Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt, in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he wrote the lines in ‘I stood tip-toe,’ asking in what mood or under what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt’s word for the fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats’s company at the time. Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth’s interpretations will no doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by native instinct.
Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in Sleep and Poetry run parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey, a poem which we know from other evidence to have been certainly much in Keats’s mind a year and a half later. Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey defines three stages of his own emotional and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,—
| An appetite, a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye,— |
and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of ‘the still, sad music of humanity,’ and by the
| sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. |
Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth’s conception of these three stages more or less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats’s Sleep and Poetry. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human life under the string of joyous images beginning, ‘A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air’, seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of the poet’s soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth’s three stages in Keats’s repeated indication of the ascending scale of theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative passage beginning—
| And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life— |
may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth’s final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind’s eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life.
Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining Wordsworth’s as a subjective and Keats’s as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke. Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in Tintern Abbey and many passages of The Prelude and Excursion, with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of association and suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats’s sense of personal identity was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth’s is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats’s, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation.