About the great Athenian admiral's mast? Are things to brood on with more ardency Little allowance has to be made in reading this charming passage for the exaggeration of the mood induced by the theme upon which the poet was then at work. It would indeed be fatuous to press over closely upon words which were never meant to bear the strain of too serious an interpretation, or to attempt to deduce a solemn and definite criticism of life from the detached verses of a writer from whom it is vain to look for systematic or carefully sustained thought. There is ever a danger lest we should persist in trying Keats before a modern philosophical tribunal the jurisdiction of which he himself would have been the first to repudiate. Yet the entire body of his work appears to justify us in finding in the abovecited lines an expression of the feeling which characterised him through life. And how, in fact, should we expect Keats to manifest any interest in certain large aspects of the life and human activity of the past when it was precisely the corresponding aspects of life and human activity as revealed under the form and fashion of his own age that he persistently turned from with unconcealed dissatisfaction and disgust? It remains for us but to touch in this connection upon the interesting question of Keats's instinctive Platonism-an illustration of that "natural affinity" of the poet "with the Greek mind" of which we shall have something more to say a little later on. It is at this point, indeed, that we find Keats's hatred of the position and rationalistic temper of modern thought perhaps most clearly and consistently formulated. How far the transcendental principle, several times distinctly enunciated by him, is to be interpreted as the merely spontaneous outcome and expression of a personal, innate idiosyncrasy, or how far, on the other hand, it may possibly be traced back to the more or less conscious absorption of ideas from the atmosphere he breathed and the books he fed upon, it would not be easy to decide. But there are few issues of philosophical importance upon which he expressed himself with such settled conviction as upon this of the supremacy of feeling in the quest of truth. 1 R. C. Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 244. His distrust of intellectual processes was profound; his faith in the imaginative faculty-in immediate intuition-unbounded. It was thus that he reached the large conception of things revealed in the ever-memorable lines which close the great Ode on a Grecian Urn: 66 Cold Pastoral ! When old age shall this generation waste, This does not mean-as is sometimes hastily inferred that Keats deliberately placed beauty before truth, or desired to sacrifice the latter to the former. But it does mean that he held the two to be ultimately and fundamentally identical, and that for him the highest revelation of truth was to be sought under the form of beauty. Nor is this all. His Platonism carries him to the further principle that by holding fast to the beautiful we possess the final secret of the true. His one recognized road to reality was thus the primrose path of the imagination. "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not "thus he states his thesis in a letter to his friend, Benjamin Bailey; adding, in striking phrase, that "Imagination nay be compared to 3 199 Adam's dream-he awoke and found it true.' Here, as elsewhere, he put emotional apprehension before intellectual verification, and made intuition, not the logical faculty, the guide to, and ultimate criterion, of truth. So far, then, as we are able to establish anything like a philosophical basis for his thought, we find Keats in fundamental antagonism to the traditions of enlightenment and the scientific spirit of his time. V. We will now address ourselves to a brief consideration of one of the most important questions confronting the student of Keats's workhis general treatment of nature. To dwell upon the large place which nature everywhere occupies in his verse would be superfluous; for him, as the most casual reader is very soon made aware, "the poetry of earth is never dead." Nor is it necessary to exemplify or discuss at length the faithful clearness of his vision and the magical quality of many of his graphic touches. That fine felicity of turn and phrase, which can be neither missed nor explained, that genuine accent of the poetic tongue which belongs only to those who are natives to the language, are in particular to be caught everywhere in his luxuriant pictorial pas 1 Forman's edition of Keats, Vol. iii., pp. 90–91. sages and in his occasional snatches of description. It is true that in weaving into his verse the glory and the loveliness of the external world, he often loses himself in mere opulence of detail-that, save in such instances as the Ode to Autumn and Hyperion, his transcripts habitually lack that true sense of proportion and perspective, that firm subjection of minutiæ to general effect, in a word, that power of composition which mark the best workmanship of Wordsworth and Tennyson. But in the marvellous fifth stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale, in the splendid opening of Hyperion, and in such memorable phrases as "I who still saw the horizontal sun Heave his broad shoulder o'er the edge o' the world"1; and 2 "The good-night blush of Eve was waning slow ""; and 3 994 Sonnet : "After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains." 4 Lamia, Book ii. |