Part 9
The welcome of Stevenson to his younger Scotch contemporary was characteristic of the man. In all his letters there is not a glimmer of professional jealousy nor a word of belittling criticism. With all his boyishness,--partly because of it, it might be truer to say,--he had a manly heart. Generosity and courage were matters of course with him, native to the blood. In his novels there is plenty--some would say a superfluity--of battle, murder, and sudden death; Cut and Thrust were two of his favorite heroes; he loved the breath of danger, and when, for the first and last time, he saw armed men taking the field, “the old aboriginal awoke” in him, and he sniffed the air like a war horse; he could be stern as the Judgment Day itself against injustice and cruelty; in such a cause he would break a lance, though all the world should call him, what he was once overheard to call himself, another Don Quixote; but withal, few men were ever more tender-hearted. At twenty-one, as he told the story more than twenty years afterward, he enjoyed a great day of fishing; the trout so many and so hungry that in his eagerness he forgot to kill them one by one as he took them from the water. In the small hours of the night his conscience smote him; he saw the fishes “still kicking in their agony;” and he never fished again. Whoever was in distress was sure not only of his sympathy, but of his hand and purse. He would walk the streets of a city half the night with a lost child in his arms, invalid though he was; and when he comes to clear the land of his new South Sea domain, he wonders whether any one else ever felt toward Nature just as he does. He pities the vines and grasses that he uproots: “their struggles go to my heart like supplications.” Since his death, says his biographer, the native chiefs--“gentle barbarians,” truly--have forbidden the use of firearms on the hillside where he is buried, “that the birds may live there undisturbed.”
Stevenson believed in the supremacy of the soul. He would not be put down by things material. Many years he lived face to face with death, and to the last his testimony was that he found his life good. To a critic who thought him too little appreciative of the darker side of human existence he wrote: “If you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them under, you must be very differently made from me, and, I earnestly believe, from the majority of men.” Such was his brave confession; and his life, from all we see of it, was in full accordance with his faith. It might be said of him what Lowell said of Chaucer: he was “so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make.”
Toward the last, it is true, he fell into a state of depression, and for a time was alarmingly unlike his old self. His power of work seemed to be gone, and the “complicated miseries” that surrounded him weighed hard upon his spirits. Even then, however, he protested his belief in “an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it.” This was his natural religion, which the early loss of his ancestral creed--that “damnatory creed” with which his childhood was “pestered almost to madness”--had only deepened and irradiated. And the dark and sterile mood was no more than a mood, after all. Soon he was writing again, more successfully than ever. And then, with everything bright before him, his powers working at their easiest and best, his prayer for “courage, gayety, and the quiet mind” fully answered, all at once the end came. The brief candle, that so often had flickered and burned low, was suddenly blown out. He had gone round more islands than his lighthouse-building grandfather, as it amused him once to boast, and now, like his grandfather, he had reached “the end of all his cruising.”
“Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.”
Over his grave, almost before his body could be lowered into it, there rose the inevitable buzz of critical surmise and questioning. Human nature is impatient. It believes in ranks and orders, and must have the labels on at once. Were Stevenson’s books really great, it desired to know,--as great as those of such and such another man? Or were his admirers--whose regrets and acclamations, it must be owned, made at that minute a pretty busy chorus--setting him on too lofty a pedestal and stirring about him too dense a “dust of praise”? A few disinterested souls seemed surely to believe it, and were in great perturbation accordingly. To listen to them one might have supposed that the very foundations were being destroyed. And then what should the righteous do?
They need not have troubled themselves. The world will last a long time yet, and our little breath of praise or blame will speedily blow itself out and be forgotten. As was said of Hazlitt, so it must be said of Stevenson: Time will tell. Not that it will of necessity tell the truth; since what we dignify as the verdict of Time is, after all, in a certain way of looking at it, nothing but the opinion of the majority; but at least it will have the force of a last word,--there will be nobody to dispute it.
Meanwhile, there is no reason in the nature of things why those who admire Stevenson, or any other contemporary, should be frightened out of saying so. Our judgment may be wrong, of course; but also it may be right; and right or wrong, if it be modestly held, there can be no law against its utterance. And if we are to speak at all, we must speak while we can,--unless, to be sure, we are to call no man happy till after _we_ are dead.
A RELISH OF KEATS
A RELISH OF KEATS
In all the writing of genius, which is a power that possesses its so-called possessor rather than is possessed by him, there is much that seems like accident. Many things--all the best ones, it might not be too much to say--are contributed by the pen rather than by the man. The man had never thought of them; it was no more within his intention to write them than to write another “Hamlet;” and suddenly there they are before him on the paper. The handwriting is his, but as to where the words came from, he can tell hardly more than his most illiterate neighbor. From No-Man’s-Land, if you please to say so.
Keats was proudly conscious of this mystery. There is nothing, indeed, upon which he, or any poet, could half so reasonably felicitate himself. His divinest verses, he knew it and owned it, were traced for him by “the magic hand of chance.” A great thing, a power almost omnipotent, is this that we call by that convenient, ignorance-disguising name. It made not only Keats’s verses, but Keats himself. Otherwise how explain him?--son of a stable-keeper, a play-loving, belligerent, unstudious boy, a surgeon’s apprentice at fifteen, dead at twenty-six, and before that--and henceforth--one of the chief glories of England, a poet, “with Shakespeare.”
He himself suspected nothing of his gift, so far as appears, till he was eighteen. Then he read the “Fairy Queen,” fell under its enchantment, and immediately, or very soon, minding an inward call, began trying his own hand at verses. At first they were no more than verses, “neither precocious nor particularly promising,” says Mr. Colvin; things that a man takes a certain pleasure in doing,--
“There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know,”--
and finds, it may be, a certain kind of profit in doing, but sees to be of no value as soon as they are done.
At twenty the vein began to show the gold. He assayed the shining particles, for by this time he had been reading Shakespeare and Milton, and knew a line of poetry when he saw it,[8] and, like the man in the parable, he did not hesitate. He knew what he wanted. He would sell all that he had and buy that field. “I begin,” he said, in one of the earliest of his extant letters,--“I begin to fix my eye upon one horizon.” He would be a poet, because he must. He would not be a surgeon, because he must not. He had done well in his studies, we are told, and was in good repute at the hospital, whither by this time he had gone; but a voice was speaking within him, and there was never an hour but he heard it. “The other day, during the lecture,” he said, “there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land.” “My last operation,” he tells another correspondent, “was the opening of a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.”
It was a bold stroke,--no prudent adviser would have borne him out in it,--to forsake everything else to be a poet. But never was a luckier one. He had but four or five years to live, and (a comfort indeed to think of!) he did not waste them in making ready to earn a living he was never to have. It was a plain case of losing one’s life to find it.
Only four or five years, but with what a zest he lived them! Misgivings no doubt he had, enough and to spare. Now and then, to use his own words, he was pretty well “down in the mouth.” “I have been in such a state of mind,” he writes to Haydon, “as to read over my lines and hate them. I am one that ‘gathers samphire, dreadful trade’--the Cliff of Poesy towers above me.” He knew also the canker of pecuniary difficulty (“like a nettle leaf or two in your bed,” his own expression is); and then, when he was but beginning his work, there fell on him the stroke of a mortal disease, recognized as such from almost the first moment. But in spite of all, and through it all, what a fire he kept burning! How gloriously happy he often was! He hungered and thirsted after beauty, and he had the blessedness that rewards such a craving. For blessedness (and that is the best of it) consists perfectly with a low estate and all manner of outward misfortune. It can do without gold, and even without health. As for resting in comforts and toys, easiness and fine clothes, a great aim, if it does nothing else for a man, will at least save him from that pitch of vulgarity. A great aim is of itself a great part of the true riches. As Keats said, having found it out early, “our prime objects are a refuge as well as a passion.”
Such delight as the right men must always take in some of his letters!--especially, perhaps, some of the earlier ones, written in the period of his first fervors as a reader. He had never been a bookish boy (and no very serious harm done, it may be--for himself, at any rate, he was no believer in precocity), and now, when he fell all at once upon the great poets, it was as if he had been born again. What a relish he has! How he smacks his lips over a line of Shakespeare,--who “has left nothing to say about nothing or anything.” Here was a poet who read the works of poets. Possibly if he had lived to be old, he might have changed his practice in this regard, finding his own works sufficient, as other elderly poets have before now been charged with doing. As it is, his raptures make one think again and again of Hazlitt’s outburst, “The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, while we are young;” which, if it does not hit the white, is at least well within the outer circle.[9]
His method was unblushingly epicurean. Like a bee in a field of flowers, he was always stopping to suck the sweetness of a line. For that very purpose he was there. The happy boy! He had found out what books were made for. For a second time, nay, rather, for the first time, he had learned to read. A great discovery!--old as the hills and new as the morning. But new or old, a great discovery. For an intellectual youth there is none to match it, as there is no schoolmaster to teach it. And with what a gusto he describes the process! You would think he had found Aladdin’s lamp. His fancy cannot see it from sides enough; as a child dances about a new toy, and can never be done with looking.
“I had an idea,” he says, “that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale. But when will it do so? Never. When man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect, any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence! A doze upon a sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings; the prattle of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to beat them; a strain of music conducts to ‘an odd angle of the Isle,’ and when the leaves whisper, it puts a girdle round the earth.”
This he calls a “sparing touch of noble books.” It is too much to be expected, of course, that readers in general, whose idea of intellectual delights is of a new novel every other day, should be contented with a method so parsimonious. If this is what you call epicureanism, they might say, pray count us among the Stoics. And for all that, as applied to Keats’s own practice, “epicurean” was the right word.
What he would have been at forty or fifty, there is no telling. For the present he was not much concerned with whole poems as works of great constructive art. He was of an age to be (what Edward FitzGerald is said to have always been) “more of a connoisseur than a critic, a taster of fragrant essences, an inhaler of subtle aromas.” He loved beauty as at that stage he mostly found it (as the bee finds sweetness), in the individual flower, thinking far more of that than of the plant’s symmetrical structure, or the composition of the landscape. In this particular he resembled Lamb, who, if he called himself “an author by fits,” was no less truly a reader by fits. “I can vehemently applaud,” he said with characteristic, half-true self-depreciation, “or perversely stickle, at _parts_; but I cannot grasp at a whole.”
It was an admission of defect--he meant it so; but it is no slander to say that lovers of poetry are in general of substantially the same mind. Their taste is selective. They love short poems, or the beauties of long ones. Many of them have confessed as much, and many others could do no less were they called into the box. Lowell, whose standing as a critic nobody questions, though some may be bold enough, or “perverse” enough, now the man is dead, to rule him out of the class of poets, bids us remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. “For my part,” he says, “I know of but one,--the ‘Odyssey.’” And Samuel Johnson, who, great critic or not, had “a good deal of literature,” told Boswell, “that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end.”
The boy Keats, then, was not so utterly out of the way, at all events he was not without the support of good company, in taking for his own the motto of Ariel,--
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I.”
And a good time he had of it; reading and idling, reading and writing, not too much in a hurry, no busier than a bee, following his bent, finding Shakespeare and the “Paradise Lost” every day greater wonders to him; looking upon fine phrases like a lover; more and more convinced that “fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world.”
“Next to fine doing,” he said,--and meant it; for his life and his own doings chimed with the word. Nor does the word, even as a verbal confession of faith, stand alone. On the testimony of his friends, and on the testimony of his letters, Keats was no selfish weakling, no puny luxuriator in his own emotions, no mere hectic taster and maker of phrases. He worshiped beauty; he was born a poet, and rightly enough he followed his genius; but he was born also affectionate and generous; in his nature there was much of that glorious something which we call chivalry; and he knew as well as all the preachers could tell him that in any true assize high conduct must always bear away the palm. No more than the apostle of old had he any “poor vanity that works of genius were the first things. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess does hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this world.” Truly said, of this world or any other; for many things may be great, but the greatest of all is charity.
It might almost have been expected that genius so sudden in its flowering, so amazingly exceptional, as Keats’s, one of the wonders of human history, would be attended by some strain of disease, some taint, more or less pronounced, of mental or moral unsoundness. It is the more to be rejoiced in, therefore, that his nature, mental, moral, and physical (except for the tuberculosis which he doubtless contracted from his mother, over whom, in her last illness, he, a boy of fifteen, watched with all a son’s and daughter’s faithfulness), was to all appearance eminently sane and normal. As a boy, undersized though he was, he would always be fighting (which is normal, surely), and as a man he showed habitually, with one distressing exception, a manly, self-respecting spirit.
The single exception has to do with his passion for Fanny Brawne, concerning which it may be enough to say that when a man is head over ears in love with a pretty girl, or a girl whom he thinks pretty, and is by her, or by some perversity of Fate, put off, he is _never_ sane. The letters that Keats wrote to his inamorata may have been, as his friendly critic says, “the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice.” For ourselves we will take the critic’s word for it. We have never read them (in our opinion it was indecent or worse to print them), nor should we feel sure of our ability to tell in what respect the love letters of a young doctor might be expected to differ from those of a young schoolmaster or a young duke of the realm. To be crazy is to be crazy. Enough to say that they were not the letters of the poet Keats. Alas, alas! What a tragedy is human life! What a weak and silly thing is the human heart! A man sees a girl’s face, and behold, he is no longer a reasonable being; his peace of mind is gone, his work hindered, his day shortened, his fame tarnished, his name a laughing-stock. It is that which hath been, and it is that which shall be. As was said of old, so one may feel like saying still, “A man hath no preëminence above a beast; for all is vanity.”
And for all that, considering Keats’s genius, its early development and its miraculous quality, and comparing him with men of his own kind, we must account him on the whole a man surprisingly well-balanced and sane. Call the roll of his famous poetic contemporaries, and few of them will be found saner. Good Archdeacon Bailey, who had abundant opportunity to know, said that common sense was “a conspicuous part of his character.” Of how many of the others would it ever have occurred to any one to say the like?
He seems not to have been either crotchety or boastful, though he believed in aiming high, and made no scruple of professing, in so many words, that he “would rather fail than not be among the greatest.” Born fighter that he was, born, too, of the _genus irritabile vatum_ (“when I have any little vexation,” he once wrote, with Lamb-like exaggeration, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles”), he loved peace, and in the Biblical phrase pursued it, for which Mr. Arnold, it is pleasant to see, awards him full credit; but he was not to be trodden upon, he held the popular judgment of poetry in something like contempt (as all poets do, it is to be presumed), and he would not be crowded too hard even by the chiefest of his brethren. The most thoroughgoing Wordsworthian must read with amusement, if not with temptations to applause, the few clever sentences in which the youthful aspirant for poetic honors, in one of his letters, hits off some of that great man’s foibles. He has no thought of denying Wordsworth’s grandeur, he declares; but not for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages will he “be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egoist.” “Every man,” he goes on, “has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself--but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers!--how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!’”
To another correspondent he expresses a fear that Wordsworth has gone away from town “rather huffed” about something or other, the nature of which does not precisely appear; but adds that he ought not to expect but that every man of worth should be “as proud as himself;” a remark concerning which we are bound to acknowledge, loyal Wordsworthians as within reason we esteem ourselves, that we rather like the sound of it.
An artist cannot well be without some of the defects--or what more steady-going, lower-flying people are wont to account the defects--that go naturally, if not of necessity, with the artistic temperament. For one thing, he must work more or less by fits and starts. Poems are not to be made--unless it be by a Southey--as a shoemaker makes shoes, so many strokes to the minute. It is a wonder how much Keats accomplished in his few years, and this even if we take no reckoning of his experiments and failures; but there were times, of course, when he could do nothing, and then, equally of course, he could invent the prettiest kind of excuses for himself, excuses that were themselves hardly less than works of genius. At such a minute he would say, for instance, “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase.” Or, if the beauty of the morning operated upon a sense of idleness, he would declare it “more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury.” “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” he would say, “and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us with a visit.... I have not read any books--the Morning said I was right--I had no idea but of the Morning, and the Thrush said I was right--seeming to say,--
“‘O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth, O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet the Evening listens.’”
Not that he was ever foolish enough to despise knowledge, or trust overmuch to impulses “from a vernal wood,” as if a poet could subsist on inspiration. A few weeks after the date of the letter just quoted, a letter which he himself qualified before he was done as “a mere sophistication,” we find him renouncing a proposed pleasure trip. There is but one thing to prevent his going, he tells his correspondent. “I know nothing,” he says, “I have read nothing, and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.”