Part 9 (2/2)
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 anguis.h.!.+ 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!
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