a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished," and remarks in a letter, "I have most likely but moved into the go cart from the leading strings. If it serves me as a pioneer I ought to be content." Yet notwithstanding its failure as a whole, its obscurity, its vicious lack of reticence, its banality, it is redeemed by passages of glowing beauty which take their place with anything of their kind in our literature. Nowhere have the subtle influence of nature on the imaginative mind and a mystic yearning after her illimitable beauty found more impassioned expression, and however often the elaborate treatment of the main characters may fail in truth to life as a whole and to the Greek conceptions in particular, no poet has ever more fully possessed that creative power by which in a few lines, at times in a mere phrase, he can penetrate to the heart of a story long since dead and with magic touch bring it back to life, so that we see it in its essential and vital truth. That same spirit of old piety which breathes in the allusion to Apollo's shrine when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet the same tender fancy which pictures Ariadne as become a vintager for love of Bacchus, and recalls the music of "Dryope's lone lulling of her child," finds ample scope throughout the poem for revealing the universal significance of ancient legend. "I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness: for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewel." So wrote Keats in his preface to Endymion in the April of 1818. A little later he tells a friend that he is meditating on the characters of Saturn and Ops and before the end of the year he was at work upon Hyperion. The subject that he had chosen was well calculated to express most clearly his essential kinship with the thought of Greece. But the wonderful advance in style and treatment was due entirely to his subservience to a stricter model, and the change from Endymion to Hyperion is not the change from a romance to a classical epic, but the change from the influence d of the Spenserians to the severer school of Milton. Milton's early poems had long been known to him; now for the first time he came under the potent spell of Paradise Lost. And now he learned his first great lesson in artistic concentration, and constructed his poem on a plan which bears obvious resemblance to Milton's Epic. His style, too, was deeply affected. Many a Miltonic echo can be caught in Hyperion, and in his vocabulary Keats replaces the limp and effeminate coinage and the exuberant wordiness of his former work by a virility of language and a stern compression of all superfluity. The example of Milton gave just the necessary curb to the faults natural to a poet of Keats's temperament, and he gained a strength and a dignity, something, as Hunt remarked, Of the large utterance of the early gods, for which Endymion may be searched in vain. It is only by the side of his great and unapproachable model that the blank verse of Hyperion seems at times to be monotonous, that the debate of the fallen Titans seems to lack something both in subtlety and passion; and if Keats cannot rival either the majesty or the stupendous range both of thought and melody that is the wonder of Paradise Lost, there is in Hyperion that glamour of romance, that same exquisite reading of the magic of nature which gave to Endymion its priceless charm. Not classical, certainly, nor Miltonic either, are the lines that tell how the Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, or the picture of Hyperion gazing into the night- or the picture of the fallen Titans like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night, or the incomparable opening of the whole poem; but for such as these, in some moods at least, we would gladly give all but the noblest lines of Paradise Lost. But as Keats proceeded with his work he became more and more convinced that the model which he had chosen was not suited to his genius. "I have given up Hyperion,” he writes; "there are too many Miltonic inversions in it-Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up."1 Milton's classicism of style, though it was the natural expression of a scholar to whom Greek and Latin were as familiar as his mother tongue, could never be the language of a purely native poet, and much as he admired the form in which Milton had cast the work, it was too much aloof from his own sphere of methods, and so he broke off his poem abruptly just as he approached the central conception of the whole. Later, when the hand of death was already laid upon him, he took up Hyperion once more and attempted to remodel it in the form of an allegorical vision expounded to him by one of the fallen goddesses. Criticism is right in pointing out that the attempt was not successful, that he spoilt many lines in the process, and that the Fall of Hyperion, as it is called, shows a distinct decline of artistic power. But it is at least a question whether if his powers had remained at their height, he would not have done the same thing and succeeded, whether he would not have turned what is, after all, a magnificent literary tour de force, into a poem fully expressive of the essential qualities of his own peculiar genius. For an artist is never at his highest when he is forcing his art into an uncongenial channel, and if he 1Letter to Reynolds, 22nd September, 1819. In the same strain he wrote to his brother: "The Paradise Lost, though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language. It should be kept as it is, unique, a curiosity, a beautiful and grand curiosity, the most remarkable production of the world; a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations. The purest English, I think—or what ought to be purest-is Chatterton's. The language had existed long enough to be entirely incorrupted of Chaucer's Gallicisms, and still the old words are used. Chatterton's language is entirely northern. I prefer the native music of it to Milton's, cut by feet. I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone." Letter to Geo. Keats, September, 1819. spoiled some of his earlier lines it must also be remembered that some of those which he added in the Vision are among the finest that he ever wrote. For Keats, romantic to the core, could find no freedom in the restraint of a classical or even a Miltonic Epic. For his model in Lamia he turned to the Fables of Dryden, the best modern example of the use of the heroic couplet in narrative verse. The versification and style of Lamia give clear evidence that he had made a careful study of Dryden. In contrast with the earlier couplets of the 1817 volume and of Endymion his employment of the run-on line and the feminine and weak endings is now carefully controlled, and he trusts to a careful use of the triplet and the Alexandrine to give his verse the necessary variety. Moreover, without direct imitation, such as would allow a comparison of special passages in the two poets, there are lines in Lamia which have caught with great effect the ring and the rapidity which are essential characteristics of Dryden's best work. Descriptions such as that of the nymph— At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured or of the angry god of love, who jealous grown of so complete a pair, Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar, or still more, perhaps, of the song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres, While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting fires, suggest the rhythmical use of language peculiarly remarkable in Dryden, whilst they are touched with a glowing imagination which is far beyond his reach. Equally evident is the influence of Dryden on the construction of the poem. The story instead of being turgid, involved, incomprehensible, is related simply and effectively with emphasis only upon the more important dramatic effects. We pass from the finding of the snake by Hermes, her metamorphosis (with the skilfully introduced digression to explain the antecedent action) and her meeting with Lycius, to the arrival at Corinth, the preparation for the fatal banquet and the tragic close. It is a masterpiece of narrative, in construction not equalled elsewhere by Keats, whilst the conflict of emotion between the worship of beauty and the calls of higher reason gives a passionate force to the whole. But his close study of Dryden was perhaps responsible for the recurrence of certain faults which mar the effect of an otherwise perfect work of art. His desire to attain to the masterly ease and fluency of Dryden's manner led him into frequent false rhymes and to some return of the unhappy characteristics of his early vocabulary. And the careless levity expected of a Restoration poet in his treatment of love, and rarely present in Dryden without the compensating charm of urbanity and airy grace, appears in Keats in the form of that vulgarity which he seemed elsewhere to have out-grown. The execrable taste of the description of a woman's charms (i. 329-339) and the feeble cynicism of the opening to the second book, both, in all probability, traceable to this cause, are alien to the whole spirit in which Lamia was conceived. It is where Lamia is farthest removed from the Greek spirit, farthest too from the spirit of Dryden, that it is most characteristic of Keats. The brilliant picture of midnight Corinth, the glowing magnificence of the phantasmal palace are triumphs of romantic description; nor is there wanting to the poem that magical felicity of phrase, that singular power over the deeply charged epithet, something, too, of the mood which loves "to touch the strings into a mystery" and by its tender imaginative insight go straight to the heart of the situation. Such is the wistful thought of Hermes as he seeks for the nymph : Ah, what a world of love was at her feet! Or the poet's own reflection on the pathos of Lamia's beauty— And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there |