Closely though he was mixed up with Leigh Hunt and his circle, Keats had, in fact, not much sympathy with their ideas on literary topics, nor with Hunt’s own poetry, still less with their views on political matters of the time, in which he took but very faint interest. Cowden Clarke thought that the poet’s “whole civil creed was comprised in the master-principle of universal liberty, viz., equal and stern justice to all, from the duke to the dustman.” He was, however, a liberal by temperament, and, I suppose, by conviction as well. One of the really puerile and nonsensical passages in “Endymion” is that which opens book iii. He told his friend Richard Woodhouse (a barrister, connected with the firm of Taylor and Hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the Tory Ministry then in office:—
“There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen
Their baaing vanities to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, oh torturing fact!
Who through an idiot blink will see unpacked
Fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe
Our gold and ripe-eared hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl’s, they still are dight
By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit’s perch, their being’s high account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones,
Amid the fierce intoxicating tones
Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
And sudden cannon.”
A rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza which he wrote, perhaps in 1818, at the close of canto 5, book ii. of “The Faery Queen.” In this stanza the revolutionary Giant, who had been suppressed by Artegall and Talus, is represented as being pieced together again by Typographus, the Printing-press, and so trained up as to become more than a match for his former victors. There is also, in a letter to George Keats dated in September 1819, a rather long and detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in English and European history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power &c., and on the writer’s sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of the people. It closes with an admiring description of Sandt, the assassin of Kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. As to Hunt, some expressions in a letter from George Keats to Dilke are decidedly strong:—“I should be extremely sorry that poor John’s name should go down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of Leigh Hunt—an association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. He speaks of him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says that on that point only he was reserved to him. The fact was, he more dreaded Hunt’s defence than their abuse. You know all this as well as I do.”
Apart from his own special capability for poetry, Keats had a mind both active and capacious. The depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of subject-matter, are highly noticeable. If some one were to take the pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to readers. It does not appear, however, that Keats took much interest in any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes of poetry. Many will remember the [anecdote], proper to Haydon’s “immortal dinner” (December 1817), of Keats’s joining with Charles Lamb in denouncing Sir Isaac Newton for having destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the whole company had to drink “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.” This was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the poet—in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions, “Lamia”—could revert to the same idea—
“Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture—she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine,
Unweave a rainbow.”
In a letter to his brother, December 1817, Keats observes:—
“The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. Examine ‘King Lear,’ and you will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean negative capability; that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his admiration of Wordsworth’s “Excursion” was great, coupling that poem with Haydon’s pictures, and with “Hazlitt’s depth of taste,” as “three things to rejoice at in this age.”
Soon afterwards, February 1818, while “Endymion” was passing through the press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:—
“In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it. And this leads me to another axiom—That, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”