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.”