CHAPTER VI

_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM

Invention and imagination--What the moon meant to Keats--Elizabethan Precedents--Fletcher and Drayton--Drayton's two versions--Debt of Keats to Drayton--Strain of allegory--The Soul's quest for beauty--Phantasmagoric adventures--The four elements theory--Its error--Book I. The exordium--The forest scene--Confession to Peona--Her expostulation--Endymion's defence--The ascending scale--The highest hope--Book II. The praise of love--Underworld marvels--The awakening of Adonis--Embraces in the Jasmine Bower--The quest renewed--New sympathies awakened--Book III. Exordium--Encounter with Glaucus--Glaucus relates his doom--The predestined deliverer--The deliverance--Meaning of the Parable--Its machinery explained--The happy sequel--Book IV. Address to the Muse--The Indian damsel--An ethereal flight--Olympian visions--Descent and renunciation--Distressful farewells--The mystery solved--A chastened victory--Above analysis justified.

Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of _Poems_, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:--

As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to talk until _Endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry--and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked--why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails--and Imagination the rudder.--Did our great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales. This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence--But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till I shall have finished _Endymion_, and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made a Mockery at Hunt's--

In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,--'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.' But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each.

Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration of _Endymion_. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion[1] as made known to him through the earlier English poets.

The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply their trade by sea, river, or canal, also of wanderers and vagabonds generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her transmuting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early poetry, and we have seen, in '_I stood tiptoe_,' what a range of beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to work on _Endymion_, we shall find her, by reason of that special glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself--what he calls in a letter 'the principle of Beauty in all things,' the principle which binds in a divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the moon-goddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of essential Beauty.

As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the _Endimion_ of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with

--that night-wandering, pale, and watery star, When yawning dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky, Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits.

So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call--

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, And would not be awaked,

uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser's _Epithalamion_, or the reference to 'pale-changeful Cynthia' and her Endymion in Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_;[2] or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the _Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats's ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.

Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been? Or whither go'st thou? Here be Woods as green As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet, As where smooth _Zephyrus_ plays on the fleet Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any; Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells, Arbors o'rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells, Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing, Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love, How the pale _Phoebe_ hunting in a Grove, First saw the Boy _Endymion_, from whose Eyes She took eternal fire that never dyes: How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light, To kiss her sweetest.

In regard to Drayton's handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called _Endimion and Phoebe_. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later piece in the same metre called the _Man in the Moone_. The volume containing Drayton's earlier _Endimion and Phoebe_ became so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton's poems in Smethwick's edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The _Man in the Moone_ is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediaeval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton's earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere.

The particular points in Keats's _Endymion_ where I seem to find suggestions from Drayton's _Man in the Moone_ are these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,--but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse):--

Endymion now forsakes All the delights that shepherds do prefer, And sets his mind so gen'rally on her That, all neglected, to the groves and springs, He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers The silver Naides bathe them in the brack. Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back, Amongst the blue Nereides; and when, Weary of waters, goddess-like again She the high mountains actively assays, And there amongst the light Oriades, That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort; Sometimes amongst those that with them comport, The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; And there she stays not; but incontinent Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, And with Endymion pleased that she saw, Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye, Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,--

the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and construction that it matters not where it is broken off.

Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in Keats's third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and dilate before the beholder's eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment in a dozen lines[3] which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion's lover.[4]

Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats was beyond all his contemporaries,--and it is the cardinal fact to be borne in mind about him,--the lineal descendant and direct heir of the Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this time most familiar--Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne and practically all the Spenserians,--were men apt to conceive alike of Grecian myth and mediaeval romance as necessarily holding moral and symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself familiar with the details of classic fable; and Sandys, in the fine Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs conform to a fixed mediaeval and Renaissance tradition by 'mythologizing' his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of illustrative parallel passages but of interpretations half rationalist, half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten that among Keats's own contemporaries Shelley had in his first important poem, _Alastor_, set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme, and one shadowing forth, as we shall find that _Endymion_ shadows forth though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic soul in man.

The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail in _Endymion_ are obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic meaning harder to detect. Keats's letters referring to his poem contain only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it, and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon them wherever we can.

For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions, inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.

In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out 'the one bare circumstance,' to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is something of Oriental bewilderment--an Arabian Night's jugglery with space and time--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected.

Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de Selincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero's probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,--the stithy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.[5] Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind him and

wander far In other regions, past the scanty bar To mortal steps,

in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? 'Our friend Keats,' Endymion is made to say in one of the poet's letters from Oxford, 'has been hauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance': and in like manner in the poem itself the hero asks,

Why am I not as are the dead, Since to a woe like this I have been led Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire--an element from which Keats's too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk, for except in telling of the blazing omens of _Hyperion's_ downfall it is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats's mind from various sources in his reading,--from the passage of Drayton above quoted,--from the _Arabian Nights_,--it may be from like incidents in the mediaeval Alexander romances (in which the hero's crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea in a glass case), or possibly even from the _Endimion_ of Gombauld, a very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance on Keats's own theme.[6]