2. THE ARTIFICER
It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things.
Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air—the bird-like flight or the bird-like song.
The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including The Faëry Queene. The first of his great poems was written after reading Chapman’s Homer, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time.
This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and
grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts?
Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry—“my demon poesy”—as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:
That I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear
The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair
Visions of all places: a bowery nook
Will be elysium—an eternal book
Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves and flowers—about the playing
Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.
This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer “The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect youthful Keats.
This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth—for knowledge, for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.
But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours.