Sh.e.l.ley"s individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical, pessimistic sense of "eating and drinking" before we die, which one is so familiar with just now.
It is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Sh.e.l.ley"s "immorality" should remember. With him "love" was truly a mystical initiation, a religious sacrament, a means of getting into touch with the cosmic secret, a path--and perhaps the only path--to the Beatific Vision.
It is not wise to turn away from Sh.e.l.ley because of his lack of "humour," of his lack of a "sense of proportion." The mystery of the world, whatever it may be, shows itself sometimes quite as indifferent as Sh.e.l.ley to these little nuances. We hear it crying aloud in the night with no humorous cry; and it is too often to stop our ears to what we hear, that we jest so lightly! It is doubtful whether Nature cares greatly for our "sense of proportion."
To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing about Sh.e.l.ley"s verse is the manner in which his whole physical and psychic temperament has pa.s.sed into it. This is so in a measure with all poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face, his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read his lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of the Mona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who has really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. How else could those indescribable pearly shimmerings, those opal tints and rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The very purity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill into the heart of "normal humanity," lends a magic, like the reflection of moonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same ethereal transparency of pa.s.sion which excites, by reason of its sublime "immorality," the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of our night," to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean "music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the _silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Sh.e.l.ley from the turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to bathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our hands in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us underlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births and forgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where the Eternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the "muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in." What separates Sh.e.l.ley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramount concern, and, after "art," morality.
With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of any material "teaching;" one is simply transported into the high, cold regions where the creative G.o.ds build, like children, domes of "many-coloured gla.s.s," wherewith to "stain the white radiance of eternity." And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life, we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter with the old too-human zest, and let the "ineffectual" madman pa.s.s and be forgotten!
I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Sh.e.l.ley"s verse is precisely what dreams of the trans.m.u.tation of "man" into "beyond-man."
That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food of the immortals.
And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something, sometimes, that responds to such strains as "When the lamp is shattered" and "One word is too often profaned." Perhaps only those who have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hope with the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can enter completely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful, sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made.
And the artless simplicity of Sh.e.l.ley"s technique--much more really simple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, of a Blake or Verlaine--lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth"s eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are so naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when they seem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot help happening upon, as they soothe their "love-laden souls" in "secret hour."
The infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recall emotions that we ourselves have had, with the very form and circ.u.mstance of their pa.s.sion. And who can read the verses of Sh.e.l.ley without recalling such? That peculiar poignancy of memory, like a sharp spear, which arrests us at the smell of certain plants or mosses, or nameless earth-mould, or "growths by the margins of pond-waters;" that poignancy which brings back the indescribable balm of Spring and the bitter-sweetness of irremediable loss; who can communicate it like Sh.e.l.ley?
There are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems, particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear-cut hill towns of Italy; but for English readers it will always be the rosemary "that is for remembrance" and the pansies that "are for thoughts" that give their perfume to the feelings he excites.
Other poets may be remembered at other times, but it is when the sun-warmed woods smell of the first primroses, and the daffodils, coming "before the swallow dares," lift up their heads above the gra.s.s, that the sting of this sweetness, too exquisite to last beyond a moment, brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret.
KEATS
It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beauty alone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to follow that terrible G.o.ddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "white implacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood--for the blood of our dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet we follow her--to the bitter end!
Beauty hath her Martyrs, as the rest; and of these Keats is the Protagonist; the youngest and the fairest; the most enamoured victim.
From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love, we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World, there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothing but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!
His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event in life, was "pluralistic." He did not ask that things should come in upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One he followed.
Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less _moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!
If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic"; but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too pa.s.sionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should have been driven by the phantom-flame of s.e.x-illusion to find all the magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned, enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated, with a furious hatred, any b.a.s.t.a.r.d claims and privileges that insolently intruded themselves between the G.o.dlike senses of Man and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the Upper Cla.s.ses? What were all these but vain impertinences, interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is my natural enemy!"
The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits.
His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such "sensation," a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a l.u.s.t, a madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him.
How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him bleeding to the ground!
But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy?
Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow.
We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!
What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing s.p.a.ces of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood the torment of the Wood-G.o.d and his mad joy, as the author of Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this poet"s insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less "vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days, had he never met "that girl."
"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking, it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.
St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such a spell!
The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, and yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the psychic plane!
For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--his death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her, this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot "was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild,"
will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, through the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing,"
borrowed originally from poor Ophelia"s despair, and echoed wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics, been conveyed to my reader?
But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist.
Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such things produce, by any profane repet.i.tion! They leave behind them, every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of sweet Pain!
Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human pa.s.sion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?
Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those "charmed magic cas.e.m.e.nts" towards "the perilous foam." We may linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze, awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town, "emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morning rose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies." We may "imprison our mistress"s soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes."
We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy "oozings" of the rich year"s vintage. But across all these things lies, like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart"s blood, the knowledge of _what it means_ to have been able to turn all this into poetry!
It means Torment. It means Despair. It means _that cry,_ out of the dust of the cemetery at Rome, "O G.o.d! O G.o.d! has there ever been such pain as my pain?"
I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child of the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty are evoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--if we are to be--like the G.o.ds, _creators of Life._ For Life is a thing that can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the wound goes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountain flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--what did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to a weary irrelevance!
One is unwilling to leave our Adonais, whose "annual wound in Lebanon allures" us thus fatally, with nothing but such a bitter cry.
One has a pathetic human longing to think of him _as he was,_ in those few moments of unalloyed pleasure the G.o.ds allowed him before "consumption," and "that girl," poisoned the springs of his life! And those moments, how they have pa.s.sed into his poetry like the breath of the Spring!
When "the grand obsession" was not upon him, who, like Keats, can make us feel the cool, sweet, wholesome touch of our great Mother, the Earth? That sleep, "full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing," which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can give may heal us also for a brief while.
We, too, on this very morning--listen reader!--may wreath "a flowery band to bind us to the Earth, spite of despondence." Some "shape of beauty may yet move away the pall from our dark spirits."
Even with old Saturn under his weight of grief, we may drink in the loveliness of those "green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars." And in the worst of our moods we can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pa.s.s not away. We can even call out to them from her very side who is "the cause," "the cause, my soul," of what we suffer.
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature"s patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth"s human sh.o.r.es--"
This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the "midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts before we pa.s.s hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some strange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, even though life turned out to mean _this!_
And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "we have lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those "happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what it may be to have been born a son of man!
But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life of the spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doors to the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over one another. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, more poignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, and dream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so!
What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _that thing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion make up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the little ways,_ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests; nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the senses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant, comes the pinch and the sting!
And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was.
What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his darling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her, forever. "Vain," as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain, unutterably vain, are "all the creeds" that would console!" Tired of hearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all the weariness of life--from these we "would begone"--"save that to die we leave our love alone"!
But it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from the flesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon, that _the tragedy of the senses lies._ It lies in the very intensity with which we have sifted, winnowed, tormented and refined these panthers of holy l.u.s.t. Those who understand the poetry of Keats recognise that in the pa.s.sion which burns him for the "heavenly quintessence" as Marlowe calls it, there is also the ghastly danger of reaction. The pitiless hands of Joy "are ever at his lips, bidding adieu" and "veiled melancholy has her "sovran shrine" in the heart of all delight."
This is the curse upon those who follow the _supreme Beauty_--that is to say, the Beauty that belongs, not to ideas and ideals, but to living forms. They are driven by the gross pressure of circ.u.mstance to forsake her, to leave her, to turn aside and eat husks with the swine!
It is the same with that supreme mystery of _words_ themselves, put of which such an artist as this one was creates his spells and his sorcery. How, after tasting, drop by drop, that draught of "lingered sweetness long drawn-out" of his unequalled style, can we bear to fall back upon the jabbering and screeching, the howling and hissing, of the voices we have to listen to in common resort? Ah, child, child!
Think carefully before you turn your candid-innocent eyes to the fatal entrance to these mysteries! It is better never to have known what the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, _having seen her,_ to pa.s.s the rest of our days with these copies, and prost.i.tutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimic humanity so abominably"!
That is the worst of it. That is the sting of it. All the _great quests_ in this world tempt us and destroy us, for, though they may touch our famished lips once and again before we perish, one thing they cannot do--one thing Beauty herself, the most sacred of all such quests, cannot do--and that is to make the arid intervals of our ordinary life tolerable, when we have to return to the common world, and the people and things that stand gaping in that world, like stupid, staring idols!