Poems,

BY

JOHN KEATS.

"What more felicity can fall to creature, "Than to enjoy delight with liberty."

Fate of the Butterfly.-SPENSER.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR

C. & J. OLLIER, 3, WELBECK STREET,

CAVENDISH SQUARE.

1817.

I have so many things to say to you, and know not where to begin. It shall be upon a thing most interesting to you, my poem. Well! I have given the first book to Taylor; he seemed more than satisfied with it, and to my surprise proposed publishing it in quarto if Haydon would make a drawing of some event therein for a frontispiece. I called on Haydon; he said he would do anything I liked, but said he would rather paint a finished picture from it, which he seems eager to do; this in a year or two will be a glorious thing for us, and it will be, for Haydon is struck with the first book. I left Haydon, and the next day received a letter from him, proposing to make, as he says, with all his might, a finished chalk sketch of my head, to be engraved in the first style and put at the head of my poem, saying at the same time he had never done the thing for any human being, and that it must have considerable

effect, as he will put his name to it. I begin to-day to copy my second book, "thus far into the bowels of the land." You shall hear whether it will be quarto or non-quarto, picture or non-picture. Leigh Hunt I showed my first book to. He allows it not much merit as a whole; says it is unnatural, and made ten objections to it in the mere skimming over.

The book was issued in octavo and without frontispiece, as Keats put it, in "non-quarto" and "non-picture."

On January 23 he wrote to Benjamin Bailey:

I have sent my first book to the press, and this afternoon shall begin preparing the second.

On February 5, to Taylor, the publisher:

I have finished copying my second book, but I want it for one day to overlook it.

On February 14, to his brothers:

I shall visit you as soon as I have copied my poem all out. I am now much beforehand with the printer; they have done none yet, and I am half afraid they will let half the season by before the printing. I am determined they shall not trouble me when I have copied it all.

On February 21, to the same:

Taylor says my poem shall be out in a month; I think he will be out before it.

On February 27, to Taylor, the publisher:

I am extremely indebted to you for this alteration and also for your after admonitions. It is a sorry thing for me that any one should have to overcome prejudices in reading my verses; that affects me more than any hypercriticism on any particular passage. In Endymion I have most likely but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings; in poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre.

Then after setting down his three axioms, he goes on to say:

I am anxious to get Endymion printed, that I may forget it and proceed. I have copied the third book and begun the fourth. On running my eye over the proofs I saw one mistake. I will take care the printer shall not trip up my heels.

P. S.-You shall have a short preface in good time.

On March 14, to J. H. Reynolds:

I have copied my fourth book, and shall write the preface soon. I wish it was all done, for I want to forget it and make my mind free for something new.

On March 21, to his publishers (it seems that the printers are tripping up his heels):

I had no idea of your getting on so fast. I thought of bringing my fourth book to town all in good time for you, especially after the late unfortunate chance. I did not, however, for my own sake delay finishing the copy, which was done a few days after my arrival here. I send it off to-day, and will tell you in a postscript at what time to send for it from the Bull and Mouth or other inn. You will find the preface and dedication and the title-page as I should wish it to stand, for a romance is a fine thing, notwithstanding the circulating libraries.

The first preface, which, after the criticisms of his friends, was entirely rewritten, was dated March 19, 1818. The tone of the passage taken from that suppressed preface is characteristic of the whole.

About a twelvemonth since I published a little book of verses; it was read by some dozen of my friends, who liked it, and some dozen whom I was unacquainted with, who did not.

Now, when a dozen human beings are at words with another dozen, it becomes a matter of anxiety to side with one's friends, more especially when excited thereto by a great love of poetry. I fought under disadvantages. Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish, and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain, so this poem must rather be considered as an endeavour than as a thing accomplished; a poor prologue to what, if I live, I humbly hope to do. In duty to the public I should have kept it back for a year or two, knowing it to be so faulty, but I really cannot do so. By repetition my favourite passages sound vapid in my ears, and I would rather redeem myself with a new poem should this one be found of any interest.

The following extract, from a letter written to Reynolds, April 9, 1818, in reply to his criticism, taken with original and the rewritten preface, shows the author's point of view when setting forth. his poem.

ENDY MION:

A Poetic Romance.

BY JOHN KEATS.

"THE STRETCHED METRE OF AN ANTIQUE SONG."

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, 93, FLEET STREET.

1818.

Since you all agree that the thing is bad, it must be so, though I am not aware that there is anything like Hunt in it (and if there is, it is my natural way, and I have something in common with Hunt). Look it over again and examine into the motives, the seeds, from which any one sentence sprung. I have not the slightest feel of humility toward the public, or is anything in existence, but the Eternal Being, the principle of beauty and the memory of great men. When I am writing for myself for the mere sake of the moment's enjoyment, perhaps nature has its course with me; but a preface is written to the public, a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility. If there is any fault in the preface, it is not affectation, but an undersong of disrespect to the public. If I write another preface, it must be without a thought of those people. I will think about it. If it should not reach you in four or five days, tell Taylor to publish it without a preface, and let the dedication simply stand,

"Inscribed to the Memory of Thomas Chatterton.”

The next day, April 10, 1818, he sent a new preface, which was duly printed, and the book was published. This new preface was a little milder in tone than the first, but showed the same doubt in his work and hopefulness of doing something better in future.

Those were the days of bitter reviews in the periodicals, the personality of the author as often coming in for virulent notice as the books under discussion. One of the most famous, or infamous, notices of any book ever published was that of Keats's Endymion, which appeared in the number of the Quarterly Review published in September, 1818. The author's preface and the book itself lent themselves readily to the malignant animus of the reviewer. Taylor, the publisher, too, seems to have invited attack, for as soon after the book was published, fearful of the reception which would be given it by the vitriol throwers of the age, he visited Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly, to seek an indulgent notice of the volume. He met the reception which he deserved and which he might have expected. The following extracts will show the character of this famous literary notice:

Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances. "Knowing within myself," he says, "the manner" (here he quotes from the preface down to "a deed accomplished"). We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be "quite so clear;" we really do not know what he means. But the next passage

is more intelligible. "The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press." Thus, "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition; and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work. . . By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.

We are told that turtles passion their voices, that an arbour is nested and a lady's locks gordianed up; and, to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalised, Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human serpentry, the honeyfeel of bliss, wives prepare needments, and so forth.

Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. Thus, the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed and night up-took; the wind upblows and the hours are down-sunken. But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives, which he separates from the parent stock. Thus, a lady whispers pantingly and close, makes hushing signs and steers her skiff into a ripply cove, a shower falls refreshfully and a vulture has a spreaded tail.

This review has often been blamed for causing the early death of Keats.

Luther S. Livingston.

A tortured, unsatisfied self-consciousness, guided by an instinct for the kinship between music and the lyric outcry of emotion, has found copious expression in the poetry of symbolism. The symbolists have advanced theories, and put forth verses which are erratic to the point of being incomprehensible. There are many who ridicule them as obscure and valueless, and others who believe them initiators of a literary revolution. They have certainly shown the power of words to sing themselves so as to delight the ear, whether they mean anything or not, and to evoke scenes and sensations as by a touch of magic.

The symbolist shows that he is one by differing as widely as possible from every other symbolist—that is, he is determined to do exactly as he chooses, unfettered by traditional usage, and to express his own joys and sorrows and general impressions with all attainable candour and spontaneity. He is always introspective, reading his own weariness and impatience, his own rare delights and frequent recoils of dread, into his surroundings. Perhaps this intense individualism was the greater shock to the public for clashing directly with the prevailing naturalism. There was in it, too, an infiltration of foreign qualities, which accentuated its strangeness. There are many foreigners among the symbolists-Maeterlinck and Ghil, the Belgians; Merrill and Vielé-Griffin, the Americans; Vignier, the Swiss; Moréas, the Greek, and others, and they certainly have introduced some non-French ways of feeling. The mysticism and lack of lucidity which characterise symbolism are not French qualities, but acquired from abroad from the dreamy and sensuous charm of English pre-Raphaelitism and from the minds of foreign stamp, which selected the French language as their means of self-expression. The symbolist does not expect always to convey a clear meaning, for he aims to suggest what is spiritual and illimitable, and this he can only do vaguely with his partial and limited means. It is the heart, not the mind, of things that he tries to probe, and all his effort is to suggest and convey emotion, not to state fact. He seems to possess abnormal faculties for seeing,

hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling, particularly for smelling, and his physical surroundings oppress his morbidly acute consciousness with their hopelessly ugly and sordid elements. So he is sad; and sad, too, because educated out of pleasant self-illusion. He still dreams, but with his eyes wide open and a mocking smile at his own folly on his lips. He avidly pursues material pleasures, but scorns himself for doing so, and makes constant demand for nothing less than ideal satisfaction. His ideal is vague, best summed up as beauty-beauty which is divine goodness and harmony and satisfaction of which he catches tantalising glimpses through partial manifestations, or rather symbols of it, furnished him by material fact.

A young chief among the French symbolists has come among us to lecture upon his art. M. Henri de Régnier has accepted an invitation from the Cercle Français of Harvard University, where he will deliver eight lectures upon the origin and development and probable future of French symbolism. He will be heard in New York and elsewhere, as well as at Cambridge, for our American. universities are eager for that personal contact with foreign thought, which somehow is always more suggestive than any mere perusal of the printed matter which crosses the ocean to us.

Many of his admirers consider Henri de Régnier as the most gifted of all the young poets who are now working to stamp their personalities upon French letters. letters. Even the austere upholder of tradition, Ferdinand Brunetière, praises his exceptional talent, although himself little in sympathy with the symbolistic school, and apparently ready with Mallarmé, its lawgiver, to term it "cymbalism." De Régnier is young, a careful, not exceedingly prolific writer, and has not entirely emerged from the experimental mood, so there is no telling what he may yet accomplish.

He was born at Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, December 28, 1864, and received his education in Paris, thus falling early into the swirl of contemporary thought, theory and feeling. Like many other young Frenchmen predestined to literature, he studied law before

he began to write. His first book of His first book of poems appeared in 1885, and since then he has published perhaps a dozen small volumes of verse and prose. Most of these are out of print, but their contents have been collected into larger volumes and republished by the Société du Mercure de France. M. de Régnier also contributes an occasional chronicle to Le Gaulois; and his first long novel, La Double Maîtresse, has recently appeared as a serial in L'Echo de Paris. About two years ago he married a daughter of José Maria de Herédia, a poet whose verse he greatly admires. Madame de Régnier, herself a poet of some distinction, will accompany her husband to America.

Few Americans know M. de Régnier's work; and even at home, aside from fellow-craftsmen and critics, there are more who can label him symbolist than are familiar with what he has written. This is partly because, like Mallarmé, his avowed master, he despises notoriety and works with single-minded interest. in his work as art; and partly because he has very little to say to the rank and file. The symbolist intends his work to be primarily a self-revelation of himself to the world, and the individual revealed by Henri de Régnier is an intellectual aristocrat. There is something about this tall, young Frenchman, with his meditative, blue-grey eyes, his long, nervous fingers, his ease of bearing and gesture, which suggests acute and delicate sensitiveness and impatient disgust of mediocrity; and these dispositions characterise everything he has written. "Any one who wanted to paint him so as to express his whole nature at once should show him descending the broad stairways of Versailles," declares a fellow poet, Albert Samain. The poor, the humble, the ignorant, make no such appeal to his sensibilities as to those of François Coppée, for instance, and so far as possible he ignores those who must exist for the support of the intellectual élite to which he consciously belongs. His refinement isolates him. The human lives around him look sordid, trivial, ignominious, and he avoids contemplating them, and creates a misty dreamland for his aspirations. The fair green forest of his fancy is laced with devious footways, abounds with gleaming fountains

and twilighted glades, and has nothing in common with primeval wildernesses. Here fair creatures and strange monsters, nymphs and fauns and satyrs, sport and sorrow; and here he wanders, a sad, inactive spectator of his own life, haunted by Hope and Memory and Regret, while sere leaves of dead illusions flutter down in a soft, continual shower.

As a symbolist, one seeing all things as pale, inadequate images of what is rich and adequate and unattainable, and for which he longs, M. de Régnier is, of course, a pessimist. He sees human nature under guise of a faun, always ready to relapse into pure brute, yet with a spark of something higher always persisting to make him wretched at himself. His heart and mind revolt against the tedious struggle between instinct and partial intelligence. He would be epicurean, but enjoyment shrivels under his passionate regret at the shortness and apparent futility of life.

"The angel of the darker draught" beckons him always.

"Tristesse mon âme est dans tes voies," he cries despairingly, and to him the world is peopled "de femmes lasses et d'hommes sans joie." Still, he sobs far less convincingly than Paul Verlaine. There is less passion and more resignation in his dissatisfaction. Through all his discouragement he has persisted in his search for the "golden key" which is to unlock his kingdom of heaven. He is still

Dreamer of the old dream which from soul to soul

Crosses and passes

From hand to hand, from age to age,

Ashes or flame.

There is joy as well as pain in being an uncompromising idealist.

M. de Régnier owes much to the Parnassians, to what he calls "the severe paternity of Leconte de Lisle," whose sumptuously perfect verse helped to mature his instinct for rhythm and harmony, and to make impossible for him. such freaks as have brought ridicule upon some of his fellows. Perhaps he owes still more to Verlaine and Mallarmé, who guided him in his revolt against naturalism, but he is less unrestrainedly emotional and more intel