The middle of the eighteenth century marks the lowest of the ebb tides of modern poetry. Under the stifling bonds of convention and authority, classic art has been reduced to “an assemblage of sterile forms”—a mass of exhausted traditions. Before the artistic cunning of a Pope or Boileau, the artificial organon of the Classicists could be wrought into verse which justified the name of poetry; but after them there is little else than a long and trying period of decadence.
The more talents degenerated, the narrower became the rules. To compare the productions of the latter Classicists with the poetry of the succeeding periods of English literature would be to compare the singing of forest birds at dawn to the sizzling of a grasshopper chorus under the rays of a summer sun.
“As the essence of music lies in change, and the chord indefinitely prolonged would be no music, so it is with the deeper harmony of the life of the world.” This can be truly said of the poetry of a period, when, by artificial restriction and resolution, the world of art sought to find a single open chord underlying life, and when all that was not in preestablished harmony with the heroic couplet was thought unmusical. Such a Keats, fortunately for his mission, never learned the art of self-repression.
Four of these narrative poems, Endymion, Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Hyperion, indicate most clearly the essential stages in the development of Keats’ genius and show each of them a significant phase of his relation to Romanticism. The interest of Endymion lies in the fact that it is the first real flight of genius, for irregular as it is, it is filled with passages of power and beauty. Its importance to the student of the Romantic movement however lies almost entirely in its story and in a few of the more lyrical of its bursts of song.
The first book relates Endymion’s attendance upon the morning festival of Pan at Latmos. Here he tells his sister, Peona, how, when he had fallen asleep in one of Diana’s haunts, he had a dream of entering the gates of Heaven, of beholding the moon in a scene of transcendent splendor, and of ascending in the embraces of the beautiful moon-goddess. So vivid were the experiences of this celestial visitation that he knows not whether he has dreamt them or actually experienced them; but upon the persuasion of his sister, he promises to regard them as a dream and to cease from striving to learn their causes.
In the second book he breaks his promise and searches far and wide that he might again behold the vision of his celestial visitant. Led by friendly nymphs, he journeys through the bowels of the earth into Diana’s shrine, where, passing through a lane of slumbering cupids, he enjoys another rapturous meeting with the goddess. The third book takes Endymion to the sea where he meets Glaucus, and learns of his ill-fated love for Scylla, and of the witchcraft of Circe which has compelled him to wander in the midst of the sea among the bodies of the drowned until a youth should come to save him. At the touch of Endymion the spell is revoked, Glaucus again becomes young, and Scylla and the corpses of the drowned lovers return to life. After a sumptuous feast in Neptune’s palace, Endymion again finds himself in the upper air. Here, according to the fourth book, he finds a beautiful Indian, Bacchante, for whom he forsakes the love of the moon-goddess. After a succession of aerial flights, first with Diana, and then with the Bacchante, the identity of the two is revealed to Endymion in the presence of his sister, Peona, but even while he kneels to bid Diana farewell, both vanish and leave Peona to wander.
“Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.”
The merit of the poem lies in the charm and felicity of Keats’ power over the creatures of classic mythology and of his own Romantic creation. He weaves their complex legends into a fabric which for mythological invention alone would command attention. The poetry, however, is most uneven; side by side with passages of the finest lyrical power and of surpassing beauty of description are portions which cannot be read without the conscious effort of attention.
But its highest value, in the words of Colvin, is “that it may be taken as a parable of the soul’s experience in the pursuit of its ideal. Let a soul enamoured of an ideal once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench, for a time, its longings in the reality of life, nevertheless it will still be haunted by that lost vision; amidst all its intoxications, disappointments will harass it, until it wakes to find that the reality which has allured it derives its power to charm from the ideal, and is, after all, but a reflection of that ideal, which was spurned for what seemed more real, more obtainable.” If such be the true meaning of what would otherwise be a meaningless intermixture of conflicting legend, it is most significant as the expression by Keats of his search in obedience to the demands of the Romantic ideal. It is an allegory, an unconscious allegory perhaps, but all the more significant from that very fact. It has been said that Allegory is the product of the certainity of the faith which it symbolizes. Diana is the spiritual ideal of Beauty; Bacchante, the incarnation of the spiritual in material form that deludes with its derived sense of reality. Peona is the dissuading voice of the sceptical bystander which so easily changes from discouragement to praise when once the ideal is obtained, Glaucus is one who, having gone astray into the province of the impossible, is reclaimed by fresh contact with his ideal, and who shall say that Endymion is not Keats? Endymion is the imagined searchings for the ideal of beauty in the world of nature as Faust is the personification of Goethe’s search for the absolute in the world of humanity.
Lamia is the next great achievement of the poet. A change in subject matter, and an advance in dramatic and poetic power that seems almost incredible have occured in the comparatively short interval between Endymion and Lamia. Here Keats turns from Grecian myth to Mediaeval tradition with an extravagance of romance foreshadowed by the awakening of the dead by Endymion’s magic. The story is of Lamia, a serpent-woman, who has been granted the power of changing from serpent to woman by Hermes in return for her favor. Lamia, with the beauty of her newly-assumed form and the power of her magic, ensnares Lycius, a young philosopher, builds him a palace, and there celebrates their marriage-feast. Appolonorus, a teacher of Lycius, attends despite the protests of Lamia, and by his power compels her and all the products of her magic to vanish. Here Keats charges philosophy and science with the destruction of the charms of nature, saying:—
“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 can clip an angel’s wings
Conquer all the mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”
We here see the last of the Romanticists touching upon a tradition of his school which was to cause its downfall. As an extreme, Romanticism leaned too much towards the ideal; and its traditions fell exhausted before the approaching truth of Science. Keats showed unmistakeable traces of an ebb-flow in the tide of Romanticism before the approach of a new age which was to reconcile its new message with the old. But, to return to the story, Lycius dies with the vanishing of Lamia. Thus ends the slender narrative of the first of the really great poems of Keats: the beginning, it may be said, of that even flight which is the conviction of genius. It is also an expression of the catholic sympathy of Romanticism:—with the romances of the mediaeval world as well as those of Greece: for here Keats combines the two elements in the interest of a desired effect. So in both periods of the past to which the Romanticists reverted, Keats leaves the mark of his interpretative genius.
Another fabric woven of mediaeval love follows in the Eve of St. Agnes. The story is the simple one of one Madeline, who, believing in the mediaeval superstition that she may, upon St. Agnes’ Eve, see her absent lover, retires to find her Porphyrio in her chamber, and elopes with him to the land from which he has come to claim her. What a slender narrative upon which to string over fifty Spenserian stanzas of the most ornate and beautiful description! And yet the poem is not only one of the best of Keats’ longer works, but is acknowledged an “unsurpassed example of the pure charm of romantic narrative and description in verse.” The mere entrance of Madeline to her chamber calls forth the following exquisite stanza:—
“Out went the taper she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine died,
She closed the door and panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide.
No utterred syllable or woe betide’.
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.”
Keats here seems to outrival himself in the revelation of that capacity for rich and varied imagination, that art of subtle suggestion which is the secret of his descriptive power. Technically it is a wonderful series of decorative images that only the subtlest art of suggestion can make consistent and dynamic. It is a climax in one phase of Romantic art; it expresses that intricate mingling of many colored and variously carven marbles which all characterizes Renaissance art. It is that very desire for richness of effect rather than purity of tone which gives Romanticism in common with all other Renaissance movements an eclectic tendency. Romantic art here shows its differences with Greek art; outer form gives away to content. It is doubtful that this special, characteristic phase of Romanticism ever received more perfect expression than in the Eve of St. Agnes. It is wrought with the skill of the jeweller, and is the foreshadowing of the creed of the Pre-Raphaelites who treated every inch of surface so that if all but a scrap were lost, the man who found that might say: “Whatever this may have represented, whatever else it may have been, it was a work of art, beautiful and rich in color, tone, and texture.”
The crown of this series of long poems is Hyperion of which Shelley exclaimed, “If this be not grand poetry, none has ever been produced by our contemporaries;” and of which Byron said, “It seems to be inspired by the Titans and is as sublime as Asahylus.” In this poem we have Keats under the influence of a reconstructive influence moving away from the extremes of his Romantic creed. He had caught the placid and chastened element of Grecian art, and had embodied it in this return to Greek mythology. A mere fragment relating the misery of the fallen Titans after their overthrow by Hyperion, the rejoicing of Hyperion although within the foreshadowed gloom of a similar disaster to himself, and finally, its fulfilment in the birth of Apollo. This fragment is significant however as pointing out a great advance in Keats’ power, and his modification of a Romantic extreme by the adoption of the true Greek ideal that found such adequate expression in Goethe: the chastening of Romantic extravagance by the counterbalancing sense of Classic form.
The remaining poems of merit are the lyrics, those beautiful bits of verse composed in the full heat of the spiritual problem which preserve the last and highest flights of the genius of John Keats. In these, with the return to pantheism, he identifies his spirit successively with the most beautiful of the earthly symbols of that beauty which he worshiped. It is his spirit’s last and passionate contemplation of his ideal that is expressed in La Belle Dame sans Merci, and the Odes to The Grecian Urn, Psyche, Autumn, Melancholy, and the Nightingale; a “handful of immortal lyrics heavy with the weight of their own loveliness.” If poetry is musical thought, if perfect music is the very birthmark of universal thought, and inspiration the divine insanity of the vision of Truth, these poems are indeed the climax of Romantic lyricism.
In La Belle Dame sans Merci he turns for the last time to the symbols of Mediaevalism and produces one of the most spiritually romantic of his poems. The tendency of Romanticism to sublimate narrative is characteristically expressed in this story of the conflicting thoughts in the sorrowing soul of the mediaeval knight whose love has placed him in the power of a merciless lady. In it “the universal heart of man speaks through the fascinating world-old symbols of mediaevalism” of its sorrow in the face of disappointing love. It is elemental feeling in so pure a form that it is scarcely articulate; it is a bold attempt to suggest voiceless thought, and emotion stifled with its own intensity. The Romanticists ever dreamed of reaching elemental feeling, and if any have succeeded, Keats has in this poem; if he has not, it is another example of genius attempting and all but attaining the impossible.
The five Odes were his last work, and were composed after he had passed under the shadow which was soon to obscure his genius; they are characterized by a depth of spiritual appreciation which elsewhere in his poetry we look for in vain. “To a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, To Autumn, To Melancholy, and To the Nightingale,” says Mr. Rossetti, “form, as it were, an intellectual symphony; and if Keats had left nothing else, we should have in this symphony a complete picture of his poetic life.” Here it is that he expresses the elements of his romantic ideal of Beauty in the highest forms of romantic imagination and insight to which he ever attained. First, let us quote the phrases which Mr. Rossetti has given as “expressing the strongest chords of emotion and music in them,” and then try to see what motives run their course through the symphony that we may get the best of Keats’ message to his vision of the ideal of Romanticism.
(1) “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear but more endeared
Pipe to the spirit, ditties of no tone.
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed
A burning forehead and a parching tongue.
Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(2) Too late for antique vows
Too, too late for the fond-believing lyre
When holy were the haunted forest boughs
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.
Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind.
Where branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.
(3) Where are the songs of spring—ay, where are they?
Think not of them; thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day
And touch the stubbled plains with rosy hue.
(4) But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from Heaven like a weeping cloud
That fosters the drooped-headed flowers all
And hides the green hill in an April shroud,
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave.
She dwells with Beauty,—Beauty that must die
And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and asking Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovrain shrine.
(5) That I might drink and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret,
Here where men sit and hear each groan
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Darkling, I listen:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
And cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
These same that oft times hath
Charmed casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas of faery lands folorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a knell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?”
If Edymion is the fancied parable of a soul searching in vain for beauty, this is the truthful record of the pursuit which led Keats the poet, into the land of his ideal. “The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty; beauty intensely perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the Sphinx.” The motives of the Symphony express his admiration for artistic beauty, in the urn of the Grecians; his appreciation of spiritual beauty as embodied in the human form, Psyche; his love of natural beauty, Autumn; his recognition of the transitory character of all beauty in its earthly aspects, Melancholy; and his final insight of the true Beauty in the world of the ideal into whose bosom he longs to be absorbed that there he “might drink and leave the world unseen.” If there is any meaning in this play of the emotions it is this; we have a series of poems representing Keats’ ideal from five fundamental points of view, which, if placed in proper order, will reveal in the order of its development the answer of Keats to the question which his brother Romanticists listened to and answered. This order seems to be through the imaginative questionings of the Ode on the Grecian Urn, to the arduous and passionate acceptance of Beauty’s priesthood in Psyche, to the appreciation of natural beauty in Autumn, and finally through the melancholy arising of the decay of beauty in earthly form, he is led into the spiritual world where he places his ideal and worships it. It is as true an allegory as the Faust or the Excursion, it only differs in that the author is led not into the world of human life, nor into that of philosophical insight, but into a spiritual world of his own fancy whence he returns reluctantly enough with his message.
“Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
As an answer to the question it is as important as those of his more practical fellows. Keats’ Ideal is truly a philosophic personal belief, that Beauty is the spirit of the Universe, the Absolute which finds expression in all the various manifestations of worldly beauty, that is, at once, the ideal and the inspiration of the poet, whose high priest is Art. We have seen that this is his answer to the questioning impulse of the Romantic movement in literature. We have seen him using Endymion as an allegory of his early struggles; with the extravagance of mediaeval romance in Lamia, embodying Romantic mysticism; in the Eve of St. Agnes, revealing the artistic method of pure romantic art, in Hyperion, reconstructing pure Romanticism in the light of the true classic ideal, in La Belle Dame sans Merci expressing the human sympathy of the movement, and in the Odes, his personal interpretation of lyricism as the consummate form of Romantic art, and of spiritual Beauty as the truest interpretation of its ideal. This is a great historical contribution, and a noteworthy interpretation of Romanticism. Its ideal was to influence the subsequent development of English poetry; its message, with well-preserved identity to be voiced again period has little significant relation to Romanticism except as a point of departure, or in the light of a philosophy which finds as deep a meaning in the silence as in the music that destroys it.
“Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue hence?
Why rushed the discords in but that harmony might be prized?”
This is the message of a later epoch; the answer of a modern poet, but the historian of the Romantic movement may well bear it in mind that he may see significance in what would otherwise be an unimportant moment:—that when the last ripple of the ebbing tide of Classicism leaves our literary shore.
Another moment and a great spiritual movement started by the releasing force of Revolution is upon us. With all the majesty and impressiveness of a great sunrise the world of art experiences another Renaissance—a fresh conception of its own ideals and purposes—and this we call Romanticism. It is the beginning of a great period when man’s soul, restless with a fresh desire for self-interpretation is led on to a vigorous reaction upon the beauties of life and nature, and to a varied and spontaneous expression of such in philosophy and poetry. The embodiment of this new ideal in a Renaissance of literature is the product of a long succession of world-famous poets, the Romanticists. The tide was come in with the sunrise; and now there were not lacking those who could absorb the penetrating sunlight of the ideal of Romanticism, and interpret the impulses it aroused within their own nature.
But it is only those of a later generation who can, as dwarfs mounted upon giant shoulders, see the completed circle of the horizon. We say, “This was a world movement that influenced the entire literature of its day,” but the poets of Romanticism were isolated by the persistent remains of Classic tradition. And even as a forest traveller traces the sun’s movement by the movement of the network of light and shadow upon the greensward, so they perceived the rising of the central sun of Romanticism only by its reflection. So we find a Romantic movement going on in Germany, in France, and in England; and a spiritual revolution taking place in each and every one of the Romanticists.
In Germany, the Romantic movement began in that awakening national consciousness which was the direct result of Frederick the Great’s reign. Wolf and Gellert discarded Latin, gave lectures in German and revolted against the tyranny of French literary influence. Adopting this yet unsanctioned literary form, Klopstock introduced it into literature, and his Messiah was, historically speaking, an assertion that literary tradition was only the crude material of literature, not its standard. Freedom from convention, the reawakening of Greek culture that is characteristic of all Renaissance periods, together with the new ideal of national expression were the creative impulses which started German Romanticism. They are persistent throughout the entire succession of German Romanticists. Wieland and Herder began their work shortly after Klopstock and gave the sanction of unmistakable genius to the new movement. Lessing, in 1754 broke from Voltaire and his tradition, espoused the new cause in the construction of a national drama, Minna Von Barnhelm, and later embodied the new ideals in a definite literary creed. The Laocoon, classic as it is in form and sympathy, in the last analysis, is the Classicism of Greek literature, something quite akin, it must be admitted, to German Romanticism. Heine led the movement into the natural path of lyricism, and thereby gave expression to one of the most characteristic tendencies of Romanticism in poetry. Around Heine and Schlegel a cult within the Romanticists was formed, a special group devoted to mediaevalism and mysticism, whose mistaken idea of the identity of Romantic Art with their special movement has led to much confusion in critical literature.
The work of these men, however, was obscured by the appearance of the greatest of Germany’s literary figures. The youth, Goethe, influenced by the Messiah of Klopstock and the Laocoon of Lessing, had decided to follow the new creed, which by that time had saturated all German literature. His powerful and masterly genius, together with its less masculine but especially lovable companion-spirit of Schiller, was destined to crown the pinnacle of Germany’s Renaissance by a contribution ranking among the greatest of all literature. Schiller, in poetry, Goethe, in poetic drama, each caught an essential phase of the reaction of the German mind upon the ideal of Romanticism. Schiller embodied the aesthetic side of the movement, and expressed, in his lyrics, in Wallenstein, and in Wilhelm Tell, the ideal of spontaneous, self-sufficient art—art whose sole mission is to give the pleasure of the beautiful—“Art for its own sake.” Goethe, with deeper insight perhaps, saw the relation of the search for freedom and the ideal to the problem of humanity, and gave fullest expression to this view in that triumph song of civilation, the Faust. These two masters stand as German Romanticism revealed in its two essential phases: the application of the freeing message of the Romantic ideal to the problem of art and to the problem of humanity. Literary art and literary philosophy alike respond to the Romantic Renaissance.
In France, the restlessness which precedes the Romantic movement is more apparent. In the protests of Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand, and in what Carlyle calls “the spasmodic smoking which issued from the philosophy of Rousseau,” we see a decided reaction against Classicism in literature. “I found myself,” says Chateaubriand, “between two ages, and at the confluence of two rivers. Plunging into their troubled waters, I reluctantly left behind the ancient strand upon which I was born, and full of hope, swam towards the unknown shore, where the new generations were about to land.” These new generations were destined to France one of the richest and most extensive periods of her literature. They were the French Romanticists: Lamartine, “the Sorrowful,” with fervent enthusiasm in spite of over-refined emotion and symbolism, leading Poetry “back to nature;” followed by Alfred de Musset, reviving the forgotten ideals of Greek lyric poetry. As in Germany, the last development flowers in a double blossom, Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo. As did Schiller, De Vigny gave the fullest interpretation of the ideal of Romanticism as a reaction in French poetry. Hugo, like Goethe, sought to read the message into the purpose of humanity: his poems, like his novels, are filled with a tolerant love for human life in all its manifold phases, and a belief in a direct relation between it and nature, and the God of both.
Romanticism in France, side by side with a political and social revolution, could not but absorb the revolutionary spirit in its destructive form. Thus Victor Hugo defines Romanticism as “Liberalism in literature,” and, in speaking of literary liberty as the “child of political liberty,” shows that he thought of Classicism as the monarchy of literature; and of Cornelle, Racine, Moliere and Voltaire as legitimate victims of the literary guillotine.
England, also saw that a new era had arisen upon the continent. Political England with all too generous ardor followed the “morning-star” of the French Revolution; literary England likewise, till the extremes of the Revolution led to impossible paths, and she then saw that a steadier light was leading the revolution of literature. Romanticism was the true literary movement: but for a while English literature, absorbing the Romantic ideal in its political form, mistook the comet of Revolution for the sun of Renaissance. The great period of English literature that followed wavered between the ideals of the French Revolution and those of Romanticism. Both are, it is true, certain phases of the same spirit of the age, but their creeds conflict hopelessly.
We have, for instance, Southey expressing at one time the recklessness of the revolutionary spirit in Watt Tyler and Joan of Arc; at another time, with the true artistic spirit of Romanticism weaving into fanciful and imaginative fabrics the tales of Arabia in Thalaba and Kehama. Coleridge, likewise, is Rousseau turned poet in his Ode to France and the Fall of Robspierre, yet at a later time we find him translating Wallenstein, and, in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, creating a world of the supernatural that his romantic imagination and art might have a world of their own order and dominion. If we look below the placid surface of the works of Wordsworth we find the same. In the Prelude he indulges in bursts of enthusiasm over revolutionary ideals that are startling when we see him responding so perfectly to the influences of Romantic art in later life; proclaiming Truth in Nature the ideal in which his spirit finds comfort and assurance. Although Byron’s poetry is the very incarnation of the spirit of unrest and despair fostered by the Revolution, we find that it possesses much which breathes forth the best of Romanticism, and which results in his being classed with Shelley and Keats, in the more romantic group of English poets. Again, Prometheus Unbound, which is the best and most liberal interpretation in English literature of the principles of revolutionary France, contains such products of pure Romanticism as choral lyrics, among them “Life of light! thy lips enkindle.” Thus Shelley places side by side the French Revolution and Romanticism in their purest and most antithetical forms.
With Keats we have the single exception; nowhere do we find the conflict of the creeds which once arose from a single element. Keats is the most romantic of the Romanticists and also the last. The French Revolution and Romanticism had both run their active courses. Both had gone to an extreme, their traditions were too exhausted to permit of further practical application; both begin that inevitable decline which is, in Science, the third law of motion; and in Poetry, the rising and falling of the tide. After this each was to play an important part in the development of future literature, but their influence was to be so blended with others, and their radical elements so modified that they might add their part harmoniously to a further interpretation of life.
As the last of this long historical line of Romanticists, Keats had the advantage of all their several contributions, and as the possessor of a nature in accord with the true ideals of Romantic art, he had the power to profit by them. We have no direct evidence in his works, but we know he must have been as familiar with the English Romantic poets as he was with Spenser. Thus it is that a modern critic writes, “Keats of all poets was the one who best felt and handed down the change which the Romantic movement had made in English literature.”
But it is not enough that we should know the relation of Keats to Romanticism as an historical movement. We must also see the relation he bears to its spiritual nature, for its essential significance is there, together with the means for observing what Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, Wordsworth and Keats possess in common. That they have some such common bond is the tacit assumption of the common name we give them, Romanticists.
It is no literary heresy, then, to suppose that they have some fundamental possession. That this is not evident on the surface of their poetry only increases the necessity of the search for it. What, for instance, would be the meaning of the political, social, and artistic history of Greece without the philosophy of Plato with which to interpret its relation to the Greek mind and genius? If, then, in this varied and complex reaction of Romantic literature upon the artistic and ideal side of self and nature, we can find a single unifying principle, it will be to Romanticism what Plato’s philosophy is to Greek thought and culture. Should it be found that the conflicting tenets of the Romantic creed are but various expressions and interpretations of one Romantic spirit, then only is there justification for the distinction in literary criticism. Only then can we truthfully combine the various motives of their strains, and call it the modern chorus of song; only then can we collect their bursts of philosophic insight and say that each is, as it were, a reflection from the presence of a great and central sun, the guiding ideal of the literary and spiritual Renaissance of modern Europe.
To find the unifying principle which is the basis of its classification is, therefore, the purpose of any treatise on the Romantic movement. The definition of Romanticism must be broad and general that it may include such differing poets as Goethe, Hugo, Byron, and Keats; and yet it must not be so broad that it will include any of the poets of another literary age. Almost every critic attempts a definition of Romanticism, and very few succeed in giving one which is, at the same time, exact and expressive of the essential features of its contribution. Perhaps it is impossible to find a general unifying principle underlying the productions of the Romantic writers; if so, the Romanticism of critical literature has no basis in literary fact, and is, therefore, a false generalization. But even should it be granted that the usual distinction between romantic and classic is purely a relative one, and admitted that Heine thought the movement was towards mediaevalism, that Hugo believed it the emancipation of the individual in literature, that many of the Romanticists themselves did not know they were participating in a general movement, it still remains that there is a broad Romanticism which includes them all; and in which, consciously or unconsciously, they accepted a common ideal and a common purpose.
There are two directions in which a definition of Romanticism may approach its subject; one, from the objective side as an analysis of the surrounding conditions which might have been the causes of the movement; the other, from the subjective side, as an analysis of the motives and ideals of each Romanticist to see what was their common possession. The former gives rise to a definition which views the movement as an historical one, and defines its relation to the social and political revolution which accompanied the Romantic revival. By far the larger number of critics adopt this method. The latter treats the movement as a philosophic and spiritual awakening in literature, and aims to interpret the common ideals of the Romantic poets together with the spirit in which they approached them. A few deeper and more philosophic critics have adopted this other method.
The critic who declares that Romanticism represents in the world of art what the French Revolution did in the political world, or he who speaks of it as a return to the consideration of mediaeval art, or the one who sees in it but the reaction against the dogmatism and tradition of the Eighteenth Century, touches, at best, but a cause or an effect of the movement.
The commotion of the French Revolution has left indisputable traces of a direct effect on literature, but the French Revolution was destructive in tendency and cannot be identified with the constructive impulse of Romanticism. That each within its own sphere proclaimed the creed of individualism is an evidence of similarity and sympathy, but not of identity. French Revolutionary philosophy can never explain the insight of Goethe nor the inspiration of Keats: the most careful search for even a vital point of contact is futile with Keats and Heine. Lyricism is something more than individualism; the protest against the institution of civilization is not the protest against the tyranny of literary tradition; Burns is not a literary Rousseau, nor Hugo a Robspierre of literature.
Prof. Beers in calling Romanticism the return to mediaeval ideals, even though he have the sanction and support of Heine’s famous definition, is compelled not only to dismiss from his consideration such acknowledged Romanticists as Wordsworth and Shelley and Goethe and Schiller, but must in turn discard much of the work of those who he himself names “Romanticists par excellence.” Of the greater poems of Keats he can include only Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and Isabelle. Because of the self-imposed handicap of his definition, he must leave Endymion, Hyperion, the Odes and the Sonnets with hardly a passing notice. Strange that Keats, the high priest of Hellenism, should also be a mediaevalist, unless he could have been a Romanticist in both. A distinguishing feature of Romanticism is the catholicism of its doctrine; Heine himself, in Die Romantische Schule protests against the narrow mediaevalism of Schelgel. Goethe took the Faust legend from the Romance of the Middle Ages, the Iphigenia, from classic antiquity; Keats in many instances combined both. The unity of Romanticism is not unity of subject-matter, but of approach and attitude. As far as can be seen from the work of the great Romanticists, in subject matter Romanticism was catholic, in form and spirit more in harmony with Greek ideals than mediaeval tradition.
Again, can we imagine that such an impulse should arise in three countries simultaneously, and continue for nearly a century its inspiring and positive course as the result of a negative reaction against authority? While it is undeniable that there are reactions in literature, literary activity cannot be explained by scientific law or by the doctrine of the conservation of energy. Romanticism, if anything, was a positive movement—a creative impulse—and creation even in science has not yet been explained as a result of action and reaction. Such historical statements of the causes, effects, and surrounding conditions of this great movement are useful and necessary for its complete understanding; but the critic who seeks in such the essence of the Romantic movement will seek in vain.
Nor will a common element be found to run consistently through the poetry of the Romanticists. We find the pages of Goethe teeming with the problems of humanity. The realities of life were the sources of his poetry, he flings himself into the whirlpool of the world’s thought, and leaves in Faust the symbol of his struggle. Goethe’s Faust, if it have a meaning beyond that of pure literature, is the expression of a philosophy of life which has as its ideal the rising of man through service to his fellow-men.
“Whosoever strives unceasingly
Is not beyond redemption.”
How different from Keats in whose work we find no trace of the problems and influences of the day, who flees from life into a world created of his own fancy, there to sing that:
“Beauty is truth, truth, Beauty—that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
Those, however, who look upon Romanticism in its spiritual aspects, who see that there can be a common ideal and multiplicity in its interpretation, grasp the real unity of the movement together with the proper means for its interpretation. They may interpret this in the light of the facts revealed by the scientific critic, and may find in the social and political conditions of each poet’s environment the forces which modified his conception of the ideal, and the very causes for the differences of his individual view. The unifying principle however, is in the ideal which the Romanticists possessed in common.
M. Pelissier states that “The Renaissance of Spiritualism was the great force which acted upon Romanticism,” but does not identify the two elements and say that Romanticism was the spiritual Renaissance. V.D. Scudder says that “The spiritual Renaissance, which has been broadening ever since its inauguration by Goethe, beheld no absolutely new vision, but its superb originality resulted from the dynamic union of the visions of ages past,” but does not name this Romanticism. Nor is the definition which this essay shall attempt a new one, for here it finds its elements. There may arise, however, a more helpful literary formula from the union of the two and their application to the principles of Romantic art. At least, it is along this path that the true definition of Romanticism must be sought and ultimately found—the analysis of the ideal which it created and the spirit which it fostered.
Carlyle truly says, “No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free thought before us; but his thought as he could translate it into the stone which was given with the tools which were given.” The poet, likewise, cannot interpret the feelings he experiences or the Truth which he sees under the limitations which his surroundings, his ability, and his nature impose. So we have the new truth of the spiritual ideal of Romanticism sundered into many and conflicting elements by the Romanticists. Not so much because they saw the ideal only in part as that the nature and environment of each was different, and according to these was the new truth interpreted. As one religion with many conflicting canons, Romanticism is a single truth with many diverse expressions, one literary ideal with many individual practices—a Romantic spirit and a Romantic creed.
The Romantic spirit was the product of a reaction in the world of thought which more than any other since that of the Greek mind upon its environment, has influenced man’s fundamental philosophy of life. More than anything else this message is to the human mind calling for a fresh interpretation of life itself. It started that yearning for the ideal, that desire for personal and direct vision which tolerates no intermediary of past insight, no restriction of past tradition, in short, that religion of personal art and philosophy which is its own High Priest, and constructs its own Holy of Holies, which runs throughout all Romantic poetry. It is the “superb reaching-out” for a personal interpretation of life which Browning voices so well when he says:
“The world’s no blot to us,
Nor blank—it means intensely and means good
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”
With such a message comes the realization of transcendental importance of the human soul, and the belief that the individual must interpret and recreate the world. It is this that we find the common bond between the restlessness of Faust and the yearnings of Endymion. Each is responding, the one with the spirit of Goethe, the other, with that of Keats, to this ideal of Romanticism. It was a time when an Everlasting Yea came not to the German philosopher alone, but to all the literary world. In the eloquent language of Carlyle, “The hour of spiritual enfranchisement is ever thus: when your ideal world, wherein the whole man has been struggling and languishing to work, becomes revealed and thrown open; you discover, like Lothario in the Wilhelm Meister, that ‘Your America is here or nowhere.’ Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standeth, here or nowhere is thy ideal. Work it out, therefore, and working, believe, live, and be free.” In this vivid picture of the revelation of Teufelsdröch, the Scottish sage was, also, interpreting the nature of the new and ideal light which shone upon the world in the dawn of Romanticism. With all the means within the power of thine own soul, with all the help proceeding from spiritual communion with Nature, and with all the past achievements of man’s intellect, with all the symbols of the romantic past, go forth and interpret life and the ideal towards which it is moving—so runs the message. He who responds to this ideal may sing of the world of struggle or the world of beauty, of man or Nature, of Grecian myth or mediaeval legend; in each and all he is a Romanticist.
Romanticism, then, is above and beyond all else a spiritual Renaissance in literature. When it formulated definite literary creeds it became a Reformation, when it protested against the established traditions of a former literary period it became a Revolution; but these were only special phases.
First and last, it was a reawakening to the purposes of literature as an interpretative art; a new birth into the “Heritage of the Past;” a fresh conception of literary art as the expression of the individual; a near approach to the elemental scources of Art,—man as Man, and not as Society; Nature, “not veiled under names or formulas, but naked, beautiful, awful, unspeakable—Nature, as to the thinker and prophet it ever is, praeternatural.” Romanticism in this sense is another attempt to resolve that paradox which Goethe calls “the open Secret.” Walter Pater came very near the truth of the romantic movement when he called it the “Renaissance of wonder,” the “grafting of curiosity upon the love of Beauty;” for there is much significance in the statement of Carlyle that “Worship is transcendant wonder.”
Thus Romanticism was, indeed, revolt against the formal traditions of Eighteenth Century Classicism, it was a return to Nature, it was a renewal of the past as material for fresh symbols—of mediaeval romance as well as of Greek idealism, it was, as Hegel said, “the period of mastery of spirit over form,” it was also a triumph of individualism, but to say it was a spiritual Renaissance of literature is to say all this and more.
A Renaissance is of itself a return to the sources of Art, to Nature, to elemental Man, to all the accumulated material of the Past that is available for new symbols. This is what was meant by saying; “The world turns to Plato in every Renaissance.” It means that it turns to an ideal, and takes, as it were, a fresh start. The spirit of Renaissance that makes Savanorola one with Giotto, and Erasmus with Raphael, is what unites Goethe with Hugo, Wordsworth with Keats.
Surely this includes all the Romanticists, but does it not also include those poets of another epoch who have responded in much the same manner? The souls of the true Romanticists were so attuned to their ideal that their heart-chords responded to no other impulse. They were all extremists: filled with the spirit of their age. Much of Romantic spirit and tradition remains through succeeding epochs in literature, but not untouched by other doctrines. The later poet who is, in his turn, in accord with the life of his time may exhibit many romantic tendencies, but he cannot adopt in pure form the extreme standpoint of the Romanticists; his poetry must, of necessity, show the modifications and blendings due to a later age.
The ideals of Romanticism with the call for spiritual activity, for an interpretation and full appreciation of life do not restrict in any very positive way the region in which the poet is to seek the answer. It allows many interpretations of its meaning according to the nature of the individual mind; for, as a direct corollary from its main theorem comes the doctrine of individual freedom. This is the reason for the diversity in the Romantic creed. One poet revels in the world of nature, another struggles in the world of art; a third, more universal in his scope, includes them both.
Nevertheless, to each arose the question of the nature of the ruling impulse which he felt: and each gave an individual answer. Goethe believed that it was a call for the perfect realization of human selfhood through culture and mutual service. This he found in a philosophical study of humanity. Hugo thought that the universal ideal lay in sympathy with God and the objects of his creation, man and nature from their lowest to their highest forms. In the fullest promise of his French heritage, Hugo grasps the humanitarianism of the Romantic movement; and laments, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “man as man has made him.” Wordsworth, in his turn, says Truth as the outcome of a philosophical study of nature, Shelley saw a vision of universal freedom, and Keats dreamt of an eternal principle of Beauty.
But going deeper into the meaning of Romanticism, we see that, after all, there is a certain amount of restriction implied which many of the Romanticists overlooked or ignored. There is one portion of the Romantic creed which must be looked upon as the truer interpretation of its spirit. The predominant element in the Romantic ideal was a direct development of Greek civilization, and so we should expect that the truest tenets of the creed of the Romantic poets would be those which were founded on a spirit Grecian in its essence. The poet who turned to Nature, then, came nearer to Romanticism than the poet who turned to humanity, although the latter, as in the instance of Goethe or Hugo, made the greater contribution to literature. Another tendency of consistent reaction was away from realism in subject matter and method, and was towards the unusual and pagan rather than the conventional and Christian elements of the past. The more universal minds ignored these narrower distinctions in their work, the more they profited by such an action, for their vigorous and constructive minds were as well suited to grapple with the problems of real life as for the analysis of impressions received from Nature.
Yet we see that the consistent reaction to the Romantic ideal resulted from an aesthetic rather than a philosophic interpretation, Grecian rather than Christian, with the motives of “Art for its own Sake” rather “Art for Humanity’s Sake.” In a certain limited sense the reason for this lies in the fact “that the higher spiritual life of all literature has been developed under the influences of Grecian antiquity.” By far the larger element that was combined in the modern spiritual Renaissance was that given by Greek ideals. The very idea of waiting for an impression and reflecting back the impressing power is Grecian to the core.
In classic Greek times there was little of the distinction between soul and body, spirit and form, yet once this distinction is made there can be little doubt that the precedence of spirit over form, which Hegel considers the distinguishing trait of Romantic art, is an emphasis consistent with the Greek temperament. Thus it is that an interpretation which is artistic, aesthetic, Grecian in spirit, and separated from the immediate problems of life is also more consistent with the Romantic spirit.
John Keats stood as last of the Romantic poets and as the embodiment of the change wrought in English literature by Romanticism. Such was his historical relation to the movement, now we must look at his spiritual relation to both this Romantic spirit and Romantic creed.
The relation of Keats to the Romantic spirit seems to have been regulated more by the bias of his temperament than by direct choice. Surely a most fortunate circumstance, for conscious Romanticism is itself a step towards Classicism. The progress of the impulse was ever from within, outward; we see no evidence of a formal adoption in spirit or in creed. Lowell says, “In Keats we have an example of a spiritual Renaissance going on before our very eyes.” Perhaps in no other poet do we find the yearning for the absolute ideal more pitifully or more fully expressed. From the beginning of his poetry to the end we see the spirit of Keats reaching out for an ideal which would satisfy and soothe its aspirations. Endymion sighing for Diana, Lycius under the spell of Lamia are the personifications of Keats laboring for the solution of his problem. The ideal of the Romantic movement seems to have been the fundamental impulse of his nature; and from this results the most sympathetic of interpretations.
The basis for Keats’ reaction upon the Romantic creed is this same fact of an embodiment of the movement in his personality. That nature, which of all English poets, could best interpret the Greek mind was surely adapted best to the aesthetic values of the new philosophy. The artistic treatment of his subject was in no way marred by the intrusion of any foreign elements: the practical world of his own time was completely eliminated from his poetry. He revels in the myths of Greece, the legends of mediaeval romance, and the play of his own feelings and emotions untouched by any contemporary influence except the Romantic idea itself. A firm believer in poetry as self-sufficient art, he obeyed all the restrictive laws of artistic harmony.
Keats was also consistently Grecian in his aesthetic doctrines. Beauty he regarded as the all-pervading spirit of the universe, and it was the true function of art, by substituting sympathy for analysis, to reveal the presence of this ideal Beauty. Plato thus sets forth a doctrine which corresponds exactly to that of Keats: “Beauty is that which not being visible in its abstract and ideal essence by man, but dwelling in the nature of God, imparts by its emenating gleams, loveliness to all that is beautiful in the lower world. It is by communion with this spiritual essence revealing itself in forms of earthly beauty, that the mind of man has means for reaching the full meaning of the ideal of life.” To be a witness of the ideal beauty which is in the realm of poetry is the accepted mission of Keats’ literary genius.
Thus by refusing to allow the modern searching for fact and truth to disturb the consistent unity of his artistic belief, and by his sympathy with all that is expressed by Greek idealism, Keats stands forth among his contemporaries as representative of complete harmony between romantic spirit and romantic creed. For the highest expression of the philosophy of life as revealed by the ideal of Romanticism, we must go to other and greater of the Romantic poets; but to Keats we may come for the fullest sympathetic exposition of the purer ideals of the Romantic school.
To be, as it were, a mirror reflecting the impulses of Romantic art was but a part of the mission of Keats, however. He was also to give a valuable contribution to its literature. Along with his powers of interpretation came the ability of creative genius. The products of a few short years, express the fundamental principles of a world-movement whose activity ceased with his own, together with his own swift and splendid literary development.
The somewhat checkered life of these few short years bears no vital relation to his poetry except that it closed while his genius was still developing, and left the world with only a partial fulfilment of one of the richest of England’s literary promises. When we have learned that Keats was gifted with a spirit peculiarly adapted to the Romantic ideal, and that he had an artistic nature which approached the principles of Greek art with intuitive insight into their meaning, we have learned all from a consideration of Keats’s life that will aid us in interpreting his poetry. Yet in critical literature, we must listen to a long discussion of Keats as the lover of Fanny Brawne and as the butt of the Quarterly’s criticism (circumstances which reveal his personality in its weakest and most trivial aspects) that the critic may conform to a tradition of his species. Little of it, if any, throws light upon John Keats, the poet of Romanticism.
Keats was, from the beginning to the end of his career, a poet of nature; in poems where a human element is introduced the slight narrative seems an excuse for the description of the natural setting of the story’s action. He shows himself a master of subjective description by his graphic touch and suggestive phrases. Such passage as:
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring thy soul abroad
In such an ecstacy.”
Or
“Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in Faerylands forlorn.”
receive the merited attention of all who deal with the poetry of Keats. The subjective note in his description cannot escape attention; every adjective is the registration of a personal mood. Nature in terms of feeling, of personality, transferred from its infinitude by the personal equation—this for the Romanticists is true description.
We find also, in Keats, a two fold attitude towards nature; one, the Polytheistic attitude of the Greeks, the other, the Pantheism of the German and French Romantic Schools. In his longer poems as Endymion and Hyperion he expresses nature under the varied personifications of the Greek mythology. A surprising array of gods and goddesses, nymphs and nyads, dryads and fauns, is presented as the embodiment of the forces of nature which cluster about the spirit of beauty. In the shorter lyrics and Odes we see a decided pantheistic attitude; his spirit becomes so blended with that of the Grecian Urn, of the Nightingale, or of Melancholy that for the time they are one in sympathy and existence. In this phase of communion with the ideal through absorption in nature, Keats expresses in his individual way the mysticism of the Romantic movement. The Grecian Urn, Psyche, Autumn, The Nightingale,—these are Keats’ symbols for the “Little blue flower” of Novalis Schlegal.
Both these phases of nature are worlds of his own creation, peopled by his peculiar and imaginative fancy; each bearing little resemblance to the other, except that both are true to that ideal of spiritual beauty which always claimed his steadfast and loving worship. This principle of Eternal Beauty was Keats’ expression of the ideal of Romanticism, indeed, “the abstract idea of the beautiful not as the scource of sensuous gratification, but as an intellectual and spiritual agency, may be regarded as the contribution of Keats to the progress of humanity.”
Such statements that the poetry of Keats reveals a spiritual message in its attitude towards nature and the beautiful, have not been without their opponents, however. Mr. Hudson declares that “In the material beauty of the world, in the appeal which the bright show of things made to his highly strung and well developed senses, he found both his sphere and his limitation.” In other words, the conception of Keats’ ideal as a spiritual one is combated by a doctrine which proclaims it merely sensuous. If such be true then, Keats could not have been a Romanticist, for he did not give an answer to the demand of the Romantic impulse for a spiritual interpretation of its ideal. Keats’ own poetry, far removed though it be from the polemic, may be quoted as evidence of the fact that he beheld in nature a spiritual relation to his own. In the Ode to a Grecian Urn, he says,
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.”
And again,
“Be still the unimagined lodge
For solitary thinking, such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of Heaven,
Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal, a new birth.”
One of the most essential conceptions for understanding the development of Keats’ genius and its relation to the Romantic movement is, to repeat Lowell’s phrase, that “In him we have an example of a spiritual Renaissance taking place before our very eyes.”
As back of the revelation of nature contained in all the poems of Keats, there lies the conception of an abstract, spiritual beauty, and a desire to make this evident, all his poems may be looked upon as self-expressive; in a sense subjective, as each and every one is tinctured with the individuality of this conception. While we find the objective sometimes revealed in the narrative poems and the epic Hyperion, the narrative proper is of little importance in contrast with the great mass of subjective description and individual fancy that is woven about it by Tennyson and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite school.
To have come upon the crest of the last incoming wave of Romanticism and to have had a nature best fitted to interpret the Romantic idea was the fortune of him who is looked upon as the most unfortunate of English poets, John Keats. To best and most consistently interpret the essential features of the Romantic movement in the light of a rich and glorious past, and to have added one of the most important and influencing answers to the question which that movement raised was his mission. Both combined, despite the fact that an early death prevented their perfect fulfilment, to make him among the most important of the English poets of his time.