CHAPTER LIX

THE STABLE-KEEPER’S SON

There is one more poet of this period with whom we must deal, and that is John Keats.

“And now you are going to have your hands full,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Everyone is quite sure that Keats is one poet who cannot possibly be accused of propaganda.”

“Yes,” says her husband; “an amusing illustration of the extent to which leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a man whose life and personality constitute one of the greatest pieces of radical propaganda in the history of English literature.”

“At least the issue is fairly joined,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go to it!”

Let us first take the life and personality, and afterwards the writings. John Keats was the son of a stable-keeper; and if you don’t know what that meant to British snobbery there is no way I can convey it to you. He did not attend a public school or a university; he did not learn to walk and talk like an English gentleman. He was a simple, crude fellow--a little chap not much over five feet high--and his social experiences early taught him the lesson of extreme reserve; he held himself aloof from everyone who might by any possibility spurn him because of his low estate. Even with Shelley he would not forget that he was dealing with the son of a baronet; everyone who surrounded Shelley was trying to get money from him, and so Keats despised them and stayed apart.

“He was of the skeptical, republican school,” wrote one of his boyhood intimates. “A fault finder with everything established.” And the first poem which he got up the courage to show was a sonnet upon the release of Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison for two years for writing an article denouncing the prince regent. This poem was published in Hunt’s paper, the “Examiner,” and the notorious editor became the friend and champion of this twenty-year-old poet.

Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser in a hospital. He was called an apothecary’s apprentice; and so when he published “Endymion,” the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him. The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to university culture! “Back to your shop, John,” cried the “Quarterly Review,” “back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!”

You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and social issue. In “Blackwood’s” appeared a ferocious article, denouncing not merely Keats, but the whole “cockney school,” as it was called; this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. “Cockney” is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar populace of London, who drop their h’s and talk about their “dyly pyper.” The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they were “athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers.” They gathered at Ambrose’s and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a rollicking song of which the chorus ran: “Curse the people, blast the people, damn the lower orders.” And when they attacked the “Cockney” poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their clothing and their faces and even their complexions. “Pimply Hazlitt” was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin--and gin was the drink for washerwomen.

Keats wrote “Endymion” at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health. He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best work he could, and said, very quietly: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.” He realized the dignity of his calling, and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower attitude toward his art. “I am ambitious of doing the world some good,” he wrote; “if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years.” And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to “Hyperion,” in which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that only those can climb to the higher altar of art

to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.

How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and despotism, and would not sit out the performance!

He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’ defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were settled in those days!

When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear. Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying: “There _was_ something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, and even perhaps about Keats.”

So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear is that it is _young_ poetry; it was all written before the age of twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings, gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the senses. He has a marvelous gift of language, splendor like a flood of moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous “Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution both reason and conscience.

The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit--the sense of fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension.

But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious examples--Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.--simply show that they have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches enjoyment instead of effort.

Use your common sense upon the proposition. When an artist takes the trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people, and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it not just as much “teaching” to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” it is perfectly plain that he is making propaganda--and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda when he declares that

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words without meaning behind them.

I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There is a stage of naïve trust in instinct through which youth passes, especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own period of the breakdown of capitalism.

The Tory party came in the end to realize that there was nothing really dangerous in the poetry of this unhappy boy. Wise old Tories like Sir Walter Scott had known it from the beginning, and young Tories like Tennyson and Rossetti proclaimed it. Keats himself was no longer alive to offend them with his Cockney manners, so they took up his writings, and made them a bulwark of leisure-class culture in a stage of arrested mentality, a resource of critics who wish to keep the young from thinking about dangerous modern questions. But I venture the opinion that if this Cockney stable-keeper’s son had grown to manhood, he would have taken care of his own destiny, and seen to it that dilettanti idlers and aesthetic decadents should find no comfort in his name and example. His letters give abundant evidence of his capable mind, and assure us that if he had been blessed with health he would have matured into a thinker, even as John Milton, the great companion of his later days.

How much the lip-servers of Keats really understand him, was proven by a peculiar incident which befell me in my own youth. Twenty-two years ago I published “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” a passionate defense of the right of young poets to survive; and of course I sang enraptured praise of Keats, and made him a text for excited tirades. At that time there was a newspaper in New York called the “Evening Telegram,” owned by James Gordon Bennett, a dissipated rowdy who might have been a blood brother to the Tory crowd which conducted “Blackwood’s” and the “Quarterly” a hundred years ago. This “Evening Telegram” published a page of book reviews every Saturday, boasting it the most widely circulated book page in the United States. Its opinion, therefore, was of importance to a young writer hoping to live by his pen. It reviewed “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” saying that we might have sympathized with the struggles of an unfortunate poet, had he not committed the indiscretion of giving us samples of his writings, which enabled us to be certain that he had no idea whatever of poetry. For example, said the editor, here was one of Arthur Stirling’s effusions. Read it:

Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Spirit of a winter’s night!-- Sit thee there, and send abroad With a mind self-overaw’d Fancy, high-commission’d;--send her! She has vassals to attend her; She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost; She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather; All the buds and bells of May From dewy sward or thorny spray; All the heapèd Autumn’s wealth, With a still, mysterious stealth; She will mix these pleasures up, Like three fit wines in a cup, And thou shalt quaff it!--

Poor Arthur Stirling was supposed to be dead, so I asked a friend to write to the editor of the “Evening Telegram” and point out to him that he had misunderstood the book; the lines quoted were not submitted as the work of Arthur Stirling, they happened to be the work of John Keats! The editor published this reply with an easygoing comment; it made a good joke, he said, but as a matter of fact he was justified in his criticism, because the lines belonged to the very early work of Keats, which was practically without poetic merit. My friend wrote again, expressing surprise that the editor should make such a statement; for this poem, entitled “Fancy,” belonged to the last two years of Keats’ life, the wonderful years which produced all his greatest writings. Palgrave, whose authority none would dispute, had included it in the “Golden Treasury,” which contained only thirteen poems by Keats. The editor of the “Evening Telegram” was unable to find space for that letter!

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