by Frank Harris
In the second volume I described how the second happy chance of my life willed it that all my education took place in the United States, in France and Germany, and that when I came to English literature I read and studied without preconceived English ideas. My Shakespeare book is one result of this foreign education; but all my views of English literature are untinged by English prepossessions and English prejudices.
I can still recall vividly the shock it gave me to find William Rossetti putting Shelley above Keats. Writing of the graves of the two poets in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, he first mentions Keats, and the slab of marble covering his remains with its pathetic inscription: "Here lies one whose name is writ in water"; and, he adds, "A few paces further on and you come to a still more sacred grave, the grave of the world-worn and wave-worn Shelley, the divinest of the demi-gods."
"Ass, ass!" I cried, throwing the book down in an outburst of rage. But I found this judgment of Rossetti was the ordinary and accepted English judgment, and I had to take myself in hand and force myself to rationalize my overwhelming and almost instinctive prepossession in favor of Keats. I knew hundreds of verses of Shelley by heart, but one has only to read his Skylark and then Keats's Nightingale in order to realize how immeasurably superior was John Keats. And the Skylark is about the best of Shelley's work, whereas Keats, in the Ode to a Grecian Urn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, has reached higher heights. All one whiter in Rome, every Sunday morning, I used to lay flowers on the unhonored grave of Keats; the grave of Shelley was always covered by unknown admirers.
"Keats is with Shakespeare," I cried to myself, indignant, and Shakespeare himself had never done anything at twenty-six to be compared with Keats.
His best is the best poetry in English, except here and there some divine verse of Shakespeare.
In one of my earliest essays of poetic criticism in England I made this declaration of faith and was immediately attacked for it on all hands.
"You will come to my opinion," was my retort, "in a little time." And two or three days afterwards I showed my chief critic a letter from Lord Tennyson in which he said: "How glad I am to see this opinion which I have held for thirty years at length finding its way into print. Keats sings from the very heart of poetry and I am glad you have said it."
A little later Matthew Arnold expressed the same opinion:
"No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. 'I think,' he said humbly, 'I shall be among the English poets after my death.' He is; he is with Shakespeare."
But Matthew Arnold's reasoning does not seem to me conclusive. He says:
"Notwithstanding his short term and imperfect experience, by virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry that in one of the great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare."
Though Keats has once or twice reached magical interpretation of nature, only to be compared with that of Shakespeare or Blake, no one has yet noticed that in manifold richness of rhythm and in the dying fall of new cadences, the blank verse of Keats in Hyperion surpasses even the "organ tones" of Milton.
I could, if I would, give a dozen passages to prove that, to me at least, Keats and not Shelley was the "divinest of the demi-gods." Yet England almost let him starve. It was thirty-seven years after his death before Keats's poems were reprinted in England, and it took fifty-odd years for him to reach his proper place, side by side with Shakespeare and Blake.
Think of his sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles:
My spirit is too weak-mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
And his Ode to a Nightingale:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves has never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan…
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The dying cadences of these lines are the finest in English verse. Think, too, of the lines in his last sonnet:
The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
Who would have dared to say then that this half-educated, consumptive lad had written purer English than Shakespeare himself and finer blank verse than Milton, and considering his years, stands without a peer in the Pantheon of Humanity?
No wonder Shelley wrote of him, Shelley who was gifted in every way, wellborn, well-bred, well-taught, yet able to keep his personal divine inspiration through all the vicissitudes of life: … Till the future dare Forget the past, his name and fate shall be, An echo and a Light unto Eternity, … till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and name shall be An echo and a light unto eternity.
I have said little of Shelley, but he was a divine poet and some of his verses are always with me:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou are gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
It was Keats who enforced the lesson which Shakespeare was the first to teach me, that poetry at its best is on the topmost height of thought, either lighting the feet of struggling humanity or encouraging men and women on the upward way, or by sheer beauty attuning them to the humane ideal.
After Keats came Thomson and Tennyson, of whom I have already written; and the next one who had a great effect upon me was Robert Browning. I have done a sort of portrait of him and have devoted several pages to him already in this Life of mine, but here I wish to say one or two things more.
I couldn't understand why he was not more widely appreciated in England.
Every cultivated man or woman knew poems of his wife, Mrs. Barrett Browning-and she has written some fine poetry-yet, Robert Browning was supposed to be difficult and obscure, though I never could see any difficulty or obscurity. He was one of the bravest souls, and one of the most optimistic that I have ever met.
Think of the verses in Rabbi Ben Ezra:
Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke thro' language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
Browning often spoke to me of the way he had been neglected and his work mis-seen, but always with a happy cheerfulness, as if it didn't matter. I remember one story he used to tell, that John Stuart Mill came across some of his early work, I think Bells and Pomegranates, and wrote to Browning, asking him, would he like him to review it in Ta
il's Magazine, which was then the chief literary organ. Of course Browning said he would be delighted and was very grateful.
Mill thereupon wrote to the editor, and the editor replied that of course he would be very glad to accept anything from the pen of Stuart Mill, but not a review of Bells and Pomegranates, because that had already been reviewed in a previous number of the magazine. Browning thereupon sent for the previous number of the magazine and found that the review in question was short if not sweet:
Bells and Pomegranates, by Robert Browning: Balderdash.
"It depended, you see," said Browning, "on what looked like the merest accident, whether the work of a new and as yet almost unknown writer should receive an eulogistic review from the pen of the first literary and philosophic critic of his day-a review which would have rendered him most powerful help, exactly at the time when it was most needed-or whether he should only receive one insolent epithet from some nameless nobody. I consider," he added, "that this so-called 'review' retarded any recognition of me by twenty years' delay."
There are many things in life which I can never hope to understand, but the vagaries of popularity are to me among the most incomprehensible of mysteries. As I have said in another place, had I been asked who was the artist most certain to be popular in England, where the love of beauty is almost a religion, I should have said, Whistler, who never did anything which hadn't a touch of beauty in it, who was devoted to beauty, more even than to sublimity. But no, the English mocked him and wouldn't have him for twenty years. And it was Ruskin, who was transparently honest and filled with the same enthusiasm for beauty, who did Whistler the greatest injury.
In the same way, if I had been asked beforehand the poet who would most appeal to Englishmen, with their manful courage and optimistic view of life, I should have said Robert Browning; and Robert Browning went through life almost unknown to the end! Meredith, I think it is, who wrote of A song seraphically free From taint of personality.
But it was just the inevitable touch of personality that endeared Robert Browning to me.
It was in the early nineties that I came across a verse that started me on a new quest:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
I was so startled that I had to get Blake at once, and I simply devoured him.
For months I used to annoy every one by reciting verses of his and declaring that he was the greatest spirit born in England since Shakespeare died.
His Garden of Love appealed to me intensely:
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds.
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
I have already quoted dozens of Blake's verses in my books; again and again he gives expression to the very spirit of Jesus, and the greatest lines of natural magic in all English poetry are his. … Let the west wind sleep on The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes And wash the dusk with silver.
His finest verses always make me feel that there will be greater men born into the world than any we know of.
As Blake himself wrote, his deepest words will.. still go on Till the heavens and earth are gone.
For above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic mountains,
In my golden house on high,
There they shine eternally.
Talking once with Oscar Wilde and another friend, the topic came up of undiscovered beauties of high poetry. "That's the best of winning a great reputation," said Oscar; "everything you do well is sure to be known."
"I don't agree with you," I objected; "the finest things, even in Shakespeare, are unknown."
Oscar laughed. "Come, come! A wild paradox," he expostulated.
"You have read the sonnets," I went on; "well, I don't believe you know the finest line in them."
"Nonsense," he exclaimed impatiently, "everyone knows Shakespeare's best.
Why Wordsworth has gone through all the sonnets, pointing out the best and after that, there's no gleaning."
"I don't believe that Wordsworth could see the best for himself," I retorted.
"Your English moralizers like Wordsworth and Milton all have blind spots in them."
"Not in poetry," persisted Oscar. "But what is your line?"
"My line," I said, "is finer than anything in Sophocles, more purely Greek, and curiously enough, it is in praise of beauty and is simply divine; 'beauty,'
Shakespeare says, 'Whose action is no stronger than a flower.' "
"Divine, indeed!" cried Oscar. "But where does it come?"
I recited the verse. He was evidently puzzled a little at having overlooked the jewel for he said, "I'll let you know tomorrow whether Wordsworth has missed that sonnet or not; I feel sure its very simplicity would have struck him."
Next day he came to me laughing.
"Frank, it's absolutely astounding; you're right; Wordsworth quotes the very next sonnet, the 66th, but omits the 65th; it's incredible!"
"It was to be foreseen," I insisted. "I knew he'd miss the best, because in Shakespeare's dramatic writings the miracles of wisdom and insight are invariably declared by the learned commentators to be from some other hand; some inferior collaborator has touched the zenith Shakespeare couldn't reach. At least that's my experience."
"You must really write your book on Shakespeare," said Oscar seriously; "it will do you all the good in the world. Fancy a western cowboy," he laughed delightedly, "teaching Oxford how to discover new beauties in Shakespeare.
It'll make your reputation in England," he added.
"Once I hoped so," I replied, "now I doubt. Swinburne discovered Blake for the English, but no one reads him, and James Thomson is still unknown. No, it takes time and more generations than one to separate the sinners from the saints."
"Well, Frank, the shiners are more amusing-eh?"
There is another sonnet of Shakespeare's that comes from the same height of inspiration-a personal sonnet:
That time of year thou mayest in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs, which shake against the cold Bare, ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Here, too, I am intimately pleased by the profound art of the verse; line after line of simple iambics, and then the discord in the last line that makes the melody harmonious-"Bare, ruin'd choirs"-and then the music taken up again-"where late the sweet birds sang."
Of course there are other great sonnets in English, for example Wordsworth's sonnet on Toussaint l'Ouverture has the finest sextet to be found anywhere:
Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
And I often think the sextet of Lord Alfred Douglas' sonnet about himself and his death is worthy to rank even with this:
For in the smoke of that last holocaust, When to the regions of unsounded air That which is deathless still aspires and tends, Whither my helpless soul shall we be tossed?
To what disaster of malign Despair,
Or terror of unfathomable ends?
That "terror of unfathomable ends" is as sublime as anything in Dante.
But I can't say I like the sonnet in English; in Italian it's easy, for Italian is full of rhymes; but English is poor in
rhymes, and a perfect sonnet in English is in my opinion almost impossible. Yet at its best it's like a fugue by Bach, beyond praise, as in two or three of Shakespeare's and two or three of Wordsworth's, and a couple of Keats's.
When I began writing on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review, Theodore Watts, Swinburne's friend and housemate and the critic of the Athenaeum, was very much interested and wrote to me. We met several times and he was frankly astonished that I cared so much for poetry. He had evidently always thought of me as an American who could hardly grapple with such high things.
One evening at the Cafe Royal I tempted him with some rare Musigny, soft to the palate as velvet and of an exquisite lingering bouquet. It unlocked the tongue of "the little sick walrus," as I used to call him to myself and other ribald juniors, and he began to swell in self-praise.
"Shakespeare's sonnets are no true sonnets," he insisted. "He neither knew nor perhaps cared for the true sonnet form; but Rossetti knew it and so do I. Do you know the sonnet I wrote on-"
"No," I replied. "Won't you recite it to me?" I added for courtesy's sake.
"I will if I can remember it," he replied, and at once began to recite verses that were good enough technically but without any inspiration or touch of beauty. I listened patiently and nodded my head at the close, as if in mute admiration, the truth being that I hate to tell flattering lies about high things.
Watts seemed to sense my coldness and was piqued by it, for at length he took his courage in both hands and said solemnly: "Rossetti said that was the most perfect sonnet in English!"
"Really!" I cried, startled out of all politeness, for I knew Rossetti's keenness of mind and reverence for good work, and such a judgment shocked me.
But Watts repeated the phrase, nodding his head the while like a mandarin.
While he was speaking, it came to me that possibly Rossetti had said, "The most perfect sonnet," meaning simply in verse-form, and wishing above all things to praise a genial, ingratiating, but commonplace creature. And once started on this disdainful way, suddenly a thought struck me, and though it was dreadfully rude, I thought Watts was probably too intoxicated to notice it, and so I resolved to say the thing.