Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

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 Shelley 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 passion 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 Shelley 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 Unzulängliche, 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 Shelley 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 passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess 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 goddess, he is in error; for she is only his goddess 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 classes. 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 goddess 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 goddess 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,