Part 3

I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body; and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary: anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war. This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from every information, that it would have had a directly contrary effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer independency without war to independency with it; and I have so much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin.

There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as itself a primary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in politics?

Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after the _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol_ or the _Speech at Bristol_, but after the _Letter to a Noble Lord_, in which Burke defends himself in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution. He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human nature--if the phrase is permissible--Burke has told the truth in lasting prose.

His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton, seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of his time--an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase) “the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the human race.

V

KEATS

1. THE VARIOUS KEATSES

Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After reading _The John Keats Memorial Volume_, consisting of appreciations in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little, one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of the _Ode to a Nightingale_ and the _Ode on Melancholy_ was “a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and whistle a tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses of _The Pot of Basil_ “the immense indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,” he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented, practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ... which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write:

The Patriot shall feel My stern alarum and unsheath his steel?

And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall find this personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.

Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle class”--an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly Keats is the true answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats who was “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another; and the Keats of _The Fall of Hyperion_ is the perfect critic of the Keats of the _Ode on Indolence_, and _vice versa_. Keats was a score of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent, ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry, sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers, a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights, and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such as that he thought for a moment of abandoning _Hyperion_ as a result of the hostile reviews of _Endymion_. Keats’s life was not that of a planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was a man torn by conflicting demons--a martyr to poetry and love and, ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness.

He bowed before altars that, even when he bowed, he seems to have known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense, and a greater Muse announced to him:

None can usurp this height But those to whom the miseries of the world Are miseries and will not let them rest.

He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron in _The Fall of Hyperion_:

Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo! Where is thy misty pestilence to creep Into the dwellings, through the door crannies Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse? Though I breathe death with them it will be life To see them sprawl before me into graves.

But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase in _The Maid’s Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.

The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s Keats--Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne--he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood--were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered in _Endymion_. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures--of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life--as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s--appears in that letter in which he writes:

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along--to what? The Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.

In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly in his greatest work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self

against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats we love is more than the Keats of the poems--more even than the Keats of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life--that proud and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples where he had worshipped.

2. THE ARTIFICER

It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things.

Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air--the bird-like flight or the bird-like song.

The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including _The Faëry Queene_. The first of his great poems was written after reading Chapman’s _Homer_, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time.

This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and

grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair;

and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts?

Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry--“my demon poesy”--as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:

That I may die a death Of luxury, and my young spirit follow The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair Visions of all places: a bowery nook Will be elysium--an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves and flowers--about the playing Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.

This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:

And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts.

Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer “The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect youthful Keats.

This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth--for knowledge, for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.

But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours.

3. FANNY BRAWNE

“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady--the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.