Part 30

And once more to Mason, in the very hour of his wife’s death; Gray was not sure whether or not his letter would reach Mason before the end:—

“If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon me; but if the last struggle be over, if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow me, at least an idea (for what could I do, were I present, more than this?) to sit by you in silence and pity from my heart not her, who is at rest, but you, who lose her. May he, who made us, the Master of our pleasures and of our pains, support you! Adieu.”

Seriousness, character, was the foundation of things with him; where this was lacking he was always severe, whatever might be offered to him in its stead. Voltaire’s literary genius charmed him, but the faults of Voltaire’s nature he felt so strongly that when his young friend Nicholls was going abroad in 1771, just before Gray’s death, he said to him: “I have one thing to beg of you which you must not refuse.” Nicholls answered: “You know you have only to command; what is it?”—“Do not go to see Voltaire,” said Gray; and then added: “No one knows the mischief that man will do.” Nicholls promised compliance with Gray’s injunction; “But what,” he asked, “could a visit from me signify?”—“Every tribute to such a man signifies,” Gray answered. He admired Dryden, admired him, even, too much; had too much felt his influence as a poet. He told Beattie “that if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet;” and writing to Beattie afterwards he recurs to Dryden, whom Beattie, he thought, did not honor as a poet: “Remember Dryden,” he writes, “and be blind to all his faults.” Yes, his faults as a poet; but on the man Dryden, nevertheless, his sentence is stern. Speaking of the Poet-Laureateship, “Dryden,” he writes to Mason, “was as disgraceful to the office from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses.” Even where crying blemishes were absent, the want of weight and depth of character in a man deprived him, in Gray’s judgment, of serious significance. He says of Hume: “Is not that _naïveté_ and good-humor, which his admirers celebrate in him, owing to this, that he has continued all his days an infant, but one that has unhappily been taught to read and write?”

And with all this strenuous seriousness, a pathetic sentiment, and an element, likewise, of sportive and charming humor. At Keswick, by the lakeside on an autumn evening, he has the accent of the _Rêveries_, or of Obermann, or Wordsworth:—

“In the evening walked down alone to the lake by the side of Crow Park after sunset and saw the solemn coloring of light draw on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At a distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls, not audible in the daytime. Wished for the Moon, but she was _dark to me and silent hid in her vacant interlunar cave_.”

Of his humor and sportiveness his delightful letters are full; his humor appears in his poetry too, and is by no means to be passed over there. Horace Walpole said that “Gray never wrote anything easily but things of humor; humor was his natural and original turn.”

Knowledge, penetration, seriousness, sentiment, humor, Gray had them all; he had the equipment and endowment for the office of poet. But very soon in his life appear traces of something obstructing, something disabling; of spirits failing, and health not sound; and the evil increases with years. He writes to West in 1737:—

“Low spirits are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, pay visits and will even affect to be jocose and force a feeble laugh with me; but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world.”

The tone is playful, Gray was not yet twenty-one. “Mine,” he tells West four or five years later, “mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather _Leucocholy_, for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state.” But, he adds in the same letter:—

“But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has something in it like Tertullian’s rule of faith, _Credo quia impossibile est_; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and on the other hand excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us! for none but he and sunshiny weather can do it.”

Six or seven years pass, and we find him writing to Wharton from Cambridge thus:—

“The spirit of laziness (the spirit of this place) begins to possess even me, that have so long declaimed against it. Yet has it not so prevailed, but that I feel that discontent with myself, that _ennui_, that ever accompanies it in its beginnings. Time will settle my conscience, time will reconcile my languid companion to me; we shall smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together, we shall have our little jokes, like other people, and our long stories. Brandy will finish what port began; and, a month after the time, you will see in some corner of a London Evening Post, ‘Yesterday died the Rev. Mr. John Gray, Senior-Fellow of Clare Hall, a facetious companion, and well-respected by all who knew him.’”

The humorous advertisement ends, in the original letter, with a Hogarthian touch which I must not quote. Is it Leucocholy or is it Melancholy which predominates here? at any rate, this entry in his diary, six years later, is black enough:—

“_Insomnia crebra, atque expergiscenti surdus quidam doloris sensus; frequens etiam in regione sterni oppressio, et cardialgia gravis, fere sempiterna._”

And in 1757 he writes to Hurd:—

“To be employed is to be happy. This principle of mine (and I am convinced of its truth) has, as usual, no influence on my practice. I am alone, and _ennuyé_ to the last degree, yet do nothing. Indeed I have no excuse; my health (which you have so kindly inquired after) is not extraordinary. It is no great malady, but several little ones, that seem brewing no good to me.”

From thence to the end his languor and depression, though still often relieved by occupation and travel, keep fatally gaining on him. At last the depression became constant, became mechanical. “Travel I must,” he writes to Dr. Wharton, “or cease to exist. Till this year I hardly knew what _mechanical_ low spirits were; but now I even tremble at an east wind.” Two months afterwards he died.

What wonder, that with this troublous cloud, throughout the whole term of his manhood, brooding over him and weighing him down, Gray, finely endowed though he was, richly stored with knowledge though he was, yet produced so little, found no full and sufficient utterance, “_never_,” as the Master of Pembroke Hall said, “_spoke out_.” He knew well enough, himself, how it was with him.

“My _verve_ is at best, you know” (he writes to Mason), “of so delicate a constitution, and has such weak nerves, as not to stir out of its chamber above three days in a year.” And to Horace Walpole he says: “As to what you say to me civilly, that I ought to write more, I will be candid, and avow to you, that till fourscore and upward, whenever the humor takes me, I will write; because I like it, and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much, it is because I cannot.” How simply said, and how truly also! Fain would a man like Gray speak out if he could, he “likes himself better” when he speaks out; if he does not speak out, “it is because I cannot.”

Bonstetten, that mercurial Swiss who died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven, having been younger and livelier from his sixtieth year to his eightieth than at any other time in his life, paid a visit in his early days to Cambridge, and saw much of Gray, to whom he attached himself with devotion. Gray, on his part, was charmed with his young friend; “I never saw such a boy,” he writes; “our breed is not made on this model.” Long afterwards Bonstetten published his reminiscences of Gray. “I used to tell Gray,” he says, “about my life and my native country, but _his_ life was a sealed book to me; he never would talk of himself, never would allow me to speak to him of his poetry. If I quoted lines of his to him, he kept silence like an obstinate child. I said to him sometimes: ‘Will you have the goodness to give me an answer?’ But not a word issued from his lips.” _He never spoke out._ Bonstetten thinks that Gray’s life was poisoned by an unsatisfied sensibility, was withered by his having never loved; by his days being passed in the dismal cloisters of Cambridge, in the company of a set of monastic bookworms, “whose existence no honest woman ever came to cheer.” Sainte-Beuve, who was much attracted and interested by Gray, doubts whether Bonstetten’s explanation of him is admissible; the secret of Gray’s melancholy he finds rather in the sterility of his poetic talent, “so distinguished, so rare, but so stinted;” in the poet’s despair at his own unproductiveness.

But to explain Gray, we must do more than allege his sterility, as we must look further than to his reclusion at Cambridge. What caused his sterility? Was it his ill-health, his hereditary gout? Certainly we will pay all respect to the powers of hereditary gout for afflicting us poor mortals. But Goethe, after pointing out that Schiller, who was so productive, was “almost constantly ill,” adds the true remark that it is incredible how much the spirit can do, in these cases, to keep up the body. Pope’s animation and activity through all the course of what he pathetically calls “that long disease, my life,” is an example presenting itself signally, in Gray’s own country and time, to confirm what Goethe here says. What gave the power to Gray’s reclusion and ill-health to induce his sterility?

The reason, the indubitable reason as I cannot but think it, I have already given elsewhere. Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul. As regards literary production, the task of the eighteenth century in England was not the poetic interpretation of the world, its task was to create a plain, clear, straightforward, efficient prose. Poetry obeyed the bent of mind requisite for the due fulfilment of this task of the century. It was intellectual, argumentative, ingenious; not seeing things in their truth and beauty, not interpretative. Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining and fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not fully educe and enjoy them; the want of a genial atmosphere, the failure of sympathy in his contemporaries, were too great. Born in the same year with Milton, Gray would have been another man; born in the same year with Burns, he would have been another man. A man born in 1608 could profit by the larger and more poetic scope of the English spirit in the Elizabethan age; a man born in 1759 could profit by that European renewing of men’s minds of which the great historical manifestation is the French Revolution. Gray’s alert and brilliant young friend, Bonstetten, who would explain the void in the life of Gray by his having never loved, Bonstetten himself loved, married, and had children. Yet at the age of fifty he was bidding fair to grow old, dismal and torpid like the rest of us, when he was roused and made young again for some thirty years, says M. Sainte-Beuve, by the events of 1789. If Gray, like Burns, had been just thirty years old when the French Revolution broke out, he would have shown, probably, productiveness and animation in plenty. Coming when he did, and endowed as he was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose full spiritual flowering was impossible. The same thing is to be said of his great contemporary, Butler, the author of the _Analogy_. In the sphere of religion, which touches that of poetry, Butler was impelled by the endowment of his nature to strive for a profound and adequate conception of religious things, which was not pursued by his contemporaries, and which at that time, and in that atmosphere of mind, was not fully attainable. Hence, in Butler too, a dissatisfaction, a weariness, as in Gray; “great labor and weariness, great disappointment, pain and even vexation of mind.” A sort of spiritual east wind was at that time blowing; neither Butler nor Gray could flower. They _never spoke out_.

Gray’s poetry was not only stinted in quantity by reason of the age wherein he lived, it suffered somewhat in quality also. We have seen under what obligation to Dryden Gray professed himself to be—“if there was any excellence in his numbers, he had learned it wholly from that great poet.” It was not for nothing that he came when Dryden had lately “embellished,” as Johnson says, English poetry; had “found it brick and left it marble.” It was not for nothing that he came just when “the English ear,” to quote Johnson again, “had been accustomed to the mellifluence of Pope’s numbers, and the diction of poetry had grown more splendid.” Of the intellectualities, ingenuities, personifications, of the movement and diction of Dryden and Pope, Gray caught something, caught too much. We have little of Gray’s poetry, and that little is not free from the faults of his age. Therefore it was important to go for aid, as we did, to Gray’s life and letters, to see his mind and soul there, and to corroborate from thence that high estimate of his quality which his poetry indeed calls forth, but does not establish so amply and irresistibly as one could desire.

For a just criticism it does, however, clearly establish it. The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul. The difference between the two kinds of poetry is immense. They differ profoundly in their modes of language, they differ profoundly in their modes of evolution. The poetic language of our eighteenth century in general is the language of men composing _without their eye on the object_, as Wordsworth excellently said of Dryden; language merely recalling the object, as the common language of prose does, and then dressing it out with a certain smartness and brilliancy for the fancy and understanding. This is called “splendid diction.” The evolution of the poetry of our eighteenth century is likewise intellectual; it proceeds by ratiocination, antithesis, ingenious turns and conceits. This poetry is often eloquent, and always, in the hands of such masters as Dryden and Pope, clever; but it does not take us much below the surface of things, it does not give us the emotion of seeing things in their truth and beauty. The language of genuine poetry, on the other hand, is the language of one composing with his eye on the object; its evolution is that of a thing which has been plunged in the poet’s soul until it comes forth naturally and necessarily. This sort of evolution is infinitely simpler than the other, and infinitely more satisfying; the same thing is true of the genuine poetic language likewise. But they are both of them also infinitely harder of attainment; they come only from those who, as Emerson says, “live from a great depth of being.”

Goldsmith disparaged Gray who had praised his _Traveller_, and indeed in the poem on the _Alliance of Education and Government_ had given him hints which he used for it. In retaliation let us take from Goldsmith himself a specimen of the poetic language of the eighteenth century.

“No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale”—

there is exactly the poetic diction of our prose century! rhetorical, ornate,—and, poetically, quite false. Place beside it a line of genuine poetry, such as the

“In cradle of the rude, imperious surge

of Shakespeare; and all its falseness instantly becomes apparent.

Dryden’s poem on the death of Mrs. Killigrew is, says Johnson, “undoubtedly the noblest ode that our language ever has produced.” In this vigorous performance Dryden has to say, what is interesting enough, that not only in poetry did Mrs. Killigrew excel, but she excelled in painting also. And thus he says it—

“To the next realm she stretch’d her sway, For Painture near adjoining lay— A plenteous province and alluring prey. A Chamber of Dependencies was framed (As conquerors will never want pretence When arm’d, to justify the offence), And the whole fief, in right of Poetry, she claim’d.”

The intellectual, ingenious, superficial evolution of poetry of this school could not be better illustrated. Place beside it Pindar’s

αἰὼν ὰσφαλὴς οὐχ ἔγεντ’ οὔτ’ Αἰακίδᾳ παρὰ Πηλεῖ οὔτε παρ’ ἀντιθέῳ Κάδμῳ ...

“A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing,—on the mountain the one heard them, the other in seven-gated Thebes.”

There is the evolution of genuine poetry, and such poetry kills Dryden’s the moment it is put near it.

Gray’s production was scanty, and scanty, as we have seen, it could not but be. Even what he produced is not always pure in diction, true in evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he is alone, or almost alone (for Collins has something of the like merit) in his age. Gray said himself that “the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.” Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray’s may be said to have reached, in style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution also of such a piece as his _Progress of Poesy_ must be accounted not less noble and sound than its style.

IV.

JOHN KEATS.[36]

Footnote 36:

Prefixed to the Selection from Keats in Ward’s _English Poets_, vol. iv. 1880.

Poetry, according to Milton’s famous saying, should be “simple, sensuous, impassioned.” No one can question the eminency, in Keat’s poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” There is the thesis, in another, “that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” There is Haydon’s story of him, how “he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory—his own expression.” One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. “He had no decision of character,” Haydon adds; “no object upon which to direct his great powers.”

Character and self-control, the _virtus verusque labor_ so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon’s portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon’s anecdotes. The editor of Haydon’s journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_ I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.

“You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love.... Your note came in just here. I cannot be happier away from you. ’Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more—I could be martyred for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often ‘to reason against the reasons of my Love.’ I can do that no more—the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”

A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who “is passion’s slave.” Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats’s love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained sort. That many who are themselves also badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their “lovely and beloved Keats,” does not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of

‘Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair, Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast.’