Part 5

The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” The greatest perversion of the poet’s function is to falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets--all the more powerful because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words “Let us make man in our own image” and “male and female created he them.” Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious--and true lovers always are--that, for the season at least, they justify the words “I have said, Ye are gods.” Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a “great sacrament.” It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between man and woman what it is now--at least to the idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced more clearly. Love being much more respected and religion much less than of old, the danger of profanation is not so great as it was when religion was revered and love despised. The most characteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses--her not caring for masculine truth and worth unless they woo her with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of her senses--is the prevailing vice of most men, especially in these times. This general effeminacy is the poet’s great opportunity. It is his pontifical privilege to feel the truth; and his function is to bridge the gulf between severe verity and its natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech which, without any sacrifice of the former, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” He insinuates in nerve-convincing music the truths which the mass of mankind must feel before they believe. He leads them by their affections to things above their affections, making Urania acceptable to them by her prænomen Venus. He is the apostle of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which the chosen people have too often denied or disgraced in their eyes.

XIII

KEATS

Mr. Sidney Colvin’s book upon Keats is, in the main, a welcome exception to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. It is remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The bulk of Keats’s poetry, including “Endymion,” is estimated at its true worth, which, as Keats--the severest judge of his own work--knew and confessed, was not much; and the little volume (justly styled by Mr. Colvin “immortal”) which was published in 1820, and which does not consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the whole of the poet’s effective writing. And even in this little volume--which includes “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the five “Odes,” and “Hyperion”--Mr. Colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many serious defects. From the comparatively worthless waste of the rest of Keats’s writing, Mr. Colvin picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of the fragment called “The Eve of St. Mark,” and of that which is probably the very finest lyric in the English language, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

As long as Mr. Colvin limits himself to the positive beauties and defects of Keats’s poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. “I think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare.” Is not the truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most un-Shakespearian poet that ever lived? True poets may be divided into two distinct classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become confused. In the first class, which contains all the greatest poets, with Shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as accidents--though inevitable accidents--of its operation. The vision of such poets may almost be described in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of the Beatific Vision. “The vision,” he writes, “is a virtue, the beatitude an accident.” Such poets are truly spoken of as masculine. In the other class--in which Keats stands as high as any other, if not higher--the “beatitude,” the beauty and sweetness, is the essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident. These poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as feminine (not necessarily effeminate); and they are separated from the first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly man from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying that the spirit of the great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. “The man is not without the woman;” though “the man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man.” The difference lies in that which has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man had not the mastery. For him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and nothing else. But it is a fact of primary significance, both in morals and in art (a fact which is sadly lost sight of just now), that the highest beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth. There is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art, which women and womanly artists never attain--an inner radiance of original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as accidental.

In his individual criticisms of Keats’s poems Mr. Colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine character. In speaking of “Isabella” he says: “Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all; its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and without these no great literature can exist.” Again: “In Keats’s conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature.” And again: “In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. Both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in art, books, and nature.” In these and other equally just and unquestionable criticisms of Keats’s character and works, surely Mr. Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was “by temperament” “the most Shakespearian” of poets since Shakespeare. And whether he was also such (as Mr. Colvin further asserts him to have been) “by power,” let the poet’s work declare. In his own lovely line--which he faithfully kept to in “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and the “Odes”--he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. When he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better, though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a General Gordon or a Sir Thomas More. But let Keats try to assume the man--as he does in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition or at satirical humour, in the “Cap and Bells”--and all his life and power seem to shrivel and die, like the beauty of Lamia in the presence of Apollonius. Some of his readers may object the semblance of Miltonic strength in certain passages of the fragment “Hyperion”; but Keats himself knew and admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the world that there was no object of merely external nature, from “roses amorous of the moon” to

The solid roar Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,

which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.

In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.

XIV

WHAT SHELLEY WAS

Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point--his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given--the Professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father--an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another--a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet--notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies--by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani--with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres (witness “Epipsychidion”); and, anon, Harriet is “a frantic idiot,” Elizabeth a “brown demon,” and Emilia a “centaur.” “It was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of Shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst.” It is, perhaps, fortunate that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such “infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than mere saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit--at least, when it suited his mood and convenience--for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. He was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming” eccentricities. “When Bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have ‘a little hell of his own.’” At Eton “in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor.” On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” he replied, “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil.” The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “Here I swear,” he writes to Mr. Hogg, “and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me--here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” His resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such a world! He had all the naïveté as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he printed a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. He was summoned before the University authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others.” Much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. Hogg--the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife--writes: “He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘I am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘I am expelled!’... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words ‘Expelled! expelled!’” Professor Dowden thinks “it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the Creed,” compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg’s authority for the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley.” Of course, in face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by horror,’” is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “His voyage,” says his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast below before she raced into the gale.” Every one knows how the craft raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook on board, as soon as the Oxford hawser was cut. Shelley might have done much worse. She was a good and attractive person. He began by liking her. “There are some hopes,” he says, “of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her.” She seems to have been sincerely devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the “frantic idiot” who, though she would give Shelley money when she had it, was apparently not sufficiently “tolerant” upon other points--such as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of Switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the “eternal rapture” and “divine aspirations” which her husband was enjoying in the arms of another woman. Poor little “idiot” as she was, she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering “romance of reality” upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.

What Shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy--constitutionally indifferent to money, generous by impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of all that it most behoves a responsible being to know, and so conceited that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility; and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. If to do what is right in one’s own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then Shelley was the saint and martyr which a large number of--chiefly young--persons consider him to have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and liberty, is to be a “supreme” poet, then Shelley undoubtedly was such. But, as a man, Shelley was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the “political animal,” which Aristotle defines a man to be. If he could not see the reasons for any social institution or custom, he could not _feel_ any; and forthwith set himself to convince the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. He was equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection. The ties of relationship were no ties to him: for he could only _see_ them as accidents. “I, like the God of the Jews,” writes Shelley, “set up myself as no respecter of persons; and relationship is regarded by me as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.” As these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and little or no true wisdom or true love. The very texture of his verse suffers from these causes. In his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and melodious; but the more serious and subtle music of life which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of Tennyson’s or Wordsworth’s, far less with the best of our really “supreme” poets. A very great deal of his poetry is much like the soap-bubbles he was so fond of blowing--its superficies beauty, its substance wind; or like many a young lady who looks and moves and modulates her speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape.

After Shelley, the chief male figure in this romance--which would be altogether incredible were it not real--is that of the guide, philosopher, and friend of the poet’s youth, Godwin. Pecksniff is genteel comedy compared with the grim farce of this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, Godwin “sincerely abhorred all that was sordid and mean; but he liked sausage”; and the way he combined the necessity for nibbling at Shelley’s future fortune by making incessant claims, which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond description. His writing to tell Shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to his (Godwin’s) own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift at all, unless the name was changed to “Hume” or any other the poet might select, is a touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for Ancient Pistol.