words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued conclusion of “Paradise Lost.”
This is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem—in snatches alluring, in entirety disheartening—the “Endymion” of Keats. It will be perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and professed subject matter—the loves of Diana and Endymion, although the episode of Glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. As we have seen, Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of incidents—partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet’s own—which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader’s mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we find little in Keats’s poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman, passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first leap in the dark, follows where Fortune leads him—and assuredly she leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist. Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana, already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled glimpse of moonlight. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately—or rather with fatuous precipitancy—gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess—it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood—shall we say superior to it?
In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion’s descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aërial voyage upon winged coursers. These incidents—except indeed that of the Bacchante—are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. The tale of the aërial voyage seems abortive; its natural raison d’être and needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached. Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep for awhile: when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the Bacchante, and, in her character of Phœbe, regulate the nascent moon; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended re infectâ. This is an ingenious point of incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet’s mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours.
Such is in fact the quality of “Endymion” throughout. Everything is done for the sake of variegation and embroidery of the original fabric; or we might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. Constant as they are, the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous; one colour, varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater, because more congruous and harmonized, variety. Luscious and luxuriant in intention—for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or ideal—the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased, the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. The number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses “Endymion” with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from faultless, is free, surging, and melodious—one of the devices which the author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especially the hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of verse-transcript of Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”), are singularly wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, vivâ voce, to be “a pretty piece of paganism”—a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley (in his undispatched letter to the editor of the Quarterly Review) pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages—“And then the forest told it in a dream” (book ii.); “The rosy veils mantling the East” (book iii.); and “Upon a weeded rock this old man sat” (book iii.) The last—relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak—is certainly remarkable; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable than scores of others—as indeed Shelley himself implied.
To sum up, “Endymion” is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish—they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive—not negative or neutral. The work was in fact (as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree.
The next long poem of Keats—“Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”—is a vast advance on “Endymion” in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in “Endymion.” Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless), Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian tale is a short one. “Isabella” has always been a favourite with the readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the poet’s works—the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story ab extra, and enlarges on “the pity of it,” instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may have been “ledger-men” and “money-bags” (Boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals, though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when Keats “again asks aloud” why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem—that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic—indignant now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother “money-bags,” just as they are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself)—
“Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
The author’s invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me a fadeur hardly more appropriate than the money-bag’s epigram upon the “dewy rosary.” But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards “The Pot of Basil.” He thinks it both beautiful and pathetic—and so do I.
“Isabella” is written in the octave stanza; “The Eve of St. Agnes” in the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. “Isabella” is a narrative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; “The Eve of St. Agnes,” though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above “Isabella”—and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and the uncompleted “Eve of St. Mark.” “Hyperion” stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that, in the long run, even “Hyperion” represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this—that Keats took hold of the superstition proper to St. Agnes’ Eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of “Endymion,” and the futility of “The Cap and Bells,” might be held to indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story—and indeed I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into “The Eve of St. Agnes” is that the lover Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that Keats’s capacity for framing a story out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. The power of “The Eve of St. Agnes” lies in a wholly different direction. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn suspense of music and reverie. “The Eve of St. Agnes” is par excellence the poem of “glamour.” It means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from “The Eve of St. Agnes” dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.
“The Eve of St. Mark” was begun at much the same date as “The Eve of St. Agnes,” rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by the author is singular. In “Endymion” he had been a prodigal of treasures—some of them genuine, others spurious; in “The Eve of St. Agnes” he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws; but in “The Eve of St. Mark” he subsides into a delightful simplicity—a simplicity full, certainly, of “favour and prettiness,” but chary of ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most charming results. The non-completion of “The Eve of St. Mark” is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain. I should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes; and that he did not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the uncompleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark’s vigil is not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes’s. In the former instance (I quote from Dante Rossetti), “it is believed that, if a person placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness.” The same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,[22] surmised that “the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return.” If this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity—emotional, and even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of “The Eve of St. Mark” is full-blooded as well as quaint—there is nothing starved or threadbare about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge’s “Christabel,” we seem to feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality, modified by Keats’s own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”