THE MIND OF JOHN KEATS

CHAPTER I

KEATS, THINKER

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KEATS the philosophic poet is being discovered. Keats the lover of sensuous beauty, the literary artist who knew how to charm the English language into magic combinations of lovely verse, the world well knows, but Keats the thinker and philosopher is to many still an undiscovered soul. It was Stevenson who said, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by catchwords." The truth of this is well demonstrated in the traditional attitude toward Keats, who happened to leave behind him, not all explained, a few striking phrases and sentences that early became catchwords by which his readers interpreted his verse and pigeon-holed him as a poet and a man. His oft-quoted "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and his declaration that

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

appeared self-explanatory. While such exclamations as "O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" and

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

seemed even more convincing. From such passages as these it was taken for granted that Keats delighted in the sensuous to the exclusion of interest in thought and life, and they became touchstones for the interpretation of all his poetry and his character as a man.

I

!

In spite of much early and continued admiration of his poetry, there grew up in the last century a sort of legend to the effect that Keats was little better than a mere dreamer, a maker of beautiful verses who spent his days in rapt intoxication with the sensuous world. This conception was fostered by such influences as that caustic characterization of Carlyle's in his Essay on Burns,

Poetry except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature is no separate faculty. . . . The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the poet are those that exist with more or less development in every human soul.

Carlyle was not a great literary critic, but his voice extended far. Even Matthew Arnold helped maintain the tradition by his emphasis, in an otherwise appreciative essay, on the Keats love letter:

It is the sort of love letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained sort.

Such popular critics as George William Dawson have probably done even more to keep the ghost astir. In Mr. Dawson's Makers of Modern Poetry, we find such sentences as this:

Byron and Shelley were both filled with the fervor of the revolutionary spirit; but in Keats there is no trace of either. He had no interest in man. In the passion and struggle of ordinary human life, he discovered no food for poetry. . . . The only thought he has elaborated in all his writings is that beauty is worthy of worship, and loveliness should be worshipped for its own sake. The worship of loveliness he thus substituted for the worship of truth, and this seems to have satisfied all the religious instincts of his nature.

Now, whether we like to admit it or not, it is this sort of thing that the rank and file of people who know anything at all about Keats believe. It is what high school youngsters learn about him in their literature classes. It is in the air. It slips

into our histories; it is the impression that gets abroad. In M. Jusserand's abridged history of English literature, in the page and a half devoted to Keats, one finds this paragraph:

Le démon Philosophique agitat l'âme de Shelley et la troublait au point de la remplir de ténèbres et de tempêtes; jusque dans les vers d'amour de Shelley paraît sa passion pour la réforme du monde. De ces rêves et de ces aspirations Keats ne se soucie nullement, réformer n'est point son affaire; admirer, désirer, aimer, voilà ce qui occupe son âme et sa coeur. Il admire, il désire, il aime jusqu'à souffrir et à mourir; toute beauté l'émeut; rien de ce qui n'est pas beauté ne le touche: "Beauté, dit-il, c'est Vérité; Vérité c'est Beauté. Nous ne savons que cela et n'avons besoin de savior rien autre sur terre!" Nulle action dans ses vers, nulle intention morale.

Indeed the legend still lives. To admire, to desire, to love, that is what occupied his mind. Only that which is beautiful moved him." Yet it is not strange that a French scholar should fall a victim to the certain blindness that has afflicted so many of Keats's own good countrymen.

But I began by saying that Keats the philosopher is being discovered. It has been no sudden revelation, but rather the gradual evolution of critical impression, which, at first only faintly suggested, has come to be expressed with bold certainty. Let us note some of the evidence. In the John Keats Memorial Volume, published in the Centenary year, 1921, one finds two writers1 explicitly calling Keats a philosophic poet, a third 2 entitling an article Keats and " Philosophy," a fourth devoting three-fourths of his lecture, the most substantial contribution to the volume, to a study of Keats's artistic growth as related to his mental development, a fifth- and I hardly need hint that this is G. B. Shaw, with a sly peek over his spectacles to enjoy the consternation he creates- broadly suggesting that Keats had in him the germs of a bolshevist and that had he lived he might have been a "propagandist and a

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1 a. A. Clutton-Brock: Keats and Shelley, a Comparison. b. Arthur Lynch: John Keats.

2 A. C. Bradley.

3 The Warton Lecture: E. de Selincourt.