Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. Weakness may exclude the world by forgetting it; only strength can conquer the world. What if this law be also the law of beauty? The thought inspires his last great attempt,
the fragment of Hyperion. Men have their dynasties and revolutions; but the immortals also, whom men worship, must change to live.
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty.
And this power cannot be won by those who shirk the challenge of ugly facts.
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty.
As if to enforce his thought by repetition, Keats made an allegorical framework for his revised version of the poem. There he exhibits himself as wandering among the delights of the garden of this life, and indulging himself to the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the temple of fame. He is told he must climb or die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to the top, and has speech there with a veiled figure, who tells him that this temple is all that has been spared in the war between the rival houses of the Gods. When he asks why he
has been saved from death, the veiled figure makes reply:
“None can usurp this height,” return’d that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”
* * * * *
“Are there not thousands in the world,” said I,
Encourag’d by the sooth voice of the shade,
“Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good? I sure should see
Other men here, but I am here alone.”
“Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,”
Rejoined that voice; “they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice:
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low—
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.”
In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself. A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning-fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect—the discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry.