The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

at the acrid contempt of reviewers! How hard it is to put oneself inside the crushing sense of failure that haunted Keats' last days, with death staring him in the face! Of course, one may say that a writer ought not to depend upon any consciousness of fame; that he ought to make his work as good as he can, and not care about the verdict. That is a fine and dignified philosophy; but at the same time half of the essence of the writer's work lies in its appeal. He may feel the beauty of the world with a poignant emotion; but his work is to make others feel it too, and it is impossible that he should not be profoundly discouraged if there is no one who heeds his voice. It is not that he craves for stupid and conventional praise from men who can only applaud when they see others applauding. What he desires is to express the kinship, the enthusiasm of generous hearts, to make an echo in the souls of a few like-minded people. He may desire this--nay, he must desire it, if he is to fulfil his own ideal at all. For in the minds of poets there is the hope of achievement, of creation; he dedicates time and thought and endeavour to his work, and the test of its fineness and of its worth is that it should move others. If a man cannot have some faint hope that he is doing this, then he had better sink back into the crowd, live the life of the world, earn a wage, make a place for himself. Indeed, he has no justification for refusing to shoulder the accustomed burden, unless he is sure that the task to which he devotes himself is better worth the doing; a poet must always be haunted by the suspicion that he is but pleasing himself and playing indolently at a pretty game, unless he can believe that he is adding something to the sum of beauty and truth. These visions of the poet are very faint and delicate things; there is little of robust confidence about them, while there are plenty of loud and insistent voices on every side of him to tell him that he is shirking the work of the world, and that he is not lifting a finger in the cause of humanity and progress. There are some self-conscious artists who would say that the cause of humanity and progress is not the concern of the artist at all; but, on the other hand, you will find but few of the great artists of the ages who have not been thrilled and haunted with the deep desire to help others, to increase their peace and joy, to interpret the riddle of the world, to give a motive for living a fuller life than the life of the drudge and the raker of stones and dirt.

But this very absence of recognition and fame was what made the lives of these two great poets so intensely beautiful; there is hardly a great poet who has achieved fame who has not been in a degree spoilt by the consciousness of worth and influence. Tennyson, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth--how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit! Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged his fault in despair and tears. But such poets as did not guess their own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and gentler is their example, walking humbly in the company of the mighty, and hardly seeming to guess that they are of the happy number. And thus we may rank it amongst the greatest gifts that were given to Keats and Shelley, though they did not know their own felicity, that they were never overshadowed by the approbation of the world, and had no touch of the complacent sense of greatness that so disfigures the spirit of a mortal.


XLIX


I have been reading all to-day the Letters of Keats, a thing which I do at irregular intervals. Perhaps what I am going to say may sound affected, but it is perfectly true: it is a book that always has a very peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few books that give one, in the first place, more of the author's own heart. Is there in the world any book which gives so fully the youthful, ebullient thoughts of a man of the highest poetical genius as this? I cannot recall any. Keats, to his brothers, his sister, and to one or two intimate friends, allowed his long, vague letters to be an absolutely intimate diary of what he was thinking. You see his genius rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes. Not to multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament, differentiating it from what he calls the "Wordsworthian Character--the egotistically sublime." He goes on to say that he feels that he has no identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently. He adds in a fine elation that "the faint conceptions that he has of poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead."

Such a letter as this admits one to the very penetralia of the supremely artistic mind--but the wonder of Keats' confession is that he saw himself as clearly and distinctly as he saw everyone else. And further, I do not think that there is anything in literature that gives one a sharper feeling of the reality of genius than to find the immortal poems, such as La Belle Dame sans Merci, copied down in the middle of a letter, as an unconsidered trifle which may amuse his correspondent.

Now, in saying this, I do not for a moment say that Keats was an entirely admirable or even a wholly lovable character--though his tenderness, his consideration, his affectionateness constantly emerge. He had strongly marked faults: his taste is often questionable; his humour is frequently deplorable. He makes and repeats jokes which cause one to writhe and blush--he was, and I say it boldly, occasionally vulgar; but it is not an innate vulgarity, only the superficial vulgarity which comes of living among second-rate suburban literary people. One cannot help feeling every now and then that some of Keats' friends were really impossible--but I am glad that he did not feel them to be so, that he was loyal and generous about them. There have been great critics, of whom Matthew Arnold was one, who have said frankly that the aroma of Keats' letters is intolerable. That does not seem to me a large judgment, but it is quite an intelligible one. If one has been brought up in a certain instinctive kind of refinement, there are certain modes of life, certain ways of looking at things, which grate hopelessly upon one's idea of what is refined; and perhaps life is not long enough to try and overcome it, to try and argue oneself out of it. I think it is quite possible that if one had only known Keats slightly, one might have thought him a very underbred young man, as when he showed himself suspicious and ill at ease in the company of Shelley, because of his social standing. "A loose, slack, ill-dressed youth," was Coleridge's impression of Keats, when he met him in a lane near Highgate. But I honestly believe that this would have been only an external and superficial feeling. Again, Keats as a lover is undeniably disconcerting. His zealousness, his uncontrolled luxuriance of passion, though partly attributable to his fevered and despondent condition of health, are lacking in dignity. But as a friend, Keats seems to me almost above praise; and I can imagine that if one had been of his circle, and had won his regard, it would have been difficult not to have idealised him. He seems to me to have displayed that frank, affectionate brotherliness, untainted by sentimentality, which is the essence of equal friendship; and then, too, he gave his heart and his thoughts and his dreams to his friends so prodigally and lavishly--not egotistically, as some have given--with no self-absorption, no lack of sympathy, but in the spirit of the old fisherman in Theocritus, who says to his comrade, "Come, be a sharer of my dreams as of my fishing," and then tells his pretty vision. With no lack of sympathy, I say, because the lavish generosity with which Keats bestowed his money upon his friends, when he had but a small store left and when financial difficulties were staring him in the face, is one of the finest things about him. There is a correspondence with that strange, selfish spendthrift Haydon, which shows the endless trouble Keats would take to raise money for a friend when he was in worse straits himself. Haydon treated him with insolent frankness, and hinted that Keats was parsimonious and ungenerous; even so, Keats never lost his temper, but described with perfect simplicity the extraordinary difficulties he was himself involved in, with as much patience and good-humour as though he had been himself the borrower; and the delicious letters that he wrote, all through his own anxieties, to his little sister Fanny, then a girl at a boarding-school, reveal, like nothing else, the faithful and-tender spirit of the boy--for he was hardly more than a boy. Of course there are letters, like those of Lamb and FitzGerald, which bring one very close to the spirit of the writer; but with this difference, that they rarely seem to lay bare their inmost thought; but Keats had no reserve with his best friends. He put into words the very things that we most of us are ashamed, from a fear of being accused of pose and affectation, to reveal--his loftiest hopes and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life, the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art. I do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and worships art, however fitfully, can register a few. There is a little picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the Ode to the Nightingale. He sits on one chair, with his arm on the back of another, his hand upon his hair, reading a volume of Shakespeare with a smile of satisfaction. He is neatly dressed, and has pumps with bows on his feet. That picture, like the letters, seems to bring Keats curiously near to life; I always fancy-that Severn must have had in his mind a charming passage in one of Keats' letters to his sister Fanny, where he says he would like to have a house with a big