Oxford Lectures on Poetry

74

The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is not so in a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of the Divine Comedy in a form not its own than you can the content of a song.

The theory is connected in some minds with the view that ‘music is the true type or measure of perfected art.’ That view again rests on the idea that ‘it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,’ and that accordingly ‘the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises’ (Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavour in its own way to achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.

75

The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub. Gowans & Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the initial of the editor’s name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually without interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader in making changes.

76

Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year as Carlyle.

77

These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times, but they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ he was thinking not merely of the reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of those unwritten poems, of which ‘the faint conceptions’ in happier days used to ‘bring the blood into his forehead.’

78

LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV, XVII, XVIII, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth’s lines, ‘The cock is crowing.’

79

LXI, C., LXVI, F.

80

LVI, C., LXI, F.

81

LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have thanked Keats for his bishopric.

82

From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C., CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV, F.

83

Especially as I have a black eye.

84

‘Pain had no sting and pleasure’s wreath no flower.’

85

XCII, C., CVI, F.

86

XIX, C., XXI, F.

87

LIV, C., LIX, F.

88

CXXXI, C., CLII, F.

89

CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word ‘turn’ in the last sentence but two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads ‘have.’

90

Keats’s use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton’s ‘pure intelligence of heaven.’

91

XCII, C., CVI, F.

92

CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a passage ending with the words, ‘they are able to “consecrate whate’er they look upon.”’ Is not this a quotation from the Hymn:

Spirit of Beauty that dost consecrateWith thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?

If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from Shelley’s poetry in the letters of Keats. The Hymn had been published in Hunt’s Examiner, Jan., 1817.

93

The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to investigate Keats’s mind, and the ideas that were trying to take shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose John Keats, a Study (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges’s treatment of these ideas is masterly. To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was dissatisfied with Endymion even before he had finished it, he did not at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too much meaning into the myth. On Alastor and Endymion see further the Note appended to this lecture.

94

A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic genius of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in the rendering of Nature.

95

XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

96

CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F.

97

XIX, C., XXI, F.

98

XXXII, C., XXXIV, F.

99

He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.

100

L, C., LIII, F.

101

XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

102

Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps that if Keats’s position, as formulated above, is accepted, the question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.

103

CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of the lecture.

104

An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI, F.

105

I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage in the revised Hyperion, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de Sélincourt’s edition.

106

XXII, C., XXV, F.

107

That is, in ‘half-knowledge,’ ‘doubts,’ ‘mysteries’ (see p. 235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.

108

LXXVI, C., LXXX, F.

109

The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well be Adam’s dream in Paradise Lost, Book viii.:

She disappear’d, and left me dark: I wakedTo find her, or for ever to deploreHer loss, and other pleasures all abjure.

Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.

110

It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read ‘the world, – those who,’ etc., so that the last two clauses would be relative clauses co-ordinate with ‘who love not their fellow-beings.’ Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting because of the comma after ‘fellow-beings,’ and because the paragraph is followed by the quotation (‘those’ should be ‘they’),

The good die first,And those whose hearts are dry as summer’s dustBurn to the socket.

The good who die first correspond with the ‘pure and tender-hearted’ who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet in Alastor. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Shelley meant this; but as he was in England when Alastor was printed, he probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the serious misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.

111

XVIII, C., XX, F.

112

In this lecture and the three that follow it I have mentioned the authors my obligations to whom I was conscious of in writing or have discovered since; but other debts must doubtless remain, which from forgetfulness I am unable to acknowledge.

113

See on this and other points Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 106 ff.

114

Rötscher, Shakespeare in seinen höchsten Charaktergebilden, 1864.

115

That from the beginning Shakespeare intended Henry’s accession to be Falstaff’s catastrophe is clear from the fact that, when the two characters first appear, Falstaff is made to betray at once the hopes with which he looks forward to Henry’s reign. See the First Part of Henry IV., Act I., Scene ii.

116

Cf. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays.

117

See Note at end of lecture.

118

It is to be regretted, however, that in carrying his guts away so nimbly he ‘roared for mercy’; for I fear we have no ground for rejecting Henry’s statement to that effect, and I do not see my way to adopt the suggestion (I forget whose it is) that Falstaff spoke the truth when he swore that he knew Henry and Poins as well as he that made them.

119

Panurge too was ‘naturally subject to a kind of disease which at that time they called lack of money’; it was a ‘flux in his purse’ (Rabelais, Book II., chapters xvi., xvii.).

120

I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did disgrace Sir Toby – by marrying him to Maria!

121

As this lecture was composed after the publication of my Shakespearean Tragedy I ignored in it, as far as possible, such aspects of the play as were noticed in that book, to the Index of which I may refer the reader.

122

See Note A.

123

‘Now whilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his wife, whom he had left at Rome, would needs take sea to come unto him. Her brother Octauius Cæsar was willing vnto it, not for his respect at all (as most authors do report) as for that he might haue an honest colour to make warre with Antonius if he did misuse her, and not esteeme of her as she ought to be.’ —Life of Antony (North’s Translation), sect. 29. The view I take does not, of course, imply that Octavius had no love for his sister.

124

See Note B.

125

The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play is not divided into acts and scenes in the folios.

126

See Note C.

127

See Note D.

128

Of the ‘good’ heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other qualities) is perhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she is, what Mr. Swinburne calls her, ‘the woman above all Shakespeare’s women.’

129

Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who in At the Mermaid and House wrote as though he imagined that neither his own work nor Shakespeare’s betrayed anything of the inner man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron’s and no self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.

130

Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning in particular Mr. Frank Harris’s articles in the Saturday Review for 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris’s views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published, in The Man Shakespeare, the substance of the articles, and also matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]

131

He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.

132

It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not played some kingly parts in sport (i. e. on the stage), he would have been a companion for a king.

133

Nor, vice versa, does the possession of these latter qualities at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the former or of gentleness.

134

Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.

135

See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in the later tragedies.

136

I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching’s note on which seems to be unquestionably right: ‘There is no reference to the poet’s profession of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society.’ This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there are also references to his profession and its effect on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the neglect last for three years.)

137

It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and the effects of disillusionment in open natures that we seem to feel Shakespeare’s personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in Henry’s words to Lord Scroop:

I will weep for thee;For this revolt of thine, methinks, is likeAnother fall of man.

138

There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the passion of love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo’s ‘love’ for Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge’s view; and, without subscribing to all of Coleridge’s remarks, I believe he was right in finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do I understand the notion that Coleridge’s view is refuted and even rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, 7th ed., illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found? Was it his practice to do so? The question is always why he used what he found, and how. Coleridge’s view of this matter, it need hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by our knowledge of Shakespeare’s mind and not of his material alone. I may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume (not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware of Shakespeare’s use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a ‘wretched poetaster.’

139

Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Timon of Athens. See Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there taken that the tragedies subsequent to Lear and Timon do not show the pressure of painful feelings.

140

It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare’s; but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.

141

That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the Passionate Pilgrim. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by other causes.

142

The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes. Ginn & Co., 1904.

143

I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.

144

I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been written by 1598.

145

A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social position of the friend.

146

Mr. Beeching’s illustration of the friendship of the sonnets from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of argument.

147

In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is too much based on beauty.

148

This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and much less that they are earlier.

149

This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby’s Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated 1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question of the chronology of the Sonnets.

150

‘Mistress Tearsheet’ too ‘would fain hear some music,’ and ‘Sneak’s noise’ had to be sent for (2 Henry IV., II. iv. 12).

151

It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the Tempest and the great passage in Pericles that Shakespeare must have been in a storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of Pericles, suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:

Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surgesThat wash both heaven and hell… The seaman’s whistleIs as a whisper in the ears of death,Unheard.

Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to Act III., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my comprehension.

I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is nothing in Shakespeare’s authorities, as known to us, which corresponds with the feeling of Timon’s last speech, beginning,

Come not to me again: but say to Athens,Timon hath made his everlasting mansionUpon the beached verge of the salt flood:

a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.

152

The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.

153

But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal significance, that the words about ‘the poor beetle that we tread upon’ are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who says:

I trod upon a worm against my will,But I wept for it.

154

Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable trait. See Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 268, where I should like to qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification ‘on the whole.’ Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too much against the dog.

155

Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that ‘prudent, cautious, self-control’ which, according to a passage in Burns, is ‘wisdom’s root.’

156

The locus classicus, of course, is Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. 75 ff.

157

Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for mention in the dirge in Cymbeline, one of the last plays, are the frown o’ the great, the tyrant’s stroke, slander, censure rash.

158

Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his position in life.

159

Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the stage.

160

In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to it is in Sonnet 146 (‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’), where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge. According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;

but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord’s Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not saying that we can draw any necessary inference from these facts.

161

It is only this ‘quiet but deep sense’ that is significant. No inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not increase the probability that the conception of the character is Shakespeare’s.

162

With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the same ring, Hermione’s

If powers divineBehold our human actions, as they do:

with the second, Helena’s

It is not so with Him that all things knowsAs ’tis with us that square our guess by shows;But most it is presumption in us whenThe help of heaven we count the act of men:

followed soon after by Lafeu’s remark:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

163

It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the First Quarto version of ‘To be or not to be,’ to ‘an everlasting judge,’ disappears in the revised versions.