Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

any spirits and water. . . . How I like claret! When I

...

'Tis the only palate affair

It fills one's mouth with

...

can get claret, I must drink it. that I am at all sensual in. a gushing freshness-then goes down cool and feverless : then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. . . . Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne. ... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock passim."

At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.

I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a manunselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found himself affronted in a form—that of press ridicule and detraction—which could not be resented in

person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single intense interest, along with poetry-both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career-his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady—all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adoles cence. From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from 1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.

CHAPTER IX.

E have seen what John Keats did in the shifting

scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. The critic who is a critic-and not a Quarterly or a Blackwood reviewer or lampooner-is well aware of the disproportion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given-and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of Keats's poems, whether an admiring opinion or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating-what I may nevertheless feel-a sense of the presumption involved in such a process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems.

As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this limited sense -that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or farfetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same: but not in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction, Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats's first volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt than of Spenser ; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into some poetic trivialities

and absurdities, not less than to anything in himself which could be taken hold of for complaint.

Keats's first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory, were it not for his after achievements, and for the single sonnet upon Chapman's Homer. Several of the compositions are veritable rubbish probably Keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon afterwards that they were deplorably bad. Such are the address "To Some Ladies "who had sent the author a shell; that "On Receiving a Curious Shell and a Copy of Verses [Moore's "Golden Chain"] from the same Ladies;" the "Ode to Apollo" (in which Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tasso, are commemorated); the "Hymn to Apollo;" the lines "To Hope" (in which there is a patriotic aspiration, mingled with scorn for the gauds of a Court). "Calidore" has a certain boyish ardour, clearly indicated if not well expressed. The verses "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" are very far from good, and are stuffed with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the real Keats. Some lines have already been quoted from this effusion, about "flowery nests," and "the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars." It is only by an effort that we can attach any meaning to either of these childish Della-Cruscanisms: the "pillowy silkiness" may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the "flowery nests may, by a great wrenching of English, be meant for "flowery nooks "-nests or nooks of flowers. "Sleep and Poetry" contains various fine lines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious descrip

[ocr errors]
« НазадПродовжити »