He led in great part a life of passive sensation, of pleasure and pain through the senses. "Take," says Masson, "a book of physiology and go over the so-called classes of sensations one by one—the sensations of the mere muscular states; the sensations connected with such vital processes as circulation, alimentation, respiration, and electrical intercommunication with surrounding bodies; the sensations of taste; those of odour; those of hearing; and those of sight—and Keats will be found to have been unusually endowed in them all."
He had, for example, an extreme sensitiveness to the pleasures of the palate, and tried to heighten them by extraordinary stimulants. A friend tells us that he once saw Keats covering his tongue with cayenne pepper, that he might enjoy the delicious sensation of a draught of cold claret after it. "Talking of pleasure," he says himself in one of his letters, "this moment I was writing with one hand and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine." It is therefore not surprising that imagery drawn from the domain of the sense of taste is of frequent occurrence in Keats's poetry. In his deservedly famous Ode to Melancholy we are told that this goddess has her sovran shrine in the very temple of Delight—
"Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine!"
And in one of his last sonnets he characteristically mentions "the palate of my mind losing its gust" as an indication of approaching death.
Naturally the senses of hearing and sight provided him with a much greater proportion of his imagery than the inferior, less noble senses. He had a musician's love of music and a painter's eye for variations of light and colour. And for all the different kinds of sound and smell and taste and sensations of touch, he possessed a store of words which any of the greatest poets might have envied. In short, he was by nature endowed with qualities which in combination, and in their full development, constituted supreme capacity to perceive and to reproduce all the beauty of nature.
To be able to reproduce it was from the very beginning his dream; and the man who affirmed that, except in the matter of art, he had no "opinions," expressed enthusiastic approval of the revolution of opinion in regard to the artificial, so-called classical, poetry of the eighteenth century, which had been brought about by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Spenser was Keats's idol, the classic poets were his aversion. In his poem, Sleep and Poetry, he has embodied an artistic confession of faith in language which could not well be more violent. After describing the old poetic triumphs of England, he exclaims:
"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories; with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah! Dismal-soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves; ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer night collected still to make
The morning precious; Beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . No, they went about.
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,
The name of one Boileau!"
Long before the French assault upon this ancient, honoured name, Keats blows the war-trumpet! Théophile Gautier himself does not treat it with greater contempt.
It was probably the above passage, the energetic style of which reminds one of that picture of Kaulbach's in Munich, in which the artist of the rococo period is painted asleep with the lay-figure in his arms, which gave occasion to Byron's repeated thrusts at Keats as the traducer of Pope. For Keats never published a line against Pope; and when Countess Guiccioli, in her naïve work on Byron, refers to attacks which infuriated her lover, she is only repeating vague remarks she has heard. It is, however, highly probable that Keats included Pope among those whom he reproached with being deaf to the music of the waves and the winds, and with sleeping whilst the morning unfolded its beauties.
He himself was not of that company. If we examine the distinctive individuality of Keats's genius, we find its determining element to be the all-embracing sensuousness already alluded to. Read this stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale:—