How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and despotism, and would not sit out the performance!
He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’ defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were settled in those days!
When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear. Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying: “There was something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, and even perhaps about Keats.”
So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear is that it is young poetry; it was all written before the age of twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings, gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the senses. He has a marvelous gift of language, splendor like a flood of moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous “Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution both reason and conscience.
The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit—the sense of fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension.
But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious examples—Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.—simply show that they have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches enjoyment instead of effort.
Use your common sense upon the proposition. When an artist takes the trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people, and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it not just as much “teaching” to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” it is perfectly plain that he is making propaganda—and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda when he declares that
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words without meaning behind them.
I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There is a stage of naïve trust in instinct through which youth passes, especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own period of the breakdown of capitalism.