'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of
judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his
criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary
circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter
mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.
In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the
magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these
letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never
dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he
hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the
inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron,
whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting
a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he
returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to
Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk
is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native
pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his
allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all
this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant
breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to
end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable
vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and
Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.

The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series
of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They
are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years
younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning. Keats, as
we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's
collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister
was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides,
passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened
with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,
avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he
left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and,
when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing
nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice
offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free
from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment
against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others
betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the
least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their
omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come
upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment
hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.

To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the
mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with
a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise
not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the
letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were
passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his
contemporaries at the same time of life. The letters remind us also
that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual
training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the
University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in
certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and
his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an
intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,
daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet
observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness,
and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the
mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of
abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very
serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an
original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by
flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep
thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of
personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind
of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.

Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at
least illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages I am
about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not
because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.
The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for
their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford,
staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man
whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'
he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies,
and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you
will see early in the next year.' It was Endymion: he wrote, it seems,
the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in
that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those
regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find
some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles,
cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how

The mouldering arch,
Shaded o'er by a larch,
Lives next door to Wilson the hosier

(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear
streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk
by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six
days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis,
and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your
eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become
naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we
have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and
talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave
religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the
best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts
which take their origin from the Lines written near Tintern Abbey.

About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a
walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the
letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they
exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.
The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':

Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little
from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of
the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand
in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is
precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpass our
fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet
of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before
me into that blue place among the mountains.

Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight
earlier from Carlisle:

After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school
holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from
France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and
whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and
whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like
mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish
figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and
beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that,
if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which
I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having
got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as
you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never
felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means
a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.

There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to
care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic
cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.

Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother
and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from
India whom he has just met:

She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich
Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I
am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am
not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can
feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very
'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,
she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet
she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two
distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,
theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and
ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian,
hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop
Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the
conquering feelings.

I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a
word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less
than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her
slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words
I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly
help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and
ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his
Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the
most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that
he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of
consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which,
if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have
readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss
Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as
probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would
still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to
destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics.
The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own
sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood
show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies
were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September,
1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the
question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his
wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood,
composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he
will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a
condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It
is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he
cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was
for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility
theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like
water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism
took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes
make great alterations.' I could easily find passages more
characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats
thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):

Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of
Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right
gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a
lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done,
without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has
taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor
Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian,
creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch
of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep
peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to
China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall;
Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its
horns against the