XXV

PHILOSOPHY OF HIS ART

UTHORS read to us from the book of human nature. Each one beholds life as a play of interacting forces, and each emphasizes their relative values according to his character. The Germans have a word for this personal estimate for which there is no adequate equivalent in English, Weltanschauung. Shakespeare's seems all-inclusive. Goethe's shows a similar range. Both hold the contending forces in poise. Dante's also has a universal range, with an added intensity of love and hate. The men of minor genius absorb and utilize only special forces. Heine is of these, and Shelley and De Musset and Poe. However great Keats may be in quality as an artist place him with Shakespeare if you choose

it is among

these men of limited vision that he must find his intellectual station. His vista was widening, yet he never saw life large.

Indeed he absorbs and utilizes only one of the

motive forces. The others appear to lie dormant. He had opinions on many subjects; the letters reveal the alertness of his mind. But these opinions scarcely touch his poetry, His age was one of the great destructive-constructive epochs of history; it witnessed a bloody revolution, the spectacle of a world conqueror, shocks of battle, conventions of despots, partitions of nationalities, sacrifices of loyalty to king and to the cause of man. Amid all these the only motive that interested Keats vitally was the principle of beauty in all things. He passed through the clamor of the time, singing, like the lover in Horace, his Lalage of beauty.

Beauty was his panacea for human ills. He shuddered at the fierce impulse of destruction in nature: the tyranny of the strong; the preying of the shark, the hawk, the robin upon the weaker animals; the struggle among men for survival.1 Sheer strength, he declared in one of the earlier poems, was like a fallen angel. “Hyperion" was designed to show, in the evolution of culture, the downfall of sheer strength before the all-conquering power of beauty. The Olympians were to vanquish the Titans because it is the eternal law that "first in beauty should be first in might." 1 Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds.

This was his message. While Wordsworth was communing with pantheistic nature and Shelley was dreaming of perfectibility through reason and Byron was blindly inspiriting the rebels, Keats was proclaiming the regenerative influence in the worship of beauty.

Pursue his principle into its implications. Then we shall see that, if he did not read life large, he read deep.

The division of philosophy is triune. It comprehends the true, the beautiful, the good; the intellectual, the æsthetic, the moral. Keats identifies the true with the beautiful and discredits the importance of anything beyond these. The æsthetic thus absorbs the intellectual and annihilates the moral. The principle of beauty is thus, of necessity, left as the guardian and guide of conduct.

Keats, as a member of society, appears to have acquitted himself, on the whole, very worthily. Of course he was educated, more or less unconsciously, by the ethics of contemporary England. Yet we can find neither in the records of his life nor in his poetry any evidence that he consciously squared his standards of conduct with a moral code. Certainly in Keats, the poet, that which we call conscience is merged and lost in the in

stinct for the beautiful. This instinct for him is the arbiter of conduct. "I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty," he wrote in a letter to his brother George.1 And later: "Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?" This, the record of a passing moment, is in line with the drift of his formal utterance. Truth he discerned and conduct he regulated through the instinct for beauty.

This exclusive worship of beauty may lead to divergent consequences. It may run down the scale into a creed of art for art's sake, and life for art's sake, until with degenerates, as Ruskin said, the sense for the beautiful may become the servant of lust. Or it may run up the scale, as it does with Keats, into a creed of art for life's sake and life for eternity's sake, until the human spirit attains the perfection of divine being." This thought lures us in speculation. For we 1 Colvin's Letters of Keats, pp. 201, 202, 237.

2 Cf. chap. xi, on "The Philosophy of Soul-Making."

conceive that a divine being, as he exists unto himself, is unvexed by a conscience. He is compelled to no scrutiny of right and wrong. His nature is complete, above temptation. His existence is one of unerring impulse, so wholly free that all distinctions of good and evil are obscured in the beauty of divine perfection. With him truth is absolute and conduct is the spontaneous expression of his nature; both are so harmoniously fixed in finality that his life is an eternal perception of the beautiful.

And is not this the ideal, at an infinite remove, toward which the human soul is rising? There is physical instinct in the brute and spiritual impulse in the divine being. Midway between stands man, wrought upon by both and conquering his way up with conscience as the means of ascent, conquering slowly until he shall attain that perfection which is so self-secure that it requires no weapon of defense.

This spontaneous spiritual impulse is superior to the calculating obligations of conscience. Put it to the practical proof. The man who is good from cold conscience-driven duty is commendable. He who is good from warm spontaneous impulse is lovable. Ponder the meaning in Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal." It is the rich abun