Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

by C. H. Herford

III

For, evidently, it is in Hyperion, if anywhere, that we have to seek the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds—I cannot write about scenery and visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and ‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the Laputan printing-press.’ ‘I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact, as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me.’ And Brown tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]

Their actual experiences of mountain-climbing were few. Weather checked them at Helvellyn, and expense at Ben Lomond; but in the ‘bleak air atop’ of Skiddaw, as Lamb had called it, ‘I felt as if I were going to a Tournament.’ What he felt about the Arran mountains we have seen. Ailsa Craig—the seafowl-haunted ‘craggy ocean pyramid,’ evoked ‘the only sonnet of any worth I have of late written.’ They found the north end of Loch Lomond ‘grand to excess,’ and Keats made a rude pen-and-ink sketch of ‘that blue place among the mountains.’ But their greatest experience was doubtless the climb on Ben Nevis, on 2 August. The chasms below the summit of Nevis seemed to him ‘the most tremendous places I have ever seen,’ ‘the finest wonder of the whole—they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain, ... other huge crags rising round ... give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or core in itself.’

The plan of a poem on the war of the gods and Titans was already shaped or shaping in his mind when Keats set out for the north. As early as September 1817 he had had in view ‘a new romance’ for the following summer; in keeping with the new aspirations which that summer brought, the ‘romance’ was now to be an epic. The most potent influence governing the execution, that of Milton, is familiar, and does not directly concern us here. Still less can we consider the possible effect of companionship with those three little volumes of Cary’s Dante, the single book taken with him on this tour.[16] But while the spell of Paradise Lost is apparent in the cast of the plot, above all in the debate of the Titans, and in the style, an influence to which Milton’s is wholly alien asserts itself in the delineation of the Titanic ‘den’ itself. Clearly based upon the idea of an Inferno, this ‘sad place’ where ‘bruised Titans’ are ‘chained in torture,’ is yet full of traits which recall neither Milton nor Dante, but rather one of those amazing chasms on Nevis, which seemed to be the very ‘core’ of the great mountain. He had, even, as he looked down into that vaporous gulf, actually thought of the image of Hell. Milton’s Hell is a plain of burning earth vaulted with fire and verging on a sea of flame[17]; if there is a hill (i. 670) it is a volcano, belching fire, or coated with a sulphurous scurf. The Keatsian Inferno is genuinely, what he calls it, a ‘den,’ a yawning mountain dungeon overarched with jutting crags, floored with hard flint and slaty ridge, and encompassed by a deafening roar of waterfalls and torrents. A shattered rib of rock, with his iron mace beside it, attests the spent fury of Creus. Enceladus lies uneasily upon a craggy shelf. To render the spectacle of the ruined and almost lifeless bodies lying ‘vast and edgeways,’ he calls in a definite reminiscence, the ‘dismal cirque’ of Druid stones near Keswick. He has felt too the silence of the mountains in the pauses of the winter wind, though he speaks of it only to contrast it with the organ voice of Saturn preceding the expectant murmur of his audience of fallen divinities (ii. 123).[18] The darkness, too, in which they languish is not eternal and ordained like that of Milton’s Hell; the coming of the Sun-god will invade it with a splendour like the morn and

... all the beetling gloomy steeps,

All the sad spaces of oblivion,

And every gulf, and every chasm old,

And every height, and every sullen depth,

Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,

And all the everlasting cataracts,

And all the headlong torrents, far and near,

Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)

will stand revealed in that terrible splendour.

It is clear that in this great passage Keats has deliberately invoked the image of a sunrise among precipitous mountains; and these lines assure him a lasting place amongst our poet interpreters of mountain glory. We must beware, as we have seen, of overstressing the element of realism in the poem. Keats was not describing mountain scenery, English, Scotch, or any other, but using certain aspects of it, which had been vividly brought home to him as he climbed or trudged, to render poetic inspirations of far richer compass and wider scope. Much of the detail of this Titan prison belongs as little to his British mountain experience as do the Titans themselves. Iapetus grasps a strangled serpent; Asia, dreaming of palm-shaded temples and sacred isles, leans upon an elephant tusk. We are conscious of no discord, so pervading is the impress of a single potent imagination, whatever the material it employs. But it is not immaterial to note that, as Professor de Sélincourt has pointed out, Keats did alter the original draft of Hyperion’s coming in such a way as to give it a close resemblance to a sunrise among the mountains, omitting two lines which preceded the last but one quoted above:

And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,

Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.

The former of these lines may be described as a momentary reversion to the tender ‘mossy’ luxuriance of the Endymion scenery, like the ‘nest of pain’ (ii. 90), which, however, he allowed to stand.[19] Its excision, in the final version, marks Keats’s sense of the incongruity of that earlier symbolism with the sterner matter in hand, as does the transformation of the dreamy, pastoral Oceanus of the earlier poem into the master of Stoic wisdom, able ‘to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,’ who offers his bitter balm to the despairing Titans, in the later.

Hyperion, we know, was left a fragment, and with deliberate purpose. The mighty shade of Milton, he came to feel, deflected him from his proper purpose in poetry. It is less important, but not less true, that his passing vision of grand mountains was not in complete consonance with his genius, and that his brief anthem of mountain poetry had in it something of the nature of a tour de force. The mountains were for him neither strongholds of faith nor sources of sublime consolation. Even in the letters written in their presence he could speak somewhat impatiently, as we have seen, of ‘scenery’ compared with life and men. And if he places his ruined Titans in this wild den among the crags and torrents, it is because there was something in him, deeper than his reverence for Wordsworth or for mountain grandeur, which felt the very savagery of the scene, its naked aloofness from everything human, to be in accord with the primeval rudeness of an outdone and superseded race. It is not for nothing that, when the scene changes from the old order to the new, we are transported from Hyperion’s sun-smitten precipices to the sea-haunted lawns and woodlands of Delos, where the young Apollo is seen wandering forth in the morning twilight

Beside the osiers of a rivulet,

Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.

Do we not hear in this the home-coming accents, as of one who has escaped from barbarous Thynia and Bithynia, and tastes the joy that is born

‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino

labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?

Keats had, in effect, come home.

Yet the deflection, if it strained, also braced; and if in the following months his imagination, when he is most inspired, moves once more habitually among mossy woodland ways and by enchanted waters, the immense advance in robustness of artistic and intellectual sinew which distinguishes the poet of the Nightingale and Autumn from the poet of Endymion was gained chiefly in that summer of enlarged ideals and experience, of which the mountain vision was a small but a significant and symbolical part.

IV
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

IV

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

MAZZINI, the most prophetic figure of the nineteenth century, declared in a famous passage his confidence in the European mission of his country. ‘The Third Italy,’ destined to be born of the long agony of the struggle with Austria without and the papacy within, was not merely to be a nation, restored to unity and independence; it was to intervene as an original voice in the complex harmony of the European nationalities, contributing of its own inborn genius something distinctive and unique. ‘We believe devoutly that Italy has not exhausted her life in the world. She is called to introduce yet new elements in the progressive development of humanity, and to live with a third life. It is for us to begin it.’ Were Mazzini to return to life to-day, how far would he regard his prophecy as fulfilled? Beyond question his lofty idealism would find much to disapprove and to regret. He would find a Third Italy, which has committed grave excesses in the name of her recovered nationhood. But he would also find a nation whose present rulers have shown more capacity for Mazzinean internationalism than any other European government. And he would find, also, in the Third Italy, a real renascence, a genuine rebirth of genius and power, and this in ways so individual as to justify in a rare degree the anticipation that Italy would give something vitally her own to the new Europe. Open any serious Italian book to-day, and you will note a kind of intellectual concentration, a girding up of the loins of speech and thought, in striking contrast with the loose-tongued volubility of most Italian writing, in verse or prose, of the mid-nineteenth century. You note also a new tone of critical mastery and conscious equality. Italy in the last century was still the ‘woman-people,’ the pathetic beauty, languid still after the gentle torpor of two centuries, and whose intellectual life, with some brilliant isolated exceptions, faintly reflected that of the more masculine nations north of the Alps. To-day she has not only critically mastered all that Europe has to give, she sits in judgment upon us, and the judgment she pronounces has again and again been of that fruitful kind which disposes of old difficulties by revealing a larger law. Benedetto Croce, who in his review, the Critica, brings the literature of Europe, weighed and measured, to his reader’s doors, has in his original philosophic work subjected her philosophic systems to a searching revision, and has succeeded in some measure to their authority.[20] A thinker less known, even to cultivated Italians, Aliotta, has surveyed in a book of singular penetration and philosophic power, the ‘idealistic reaction against science’ in the nineteenth century. And when we look to creative literature, we find in this Third Italy, together with a profusion of those fungoid growths of which the modern age has in the West been everywhere prolific, a group of poets, of powerful temperament and dazzling gifts, to whom no predecessor, in Italy or elsewhere, offers more than a distant resemblance. One of these, after pouring forth poems, dramas, novels, in prodigal abundance for thirty years, became the most vociferous, and possibly the most potent, of the forces that drove Italy into the war, and was until lately the idol of the whole Italian race. Even to-day, after the sorry collapse of his adventure, the man in whom Europe, irritated and impatient, sees only a sort of Harlequin-Garibaldi, impudent where his predecessor was sublime, and florid where he was laconic, is still, for multitudes of his countrymen, the hero-poet who took the banner of Italianità from the failing or treacherous hands of diplomats and statesmen, and defended it against the enemy without and the enemy within, with the tenacity of maturity and the ardour of youth. Certainly, one who is beyond all rivalry the most adored poet, in any country, of our time, who has fought for Italy with tongue and pen and risked his life in her service, and whose personality might be called a brilliant impressionist sketch of the talents and failings of the Italian character, reproducing some in heightened but veracious illumination, others in glaring caricature or paradoxical distortion—such a man, as a national no less than as a literary force, claims and deserves close study.

Before entering, however, upon the detail of his life and work, let me assist our imagination of Gabriele d’Annunzio by quoting from the vivid description given by Mr. James Bone of a meeting with him at Venice in the summer of 1918. The poet, fifty-six years old, was then at the height of his renown; Fiume was still unthought of. His great exploit of flying over Vienna and dropping leaflets inviting her in aureate imagery to make peace was on every tongue. The gondoliers took off their hats as they passed his house on the Grand Canal, and he had to register all his letters to prevent their being abstracted as souvenirs. Mr. Bone was talking with the airmen at an aerodrome on one of the islands in the lagoons; when ‘Conversation died instantly as an airman, very different from the others, came hurrying towards us a rather small, very quick, clean-cut figure, wearing large smoked glasses and white gloves with the wrists turned down.... The nose was rather prominent, complexion not dark but marked a little, the whole profile very clear, making one think not of a Renaissance Italian but of a type more antique, an impression accentuated by his rather large, beautifully shaped ear, very close to the head. The body denied the age that was told in the face, for all its firmness. One’s first impression was of a personality of extraordinary swiftness and spirit still at full pressure, remorselessly pursuing its course “in hours of insight willed.”... The whole surface of d’Annunzio’s personality suggested a rich, hard fineness, like those unpolished marbles in old Italian churches that gleam delicately near the base where the worshippers have touched them, but above rise cold and white as from the matrix.... There was something of the man of fashion in the way he wore his gloves, and in his gestures, but nothing one could see of the national idol aware of itself.’[21]