For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions, inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.
In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He draws out ‘the one bare circumstance,’ to use his own phrase, of the story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is something of Oriental bewilderment—an Arabian Night’s jugglery with space and time—in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected.
Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de Sélincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero’s probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,—the stithy of Vulcan, the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.[5] Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind him and
| wander far In other regions, past the scanty bar To mortal steps, |
in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? ‘Our friend Keats,’ Endymion is made to say in one of the poet’s letters from Oxford, ‘has been hauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance’: and in like manner in the poem itself the hero asks,
| Why am I not as are the dead, Since to a woe like this I have been led Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea? |
But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire—an element from which Keats’s too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk, for except in telling of the blazing omens of Hyperion’s downfall it is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats’s mind from various sources in his reading,—from the passage of Drayton above quoted,—from the Arabian Nights,—it may be from like incidents in the mediæval Alexander romances (in which the hero’s crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea in a glass case), or possibly even from the Endimion of Gombauld, a very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance on Keats’s own theme.[6]
Book I. This book is entirely introductory, and carries us no farther than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole passage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms in St Thomas’s Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to a new line he had just written,—‘A thing of beauty is a constant joy,’—and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’[7] Using this for the first line of his new poem, Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of beauty—sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and heroism indiscriminately—which make for health and quietude amidst the gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the Chaucerian poem, The Floure and Lefe, in which he took so much pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new, unexplained soul-sickness.
The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the god: then come dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit apart among the elder shepherds, who pass the time imagining what happy tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their ‘homes ethereal’ after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lemprière as a son of Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of the gods in the Iliad, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep—his second, the first having been at the beginning of Sleep and Poetry. Endymion awakens refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future. She sings soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his troubles:—
| Brother,’tis vain to hide That thou dost know of things mysterious, Immortal, starry; such alone could thus Weigh down thy nature. |