It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious enthusiast. When I have laid aside the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, and opened the Faerie Queen, I feel as though the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of Warwickshire.
And yet, melancholy truth! the Faerie Queen is most unpopular and most unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand people who begin the Faerie Queen, not ten read half way through it, and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My Faerie Queen occupies 792 pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels! And still it is unperfite! I find that although I have owned the book for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.
It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the Faerie Queen the poets’ poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.
The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all the Faerie Queen, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets – those rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities – turn themselves into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us. They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds, and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife. The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight when free and catholic and pagan.
After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan, how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads —
“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;And fayre Aurora from the deawy bedOf aged Tithone gan herselfe to reareWith rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shedAbout her eares, when Una her did markeClymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”Or again here —
“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,His onely daughter and his onely hayre;Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,As bright as doth the morning starre appeareOut of the east with flaming lockes bedight,To tell that dawning day is drawing neareAnd to the world does bring long wished light:So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even – but Truth! An abstraction! A whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth, but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.
There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser. The fact is, all the Faerie Queen ought to be quoted except the blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no other poem – except Shelley’s Alastor– do I notice such grievous, continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome often. But who can resist this? —
“ – And, when she spake,Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,And twixt the perles and rubins softly brakeA silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.…Upon her eyelids many graces sateUnder the shadow of her even browes.”I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem to melt together of their own propinquity.
Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day —
“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying something about the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, I had the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser – to have it nigh. My copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It seems to me I shall never again look into the Spelling-Book or the Pilgrim’s Progress. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted reading of the Faerie Queen at page 473. My intellect is too weak and my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.
MY COPY OF KEATS
The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty searches for favourite passages.
The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s Poetical Works in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers. The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than a wheaten straw after the threshing.
In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the volume I speak of under the head “Poetry —Pocket Editions;” described as “Keats’s Poetical Works. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3s. 6d. cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand – as a poor gentleman in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a feast his purse denies to his lips.
If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste, and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so deeply such a preposterous demand.
My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh of a hand waxing old.
Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared, save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of substantial brown paper.
For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.
But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled. What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable! Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary, and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.
There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish; one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek; a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend, “Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the bidding to a banquet.
So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever, and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins, wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as any man now living – almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s song haunting a sea shell?
Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge, the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common property – “’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose, speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we had stood humiliated and afeard.
My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that embattle the heights of Parnassus.
What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins the Ode on a Grecian Urn. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn blossom.
One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder, saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.
He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:
“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leaveThy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!”He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the grass watching the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as though they had grown aweary of the sun, and longed to glide into the broad full stream.
As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur, and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure, and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and denial for ever final.
“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a corpse – merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader, with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk, beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not resume.
I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.
When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.” I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own thoughts – thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.
On turning over the leaves without reading, I find Hyperion opens most readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite purpose I turn to Hyperion, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun. Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.
I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and Hyperion. It would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think there can be ten worse employing the English language to-day. I not only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage, which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so, instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.
