On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my friend’s request, to Hyperion, and began to read aloud. He was more patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally, when I did a most exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.
He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said; for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.
I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I came in page two on he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove! can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck’ is perfect. You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”
“She would have ta’enAchilles by the hair and bent his neck,”He next stopped me at
“Until at length old Saturn lifted upHis faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”“What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god. But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of
“‘And all the gloom and sorrow of the placeAnd that fair kneeling Goddess.’The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably anticlimacteric.”
“Yes, there must be a golden victory;There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blownOf triumph calm, and hymns of festivalUpon the gold clouds metropolitan,Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stirOf strings in hollow shells; and there shall beBeautiful things made new, for the surpriseOf the sky-children; I will give command:Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then, before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action in the text immediately following:
“This passion lifted him upon his feet,And made his hands to struggle in the air.”“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the winds, – “come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative nowhere! Why man,” – this being addressed to the Puritan poet – “it carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.
“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing he could give any of them points” – (I deplore the language) “any of them, ay, Shakespeare himself points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he would have adopted the airs of the profession and been ruined. In his time no one thought of calling a play a poem – that was what saved the greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend him.”
I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and ostracized.
As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down again and lit a pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed without interruption until I came to:
“His palace bright,Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;And all its curtains of Aurorian cloudsFlushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight. I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”
“O dreams of day and night!O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? whyIs my eternal essence thus distraughtTo see and to behold these horrors new?Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?Am I to leave this haven of my rest,This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,This calm luxuriance of blissful light,These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,Of all my lucent empire? It is leftDeserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetryI cannot see – but darkness, death and darkness.Even here, into my centre of repose,The shady visions come to domineer,Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp —Fall! – No, by Tellus and her briny robes!Over the fiery frontier of my realmsI will advance a terrible right armShall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering, leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of Hyperion, and the other books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to Paradise Lost.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the hearts of young men in those old days.
There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case of Hyperion. Endymion boasts only one mark, and that expressing admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathingTherefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing – ”The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears. So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay between to-night and that hour?
Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs, and dinted the line in The Eve of St. Agnes,
“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked
“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”
I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in The Eve of St. Agnes, the other in the Ode to a Nightingale. These marks, more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so. Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter, when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold. He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when
“‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours; and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased “Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me, worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats – to even a lawyer.” How I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost have said to him,
“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,Or see my case with half an eye;But must not – there are reasons why.”So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as that spoken of here? ‘To cease upon the midnight!’ Here is no struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of noiseless sand.”
For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.” “That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe stared at the Pacific – and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise —Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”“‘And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise,’” he repeated, “‘silent upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once more abroad.”
That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country – here in England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.
When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends. It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new hands – into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart – he will know nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature he digs up this key – this Rosetta stone.
DECAY OF THE SUBLIME
The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it. To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although, being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases, but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.
Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land under him he had met all kinds of ground – valley, forest, mountain, plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him, was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest, if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions, his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime cannot exist any length of time, if at all.
It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with burlesques and blasphemies.
