Life would be a dull affair for the smaller men if comment and side remark were forever debarred as soon as the bigwigs had settled the main contention.
Leaving on one side, then, the odes and other pieces which by universal consent are perfect, or as nearly so as consists with human frailty,[10] let us content ourselves with intimating the profit which readers of a proper youthfulness and other needful, not over-critical, qualifications may derive from some of the other and longer poems, which by the same common consent, as well as by the acknowledgment of the man who wrote them, are in every sense imperfect.
Indeed, there are few things in Keats’s letters more interesting in themselves, or more characteristic of their author, than his apologies for these same longer pieces, especially for “Endymion.”
“Why endeavor after a long poem?” he has heard some one ask. And this is his 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; which may be food for a week’s stroll in the summer? Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes downstairs? a morning work at most.”
Evidently his “lovers of poetry” are of the tribe of those whose practice we have heard him describing as “a sparing touch of noble books;” lovers rather than critics or students; browsers and ruminators; not determined upon devouring whole forests, or even entire trees, but content with getting here and there the goodness of a leaf or the sweetness of a blossom. He foresees that “Endymion” is doomed to be in one way a failure; he knows that his mind at present, in its nonage, is “like a pack of scattered cards.” The words are his own. Yet he confides that there will be poetry in his long poem, and that the right spirits will find it. And so they do. He has touched their disposition to a nicety. They love to “wander in it.” They may never have tried very hard to follow the story; they may not care to read any special student’s supposed discoveries as to just how this part of the action is related to that or the other. But they like the poetry. They never read the poem, or read in it, without finding some. They do not wish it shorter, nor are they conscious of any very sharp regret that it is not better. Wisely or unwisely, they accept it as it is, and are thankful that the young man wrote it, and, having written it, took nobody’s advice against printing it. If they read in it, as we say, why, that is mostly what they do with the “Fairy Queen” and “Paradise Lost.” It may be the fault of the poem, or it may be the fault of the reader; or it may be nobody’s fault.
In the case of “Endymion,” indeed, it requires no exceptional acumen to perceive that the work hangs feebly together, that its construction, its architectonic, if that be the word, is defective past all mending. “Utterly incoherent,” is Mr. Arnold’s dictum, and for ourselves we have no inclination to dispute him. Our fault or the poet’s, we have always found it so. But like Mr. Arnold, we feel the breath of genius blowing through it, and therefore, as we say, we find in it not infrequently an hour of good reading.
Such reading, it has sometimes seemed to us (and the poet’s apology, now we think of it, comes to much the same thing), is like walking in a forest, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. All about us they stand, dwindling away and away as we look, till, whichever way we turn, there is no looking farther. Above our heads is a canopy of interlacing branches,—
“overwove
By many a summer’s silent fingering,”—