JOHN KEBLE 1792-1866 CANON AINGER, an admirable critic, once commented to me on the claim of the writer of a popular hymn to respect as a poet: 'You know, the standard of poetic merit in hymns is not high.' Is it necessary to plead for saintly Keble's poetic title, as it were, in forma pauperis? He wrote, indeed, other verse, some of it of worth; for example, a delightful appeal of wild flowers to the lord of the manor to spare from his high farming: Shady spots and nooks, where we Yet may flourish, safe and free.1 But, as a whole, it is inconsiderable; and by his hymns he must virtually be judged. Without going, therefore, outside The Christian Year and Lyra Innocentium, I am glad for my own sake to be able from them to answer my question— limited, as it is in the negative. I find genuine poetic sensibility in a fair proportion of their contents. Tenderness, sympathy, judgement, and delicacy, aspirations after the noble and sublime, are there. Everywhere I observe a feeling for beauty, a sincere longing to understand and interpret Nature. Every one has felt the sweetness of some five or six stanzas of the Evening Hymn in The Christian Year. Occasional Thoughts on children's troubles in the Lyra Innocentium almost match them.2 With equal intuition and affectionateness Keble draws happy lessons from sickness, the heart's self-doubtings, mourning, and death. At times, not often, he nears sublimity; as when he imagines Christ's Passion in the Garden of Gethsemane ; 3 when he follows the spirit of the Crucified or, as by the Saviour's side, muses on the lone upland above the waters of Gennesaret. He is nevertheless more at home where he habitually dwelt; that is, amid scenes of natural grace and beauty. They make for him fitting framework for every word of Prophet and Evangelist. He had sat at Wordsworth's feet, and learnt to register each soft touch invisible,5 by which Nature, newly born at every successive, sunrise, works her wonders. He could have written a monograph on the soft green willow springing and volumes on the flowers of the field: 6 Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies, Relics ye are of Eden's bowers, Mountains, in particular, he loved for their peculiar companionship, as he deemed, with Heaven : Where is thy favour'd haunt, eternal Voice, Where, undisturb'd by sin and earth, the soul Owns Thy entire control ?— 'Tis on the mountain's summit dark and high, 'Tis 'mid the strong foundations of the earth, No sounds of worldly toil ascending there, Lone Nature feels that she may freely breathe, Are heard her sacred tones: the fitful sweep Of winds across the steep, Through wither'd bents-romantic note and clear, The wheeling kite's wild solitary cry, And, scarcely heard so high, The dashing waters when the air is still From many a torrent rill That winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell, Track'd by the blue mist well; Such sounds as make deep silence in the heart For Thought to do her part.8 For him each day marshals a triumphal pageant, from dawn, with its every dewy spark jewelling leaf and blossom, to the glory of the clouds about the setting sun. To a certain extent though, in general, it must be confessed, he does violence to his own sweet nature in dogmatizing to the young-he even consents to view the flush of springtide, the garlands of May, through a child's eyes.9 Now and then, for moments, he actually seems, though in a hymnal, to forget hymnology, and to be unconscious of all but Nature's and Music's magic : 'Tis misty all, both sight and sound- Almost it might be a bard of Love who sang, if he had ended there : Who ever saw the earliest rose First open her sweet breast? Or, when the summer sun goes down, But there's a sweeter flower than e'er 'Tis Love, the last blest gift of Heaven; But tenderer than a dove's soft eye, She never could endure.11 Having said so much in Keble's favour, can I stop short of pronouncing him not only a writer of poetry, but a poet inspired? I can, and must, though, in the opinion of many, I condemn myself as a critic. One quality of high poetry, though there are approaches towards it now and then, I do not discover in him; and, unfortunately, it happens to be of the essence. The defect is not that he is facile and diffuse; for that weakness he shares with some of the highest. It is not that his tendency, although he can be daintily simple, is to be artificial, ingenious, and elaborate. Greatness may be there too. The capital fault I find, sensible as I am of an apparent paradox, is that the piety, which is the one motive of his verse, is wanting in passion. Passion is a condition of all masterly achievement, probably in all literature, certainly in poetry. It burns beneath Dryden's Court politics, Swift's misanthropy, Burns's defiant humour, Byron's cynicism. Above all, for religious verse, as Herbert's, Crashaw's, Vaughan's, Herrick's, it is the breath of life. In Keble's it is never more than an accident. He, the devoutest of men, the most emotional, the least worldly, a Nathaniel without guile, only by fits and starts blazes into flame from his own sovereign theme. I feel him, while he diversifies and polishes his rhythm, drills his topics, verifies his allusions, corrects his punctuation, to be always on the watch against himself. He is guarding against explosions of enthusiasm, which would have swept away his excess of elaboration, and the prolixity fatal to many a fine thought. In modesty and shyness like to Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, he was, unlike them, not of those who invite or suffer the world to count their heart-beats. He has sung: T And well it is for us our God should feel Alone our secret throbbings; so our prayer The rule is true for worshippers; not for the poet who writes of them and himself. It is from those deep throbbings, secret except for verse, that essential poetry is distilled. Poetry demands the sacrifice of the privacy of souls. A poet, to aspire to the peaks, must be incapable of withholding the best and dearest in his nature. Keble, if so made as to have dared thus to suffer his spirit to take fire, at all events did not let it. Always he reserved something from the furnace. He constantly was pointing out how Christians, he with the rest, ought to think of Earth and Heaven, rather than how he himself in fact thought. Not having fastened his soul to the stake, he is not of the inner circle in poetry. Whether, had he submitted himself, he would have been, who can tell? |