Among My Books Volume Ii Part 29

"Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss,"

and perhaps

"I see his tents Pitched about Sechem"

might be added.

[370] I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of _enemy_ and _calamity_ in this pa.s.sage. Mr. Ma.s.son leaves out the comma after _If not_, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep _not_ a little farther apart from _what_, ("teach each"!)

[371] "First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.

[372] There seems to be something wrong in this word _sh.o.r.es_. Did Milton write _shoals_?

[373] But his etymological notes are worse. For example, "_recreant_, renouncing the faith, from the old French _recroire_, which again is from the mediaeval Latin _recredere_, to 'believe back,' or apostatize." This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in either language. He derives _serenate_ from _sera_, and says that _parle_ means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as _parley_, had the same meanings, and was commonly p.r.o.nounced like it, as in Marlowe's

"What, shall we _parle_ with this Christan?"

It certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant _negotiation_. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the princ.i.p.als. On the verses

"And some flowers and some bays For thy hea.r.s.e to strew the ways,"

he has a note to tell us that _hea.r.s.e_ is not to be taken "in our sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the ways for thy hea.r.s.e." How could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it?

[374] A pa.s.sage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes.

[375] Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.

[376] Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.

[377] So Dante:-- "Ma sapienza e amore e virtute."

So Donne:-- "Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."

[378] Mr. Ma.s.son is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's "Shakespearian Grammar" in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walker's "Shakespeare's Versification" would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge.

[379] Milton has a verse in Comus where the _e_ is elided from the word _sister_ by its preceding a vowel:--

"Heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!"

This would have been impossible before a consonant.

[380] So _spirito_ and _spirto_ in Italian, _esperis_ and _espirs_ in Old French.

[381] Milton, however, would not have balked at _th' bottomless_ any more than Drayton at _th' rejected_ or Donne at _th' sea_. Mr. Ma.s.son does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th'

midst_ to _i' the midst_, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored the _n_ in _i'_, where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the p.r.o.nunciation, as _o'_ for _of_ and _on_.

[382] Exactly a.n.a.logous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two syllables.

[383] Milton himself has _invisible_, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a verse like

"Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"

while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he loved.

KEATS.

There are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of their personal history than those of Keats; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they have written. To write the life of a man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circ.u.mstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coa.r.s.er material; but the gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape of that,--upon the knots and twists which existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art.

John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was "born in the upper ranks of the middle cla.s.s."

This shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society, and reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-player who, wis.h.i.+ng to compliment his pupil, George III., divided all fiddlers into three cla.s.ses,--those who could not play at all, those who played very badly, and those who played very well,--a.s.suring his Majesty that he had made such commendable progress as to have already reached the second rank. We shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told us in an earlier biography) "was employed in the establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a _proprietor_; second, he was the proprietor of an _establishment_; third, he was the proprietor of a _large_ establishment; and fourth, this large establishment was _nearly_ opposite Finsbury Circus,--a name which vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs. It is true Leigh Hunt a.s.serts that Keats "was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin,"[384] but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed. We suspect the fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which measured genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest establishments in Moorfields.

As well as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather, on the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. It is of more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a "lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by her pa.s.sionate love of amus.e.m.e.nt,"

bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of December, as would have been conventionally proper. Lord Houghton describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat saturnine demeanour." This last circ.u.mstance does not agree very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by adding that "she succeeded, _however_, in inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." This was particularly true of John, who once, when between four and five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to be disturbed.[385]

In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to have been ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr.

Clarke at Enfield with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camperdown, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school resolved to maintain the family reputation for courage. John was always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. He attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears; and when his mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable, hiding himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher or friend.

He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and impressed his companions with a sense of his power. They thought he would one day be a famous soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by the boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at the least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by necessity or fear of the police reports.

Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the Aeneid, read Robinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but he had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's Dictionary, and knew G.o.ds, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good company perhaps for him as artists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive tinder their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.[386]

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, "of some eminence" in his profession, as Lord Houghton takes care to a.s.sure us. The place was of more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr.

Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the "Faerie Queene."

Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. Keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story,--the lost heir discovered by his apt.i.tude for what is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us "that he used sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the shortness of his own career.[387]

Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chapman's translations had a more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his comments on the "Paradise Lost" are enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself, but does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early G.o.ds, nevertheless pa.s.sed a very creditable examination in 1817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It attracted little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the composition of "Endymion,"

which was published in 1818. Milton's "Tetrachordon" was not better abused; but Milton's a.s.sailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the const.i.tuted authorities of literary justice. They might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all England. The difference between his fortune and Milton's was that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and being set in the pillory. In the first case, the annoyance brushes off mostly with the mud; in the last, there is no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a certain extent, Keats had; for his ambition was n.o.ble, and he hoped not to make a great reputation, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose.

It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad morals. Is it because they feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the other? Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. However it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there were never a _not_ in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature outraged by the "Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgarities of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling below it. In England, especially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord; but to be ridiculous and an apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly to be excommunicated. _A priori_, there was something absurd in poetry written by the son of an a.s.sistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jennings, even though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the actor,[388] thought so even more distinctly in Blackwood, bidding the young apothecary "back to his gallipots!" It is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditchwater, though you know it to be thrown by a scullion in a garret.