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

bow-window with some stained glass in it, looking out on the Lake of Geneva, with a bowl of gold-fish by his side, where he would sit and read all day, like a portrait of a gentleman reading. The picture is somehow so characteristic that one feels for a moment in his presence.

Well, what do I deduce from all this? Partly that Keats was a man of incomparable genius; partly that he was a man whom one could have loved for himself; partly, too, that one ought not to be ashamed of one's far-reaching thoughts, if one is fortunate enough to have them, and that one receives and gives more good by telling them frankly and unsuspiciously than if one keeps them to oneself for fear of being thought a fool.

Of course the whole career of Keats opens a door to a host of uneasy speculations. If the purpose of our Creator is to educate the world on certain lines, if he desires by the memory and the utterance of men of high genius to kindle the human spirit to fine and generous dreams and to the appreciation of beauty, it is terribly hard to discern why he should have created a spirit so fiery-sweet as that of Keats, and then cut short his career by a series of hard strokes of misfortune and disease just when he was finding fullest utterance. One looks round upon the world, and one sees temperaments of all kinds--religious, artistic, philosophical temperaments on the one hand; commercial; commonplace, animal, selfish temperaments on the other. The percentage of the higher spirits is few and does not seem to increase; yet the human race owes much of its advance in purity, nobility, and kindliness to them. We cannot be wholly mistaken in thinking that it is these rare spirits which sustain, enliven, and enrich the world. And yet they seem to be regarded with no special favour by the Creator; they have to contend with insuperable obstacles; the very sensitiveness of their spirit is a torturing disability. The selfish, worldly, hard, brutal temperaments have almost invariably a far better time of it in the world; yet both the exalted spirit and the brutal spirit are undeniable facts; the lofty, unselfish, pure spirit is as real and existent as the vile and sensual spirit. Are we all under a lamentable mistake in the matter? Is the heart of God more on the side of what is noble and pure and enthusiastic than it is on the side of what is base and vile; or is it only the enthusiasts who think so? If an enlightened nation is engaged in a war with a brutal nation, do not the patriots on both sides pray with equal fervour and hope to God to protect what they call the right? Do not both sides hope and believe that he will support them and confound their opponents?

These are dark mysteries of thought; but if we argue in the cold light of reason we dare not, it seems, think that God has any favourites in the battle. He silences the poet, he smites the preacher down; while he sustains in wealth and comfort and honour the man of low and selfish ambitions. The Psalmist said that he saw the wicked flourishing like a green bay-tree, and he was pleased to observe a little after that he was gone and that his place was no more to be found. If he had looked a little closer he might have seen the virtuous man oppressed, and presently removed as indifferently as the wicked. One cannot feel the justice or the mercy in the case of Keats. He was made to give utterance to a certain pure and delicate music of the mind, which has refreshed and inspired many a yearning spirit; but he was swept away ruthlessly at the very height of his genius, and it is still more bewildering to reflect that his life was probably sacrificed to his devoted tendance on his consumptive brother.

Perhaps these are but fruitless reveries! but it is hard to resist them. The only course is to hold fast to one's faith in what is pure and beautiful, and to give thanks that such spirits as the spirit of Keats are allowed to pass in flame across the dark heaven, calling from horizon to horizon among the interstellar spaces; and to be sure that the glow, the ardour, the aspirations that they impart to the soul are real and true--an essential part of the mind of God, however small a part they may be of that Eternal and all-embracing Will.


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I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a schoolboy would designate as "buffers," inviting the public to come forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley. I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the proposal. In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of our great English poets in Rome, of all places--that is fantastic enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,"--could anything be more inappropriate? It is not too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period of his short life. If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have been purchased,--the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom, Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,--there would have been some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in fact, if the Dumfries inn had been purchased, it might have been made a Keats-Burns museum, if the idea was to kill two birds with one stone--for to associate Shelley with Keats in the house at Rome is another piece of well-meaning stupidity. Their acquaintance was really of the slightest, though Shelley was extraordinarily kind and generous to Keats, offering to receive him into his own house as an invalid, and of course regarding him with the deepest admiration, as the Adonais testifies. But Keats never took very much to Shelley, and was always a little suspicious that he was being patronised; and consequently he never opened his heart and mind to Shelley as he did to some of his friends. Indeed, Shelley knew very little of Keats, and supposed him to be a very different character to what he really was. Shelley supposed that Keats had had both his happiness and his health undermined by severe criticism; as a matter of fact Keats had been, for a young and unknown poet, respectfully enough criticised--and his letters show how extremely indifferent he was to external criticism of any kind. Keats said--and there is no reason to doubt the truth of the words, because they are borne out by many similar sayings in his most candid and most intimate letters--that his own perception of his poetical deficiencies had given him far more pain than the strictures of any critic could possibly do. The fact that the two poets both happened to die in Italy is no reason for selecting Italy as the place in which to give them a permanent joint memorial.

But one can excuse the inappropriateness and the tactlessness of commemorating the two poets together in Italy, because it is so well-meant and sincere an attempt to do them honour. What one finds it harder to do is to pardon the solemnity, the snobbishness, of the whole proceeding. The names of those eminent people who have signed the letter include a certain number of eminent men of letters, but they include also the names of people like the Headmaster of Eton, presumably because Shelley was at Eton. When one remembers how Shelley was treated at Eton, and the sentiments which he entertained about the place, one cannot help recalling the verse about the men who built the sepulchres of the prophets whom their forefathers had stoned. An almost incredible instance of this occurred at Oxford. Shelley, as is well known, was at University College. He lived his own life there, tried his chemical experiments, took long walks in the neighbourhood, in the company of Hogg, for the purpose of practising pistol-shooting or sailing paper boats. No one took the slightest trouble to befriend or advise him, though he was one who responded eagerly to affectionate interest. When he published his atheistical pamphlet, which was the whim of a clever, fantastic, and isolated young man, the authorities expelled him with scorn and fury; and now that he has become a great national poet; they have commemorated him there by setting up a very beautiful figure of a drowned youth in a state of nudity, though Shelley's body was naturally found clothed when it was recovered on the seabeach--indeed it is recorded that he had a volume of Keats and a Sophocles in his pocket. This figure is placed in a singular shrine, lighted by a dome, that somehow contrives to suggest a mixture between a swimming-bath and the smoking-room of a hotel. Well, it may be said that the least we can do is to give posthumous honour to those whom we bullied and derided in their lifetime. A memorial placed in a seat of learning and education is a sort of stimulus to the young men who are trained there to go and do likewise; but do the worthy men who placed this memorial at Oxford really wish their students to emulate the example of Shelley? If a sensitive young man of wild ideas went up to Oxford now, how would he be treated? Probably nowadays some virtuous and enthusiastic young tutor would feel a certain sense of responsibility for the young man. He would endeavour to influence him; he would implore him to play games, to go to lectures, to attend early chapel. He would do his best to check any symptom of originality or free thought. He would try to make him dutiful and orthodox, and to discourage all his fantastic theories.

Which of these eminently respectable gentlemen who have brought before the public the necessity of commemorating two great poets are on the lookout for talent of the kind that Keats and Shelley exhibited? How many of them, if they came across a latter-day young poet, indolent, unconventional, crude, fantastic, would encourage him to be true to his ideas and to work out his own salvation on his own lines? Which of them, if they had been confronted with our two poets in the flesh, would have encouraged Keats to be Keats and Shelley to be Shelley? Would they not rather have done their best to inculcate into them their own tamer conceptions of culture and righteousness?

Of course there is something impressive in the posthumous fame of these two men of genius collecting in their wake a crowd of adoring respectabilities, like the people in the German story who touch the magic spear carried by the young hero, and are unable to withdraw their hands, but trot grotesquely behind their conqueror through street and market-place. The melancholy part of the situation is that one feels that these excellent people, for all their admiration, have not learnt the real lesson of the incident in the