its way down stairs after it has been scanned | famous Scotchman, held similar language. in the parlor. CHESS. FORBES tells us, in his Life of Beattie, the poet and Scotch Professor, that "To chess he had a real aversion, as occasioning, in his opinion, a great waste of time, and requiring a useless application of thought." Another poet, romancer, and still more Scott, as a boy, we are told by Lockhart, "engaged easily in the game, which had found favor with so many of his paladins, but did not pursue the science of chess after his boyhood. He used to say it was a shame to throw away upon mastering a mere game, however ingenious, the time which would suffice for the acquisition of a new language. 'Surely,' he said, 'chess-playing is a sad waste of brains.' THE "HYPERION" OF JOHN KEATS. THE genius of John Keats, like his own Saturn, majestic and solitary, ruled with a broken sceptre a kingdom of desire. Its breathings are all sighs. Instead of love, it has yearnings. Its voice is the melodious cry of unrequited, insatiate longing. "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn he buries himself in the cavern of memory. His glory is the glory of the past; he broods over the ruined empire of passion; the Titans are subdued for him; mountains rest upon their breasts, and still he scornfully yet sadly refuses the modern allegiance. Reason is his Jove, whose power he confesses, but to whom his proud spirit refuses to bow. Death closed in upon him while he yet wavered. He was never taken into the circle of the gods; his statue stands without the vestibule. In his poem of Hyperion, there is indeed a majesty of movement rivalling the Miltonic. The silence is sublime, and the sound of the verse rolls off constantly into a silence. "No stir of air was there; Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity spreading a shade; The Naïad mid her reeds pressed her cold finger Closer to her lip." It is the recession of a storm; the departure of a multitude; the coming on of night and death. No less solemn and imaginative is the imagery of what is seen: life, palpitating but not moving; the outward stillness convineing of the inward grief; and the little motion that has been, only a return and not a relief to the immovable. "Along the margin sand large foot-marks went His ancient mother, for some comfort yet." Great emotions are short-lived. The first line after this magnificent passage is pure prose, a flat falling into commonplace: "It seemed no force could wake him from his place;" which, after the swelling of the lungs and thrill of the preceding verses, is a mere | poem is an interlude, and has neither beginasthmatic puff. What follows is but little ning nor end; it seems to have been thrown better: off as a pattern for a whole cloth which was "But there came one who with a kindred hand Touched his wide shoulders after bending low With reverence, though to one who knew it not." By the epithet "kindred," we perceive that the genius does not wholly desert the poet; but the action is roughly and coldly inverted. First we picture to ourselves the "kindred hand" touching the "wide shoulders," and after that the figure "bending low with reverence;" whereas, in fact, the one who came first bent low with reverence and then touched the wide shoulders. It is an absolute demand of poetry that description shall go along with action; inversion of the action takes all dignity from the imagery. The figure touching the shoulder first, and bowing afterwards, is like that of a messenger jogging your elbow, and bowing when you turn to see who touched you. And finally, the intimation that Saturn did not know who it was that touched him is commonplace, verging to vulgar. This peculiar defect of interruptedness, a proof either of intellectual or constitutional feebleness, distresses the reader less in this The Achilles by the hair, and bent his neck, "Her face was large as that of Memphian Sphinx." "But oh, how unlike marble was that face.” "How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than beauty's self! poem of Hyperion, and in "St. Agnes' Eve," than in any other of Keats's works. genius of the poet flares up, dies out, and flares again, as if there were a dearth of fuel As if the vanward clouds of evil days to feed it; and by this fault, more than any Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder laboring up." other, he is removed out of the class of great poets, and occupies but the second The majesty of these lines brings back a rank. The voice of a hundred excellent conviction that in the mind of the poet there critics, both ancient and modern, sustains was a unity of design and feeling, which he the opinion that the place of honor in art had not the power to express in its totality. must be given to the creative or sustaining The fragments of the architecture, capitals power-that which carries one feeling, one of columns, the frieze, entablature even, finpassion, one sentiment, through as many re-ished with a master hand, lie all along in volving periods of verse and shifting scenes gigantic disorder. It is as though the builder as may serve for the exhaustion of the idea of the temple had not yet invoked the deity. or subject. It may have been through phy- The invocation wanting, the foundation not sical weakness, mental defect, or the very ex- laid, the genius would not descend. cess of an inferior faculty, fancy; by violent action, drawing away the vital pith from imagination; or perhaps an ambition, of which Keats was certainly the victim, of transcending the powers granted by his years, as the tree, striving too early to produce a perfect fruit, exhausts itself and dies;-through one or all of these causes, this poet produced nothing entire. The "Eve of St. Agnes" will be quoted against the opinion; but this Nothing could have been imagined more suitable for epic genius than the argument of this poem. Modern philosophy, penetrating the mythological veil, has discovered in the gods of antiquity an impersonation of the powers and passions of the human soul. Whether primeval philosophy, seizing upon the traditions of the vulgar, forced the deities into its service, and made Hermes stand for Wit, Horus for Imagination, Juno for Pride, Ammon and Osiris for the diviner | conquered by imparted Divinity, the epic principles in man; or whether the greater would be pure. As it now moves, the angods, the powers of nature and the soul, were clothed by the sages with the forms and attributes of humanity,-as in Thoth, understanding, in Osiris beneficence, in Phtha| will and justice, in Ammon innate dignity, -let the learned dispute. Certain it is, no true epic of mythology and cosmogony could be constructed without a philosophical knowledge of the gods. Under the character of the Titans, in this poem of Keats, the primeval empire of passion is represented. Cronos, the dethroned Saturn, is that power of necessity and circumstance, the sole deity of the unenlightened mind; venerable indeed, beloved of the senses and of the passions, but succumbing always to that divine reason in man to which the accidents of life or death are indifferent. How majestic the subject of this poem! Hyperion, the God of Light, the pride and beauty of the natural world, leads the war against the new dynastry of Reason, and of Jove, Assembled in their caverns, at the roots of the volcanoes, the Giants of Nature hold a gloomy council. The spirit of Milton presided over the conception of this council. But who can say whether a mythological epic must not of necessity resemble all others of its name? The elements of all are simple and the same. If the poem is mythologie, to have a human interest the right must conquer pride, as among men. The honor of the superior powers must be vindicated; the right of reason over the wild and furious democrats of nature must be established by aristocraty of Character.* Herein would lie all the dignity of the poem, that Jove and his compeers conquer by right of Character, and vindicate that right in themselves. And if mythology is merely an impersonation of the inferior and superior powers, the mythologic epic is but one subject, and must be ever treated from the same point of view. In Milton's poem, the angels of God conquer by divine authority; and the weakness of the poem is the introduction of the Deity in person. Had the divine Source itself been left in darkness, and Heaven set against Hell, equal in attributes, but conquering or * Character-"mark;" as we say, "a man of merk." gels, with their beauty and their strength, are unreal phantoms, and the Deity in person is the Conqueror; while Satan and his peers have the attributes and consequently the dramatic value of persons. In Milton's angels there is no Will. All the freedom is with Hell. These angels seem passive; almost soulless. Abdiel alone has real characteristics. By this arrangement, the poem loses one half the interest of true epic. If we believe that the genius of Keats would at length have proved equal to what he undertook, his poem would then have been more perfect in its frame-work than the Paradise Lost; and certainly it was far more philosophical in its design. His gods, who were to conquer, would have shown in action the perfections of the higher reason. By wisdom, by strength of will, and by reliance on the Eternal, after many reverses, they would have subdued, and again buried the rebellious powers. Both literature and philosophy suffered an irretrievable loss in a mind capable of conceiving and executing so majestic a design. But it is idle to waste conjecture; let us endeavor to appreciate the merits of the fragment. At the conclusion of the second book is a description of Hyperion entering the council of the Titans:«Suddenly a splendor like the morn Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps, All the sad spaces of oblivion, And every gulph and every chasm old, And every height and every sullen depth, Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams; And all the everlasting cataracts, And all the headlong torrents far and near, Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, Now saw the light and made it terrible. His bright feet touched, and there he staid to view It was Hyperion. A granite peak The misery his brilliance had betrayed To the most hateful seeing of itself. Golden his hair, of short Numidian curl; Regal his shape majestic; a vast shade In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk Of Memnon's image at the set of sun To one who travels from the dusking East: Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon's harp, He uttered, while his hands contemplative He pressed together, and in silence stood. At sight of the dejected King of Day.” Despondence seized again the fallen Gods It strikes some readers, whether justly we know not, on the reading of this fragment, that there is in it no promise of ACTION. Thus Satan, talking to his nearest mate, Milton is easier to read than Keats. The description is rapid and concise. There is no description without motion; a quality necessary to the epic, since by dwelling too long upon a part, the interest is lost, and imagination flags. The description must move forward, or it falls; it must soar and soar, and continually soar, passing mountains and rivers at a wave of its mighty wings. Indeed, it may be ventured, that Keats would have failed in the Hyperion for want of action. His figures are contemplative. The Muse pauses, as she creates them, and steps backward to meditate their fair proportions. The poems of Milton, on the contrary, even his earliest, have a vivacity, a lively spring and movement, which give promise of the epic. 'Come, but keep thy wonted state He will not suffer even Melancholy herself to sit contemplative; she must pace forward. Hardly a line is deficient in the activity either of thought or of motion; the mark of a genius essentially and powerfully epical. In Keats, on the other hand, there is every where flaccidity and weakness; his heat is not the heat of motion but of emotion; he has the melancholy of Hamlet, dreaming of a purpose, but never moving toward it. The appearance of the Miltonic feeling in "Hyperion" has been alluded to by some critics as a fault. But is not the earliest evidence of artistic ability in imitation? Great artists have indeed distinguished themselves by an original nature of their own, but have they not equally proved their merits by the skill and taste with which they have reproduced the originality of others? Unaided by the faculty of imitation, and even of appropriation, originality decliness into lameness and obscurity. We know that the education of a great artist is begun by a close acquaintance with the works of his predecessors, as well as of Nature. The most intimate friendship with Nature avails nothing without the power of imitation; and though this representative faculty be given to the artist in never so great perfection, yet, as it is of all the most artificial, and the most intelligent in its mode of action, so it requires the greatest accumulation, and experience, and aids to shorten and improve its pro cesses. The advancement, that is to say, the dignity of a school of artists appears chiefly in their choice of subjects; for we know that nature is not all representable, but only certain scenes, times, phases: phases of beauty, sublimity; times or seasons of richest development; scenes illustrating what is moral or immortal in humanity. Representative art will not allow its powers to be wasted with impunity upon the tame, the sensual, or the vulgar of common life. The selection of its subjects is therefore a moral occupation, and of a high order, suitable to the leisure of cultivated and heroic ages, and unsuitable, because of baseness and incapacity, to those that are barbarous and mechanical. The lessons of the artist, in overcoming his greatest difficulty, the choice of subject, come to him at first through his predecessors. He imitates nature, it is true, but he looks at nature through the eyes of those who have preceded and aroused him. Every artistic age refines upon former ages, holding to a certain taste, and improving the "school." The degeneracy of art appears in a mean or novel choice of subject; in eccentricity of manner; in a close and studied imitation of insignificances. The two-fold imitation of previous art and of nature goes on ripening to a certain point, the height or perfection of the school; and then follows a gradual decline, when imitation predominates over Poesy as well as painting has grown by accretion as well as by invention. As it required a Giotto and a Cimabue to prepare the ground for a Da Vinci, so it required an Ennius to do the same for a Virgil. Imitation reaches out from school to school, over entire epochs and centuries. Homer precedes Ennius and Virgil; and Virgil's Æneid gives form and beauty to the poems of Dante. The influence of Phidias is seen again in Angelo and Raphael, and something of the Hebrew grandeur and simplicity reappears in the liturgy of the Church of England. In a word, the greatest imitators are the greatest artists; for by the same power that is given them to receive and reproduce the sublime and beautiful from nature, they seize and reproduce the sublimity and beauty of their predecessors; so that the greatest works of art, in painting, poetry, and sculpture, are those which carry in their lines the entire history of art itself. The Christ of Raphael and the Moses of Michael Angelo, the Satan of Milton and the Hamlet of Shakspeare, are the best traditions of the progress of genius from the beginning. design, when genius fades into sentimental- | every melody which he hears; indifferent ism, and the artist becomes either an eccen- whether it come first through himself or tric or a tame and laborious imitator. through another. Wherever the greatest beauty is to be found, he makes his study. As in the circle of twenty-four hours there are but two times, the evening and the morning, which give the highest beauty to scenery; as in the circle of the year, the season of vegetation alone, and in human life, the point of transition from youth to adult age; as these alone give the highest instances of beauty, and they too at long and rare intervals, one among a thousand meeting the ideal of the artistic mind,-it becomes impossible to go through the entire circle of nature's beauties, and complete it, in the life of one artist. Each presents his discovery, his segment. The discovery of a single perfeet beauty immortalizes the original imitator. Out of the succession of many artists and many schools, the great designer finds and appropriates almost the entire sphere of moral, intellectual and physical perfection. The more he appropriates from others, the more alive is he to the beautiful in Nature herself. His studies alternate between her works and those of men. As the original observer turns variously toward fields agreeable to his feelings, he will naturally addict himself to congenial models. The pastoral, the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric will draw by turns, or constantly, the attention of the young and unformed poet. And when conscious judgment has discovered and The greatest imitator absorbs and surpasses all that have gone before him, as did Shakspeare, even to the reproduction of the morality and sentiment of races who flour ished centuries before him, under other religions and other systems of society. Shak-marked the proper and congenial field, the speare's appropriation of his predecessors amounts even to the swallowing and digestion of entire works. favorite models are still read and re-read. The sculptor, blind and superannuated, solaced his genius by passing his hands over the antique marble; the poet, blind and broken in spirit, had read to him the Hebrew lyrists and the dramatists of Greece. The fashion of this age is greatly for Great artists are eclectic, and build upon many masters. Like Goethe, in whom the eclectic, imitative genius predominated to that degree, his works are a prodigious mass of imitations of every master in letters. Vir-originality, that is to say, for the production gil, Sophocles, Shakspeare, Ovid, Boccaccio, Petrarch, by turns occupy him. From the secondary writers of Germany he took away their proper excellences, by surpassing each in his field. Nor was it a blind instinct that prompted him; his imitations, like those of Virgil and Milton, are deliberate and conscious and profound. The pride of originality can have no place in the spirit of a first-rate artist: he appropriates and assimilates and reproduces in new shapes every beauty which he finds, and of styles,-new styles in writing, new styles in thinking, novelty in all things. So much of novelty has appeared within the last century, men have ceased to be astonished at things new, and even to be disgusted with novelty itself. It is perhaps safe to affirm that originality cannot be attained by seeking for it, but only eccentricity-oddity and eccentricity, which the great artist avoids as he values his immortality. In art we are apt to mistake novelty for ingenuity, and what is only old, for what is ancient and |
