Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 14

Women must want Imagination, and they may thank G.o.d for it: and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime.'[12] These pa.s.sages, taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such 'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say, 'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four.

'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score"

without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it.

Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three pa.s.sages to ill.u.s.trate in different ways Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,'

rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:

I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to sell.'[13]

In the second pa.s.sage Keats is describing one of his friends:

Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal ident.i.ty unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a G.o.dwin Methodist.[14]

These lines ill.u.s.trate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.

They ill.u.s.trate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,'

'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise pa.s.siveness. And, further, what he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,'

the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident a.s.sertions and negations of Sh.e.l.ley and his other G.o.dwinian friends and acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises in criticising them. The following pa.s.sage, from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Siecle de Louis XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:

The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hards.h.i.+ps and disquietude of some kind or other.

If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be acc.u.mulated for the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the worldly elements will prey upon his nature.

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superst.i.tious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of G.o.d and taken to Heaven. What a little circ.u.mscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say '_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire ident.i.ties, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure; in short they are G.o.d. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are G.o.d to have ident.i.ty given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental s.p.a.ce suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Ident.i.ty_. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the _world_ a School inst.i.tuted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the _Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its ident.i.ty. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does G.o.d make individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]

Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original power of thought.

About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid, and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the _Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave, sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the trees and over meadow-gra.s.ses and corn, and looking sometimes like a young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.

Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the _Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the 'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_ appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think, solely with his pa.s.sion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies.

The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-wors.h.i.+p by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance.

In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language, but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.

It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or aphorisms, and these I must pa.s.s by. The others I intended at first to deal with in connection with Sh.e.l.ley's view of poetry; and, although that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that 'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity, or with Manchester Ma.s.sacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for theories, abstractions, or ideals. He wors.h.i.+pped Beauty, not Liberty; and the beauty he wors.h.i.+pped was not 'intellectual,' but visible, audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fas.h.i.+oning his material until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.

In all this he was at the opposite pole to Sh.e.l.ley; and he himself felt it. He refused to visit Sh.e.l.ley, in order that he might keep his own unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Sh.e.l.ley cordially. He told him, too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a work as the G.o.d, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.

In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not _the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences, too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Sh.e.l.ley also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time.

Let me ill.u.s.trate these statements.

The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Sh.e.l.ley had used this language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]

Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet; of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the rapture of union with it; of the pa.s.sion thus enkindled, and the search for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences.

If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of them are intended to have this further significance, and we are perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]

Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and real which haunted Sh.e.l.ley and was so characteristic of the time? So far is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance; it attains the ideal;

Das Unzulangliche, Hier wird's Ereigniss.'

This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere, they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a Nightingale_.

It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_ as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men.

We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Sh.e.l.ley if I try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.

That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One.

All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial pa.s.sages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The G.o.ddess Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon, declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:

thou wast the deep glen-- Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen-- The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun; Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won; Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed-- My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:-- Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

O what a wild and harmonised tune My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself therefore false to his G.o.ddess, he is in error; for she is only his G.o.ddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.

Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to fall into two main cla.s.ses. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought, and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his G.o.ddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.

Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow, and gains his G.o.ddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the question,

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

And he answers:

Yes, I must pa.s.s them for a n.o.bler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts.

He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_ and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of pa.s.sion, 'agony,'

and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'

Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What, then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to Sh.e.l.ley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is to be found in Sh.e.l.ley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find, I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of Sh.e.l.ley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in 'G.o.dwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him.

Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human nature is finer';[19] and the pa.s.sions and actions of man are finer than his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_ is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in _Prometheus Unbound_. The t.i.tans must yield to the Olympians because, in a word, they are less beautiful, and

'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might.

But the t.i.tans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in _Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of strife.

Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the t.i.tans must submit because they are less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and Sh.e.l.ley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Sh.e.l.ley has many names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name nearest to his heart. The spirit of his wors.h.i.+p is rather

that sustaining Love Which, through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst;

and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to _King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object is seen truly as the vesture of great pa.s.sion and action, and all 'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all; for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a wors.h.i.+pper of Beauty.

When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.

The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of pa.s.sages would readily show, has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_ sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the speech of Ocea.n.u.s are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole, the gist of his att.i.tude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as follows.

He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after truth.'[22] He writes of a pa.s.sage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I a.s.sure you that, when I wrote it, it was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many pa.s.sages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth 'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,'

and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means, to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Sh.e.l.ley, a poet pure and simple.[27]

We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Sh.e.l.ley about the _Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon.

A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the G.o.d. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness, perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to Sh.e.l.ley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is _his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound doctrine.