(4) Tiff. By the Author of Lucy; or, A Great Mistake. ‘Favourite Fiction’ Series. (William Stevens.)
TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1887.)
A poet, said Keats once, ‘is the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures,’ and whether the aphorism be universally true or not, this is certainly the impression produced by the two last biographies that have appeared of Keats himself. It cannot be said that either Mr. Colvin or Mr. William Rossetti makes us love Keats more or understand him better. In both these books there is much that is like ‘chaff in the mouth,’ and in Mr. Rossetti’s there is not a little that is like ‘brass on the palate.’ To a certain degree this is, no doubt, inevitable nowadays. Everybody pays a penalty for peeping through keyholes, and the keyhole and the backstairs are essential parts of the method of the modern biographers. It is only fair, however, to state at the outset that Mr. Colvin has done his work much better than Mr. Rossetti. The account Mr. Colvin gives of Keats’s boyhood, for instance, is very pleasing, and so is the sketch of Keats’s circle of friends, both Leigh Hunt and Haydon being admirably drawn. Here and there, trivial family details are introduced without much regard to proportion, and the posthumous panegyrics of devoted friends are not really of so much value, in helping us to form any true estimate of Keats’s actual character, as Mr. Colvin seems to imagine. We have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common-sense and gentleness were Keats’s two special characteristics the worthy Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence. Part of Keats’s charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness. We do not want him reduced to a sand-paper smoothness or made perfect by the addition of popular virtues. Still, if Mr. Colvin has not given us a very true picture of Keats’s character, he has certainly told the story of his life in a pleasant and readable manner. He may not write with the ease and grace of a man of letters, but he is never pretentious and not often pedantic.
Mr. Rossetti’s book is a great failure. To begin with, Mr. Rossetti commits the great mistake of separating the man from the artist. The facts of Keats’s life are interesting only when they are shown in their relation to his creative activity. The moment they are isolated they are either uninteresting or painful. Mr. Rossetti complains that the early part of Keats’s life is uneventful and the latter part depressing, but the fault lies with the biographer, not with the subject.
The book opens with a detailed account of Keats’s life, in which he spares us nothing, from what he calls the ‘sexual misadventure at Oxford’ down to the six weeks’ dissipation after the appearance of the Blackwood article and the hysterical and morbid ravings of the dying man. No doubt, most if not all of the things Mr. Rossetti tells us are facts; but there is neither tact shown in the selection that is made of the facts nor sympathy in the use to which they are put. When Mr. Rossetti writes of the man he forgets the poet, and when he criticises the poet he shows that he does not understand the man. His first error, as we have said, is isolating the life from the work; his second error is his treatment of the work itself. Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful Ode to a Nightingale, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and form. He begins by saying that ‘the first point of weakness’ in the poem is the ‘surfeit of mythological allusions,’ a statement which is absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three contain any mythological allusions at all, and of these not one is either forced or remote. Then coming to the second verse,
Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
Mr. Rossetti exclaims in a fine fit of ‘Blue Ribbon’ enthusiasm: ‘Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale’s music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation’! ‘To call wine “the true, the blushful Hippocrene” . . . seems’ to him ‘both stilted and repulsive’; ‘the phrase “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” is (though picturesque) trivial’; ‘the succeeding image, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”’ is ‘far worse’; while such an expression as ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ is an obvious pleonasm, for Dryad really means Oak-nymph! As for that superb burst of passion,
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Mr. Rossetti tells us that it is a palpable, or rather ‘palpaple (sic) fact that this address . . . is a logical solecism,’ as men live longer than nightingales. As Mr. Colvin makes very much the same criticism, talking of ‘a breach of logic which is also . . . a flaw in the poetry,’ it may be worth while to point out to these two last critics of Keats’s work that what Keats meant to convey was the contrast between the permanence of beauty and the change and decay of human life, an idea which receives its fullest expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Nor do the other poems fare much better at Mr. Rossetti’s hands. The fine invocation in Isabella—