“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
I am not prepared to say whether Keats was the first writer to formulate any axiom to this effect,—I should rather presume not; but at any rate it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who might have varied the dictum of Iago, and said of himself
“For I am nothing if not beautiful.”
In the Ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured Grecian Urn “to man,” and is thus propounded as being of universal application. It amounts to saying—“Any beauty which is not truthful (if any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane condition: but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind, beauty and truth are one and the same thing.” To debate this question on abstract grounds is not in my province: all that I have to do is to point out that Keats’s perception and thought crystallized into this axiom as the sum and substance of wisdom for man, and that he has bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the secret of his writings. Those other lines, from the “Ode on Melancholy,” where he says of Melancholy—
“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu”—
appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry—as intense in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. They pair with the other celebrated verses from the “Ode to a Nightingale”—
“Now more then ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain;”
and—
“Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.”
The phrase “rich to die” is of the very essence of Keats’s emotion; and the passage about “magic casements” shows a reach of expression which might almost be called the Pillars of Hercules of human language. Far greater things have been said by the greatest minds: but nothing more perfect in form has been said—nothing wider in scale and closer in utterance—by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness.