THE

XI

THE PHILOSOPHY OF

SOUL-MAKING

HE purport of "Endymion" has never been made clear. Mrs. Owen has interpreted the poem as an allegory. Colvin assumes it to be "a parable of the soul's experience in pursuit of the ideal." Rossetti finds it meaningless and considerately reconstructs the fable. Keats did attach some philosophical ideas to his narrative; but his purpose was neither allegorical nor meaningless.1

"Endymion seems a a puzzle because the Anglo-Saxon critics have insisted upon reading it

1 An allegory, as a literary type, is a sustained metaphor, drawn out to the length of a narrative, which particularizes the abstract. If “Endymion " is an allegory, then Keats was more interested in an abstraction than in a story. There is no external evidence that he was interested in an abstraction at all. There is definite proof that his purpose was to tell a story. It is possible that his imagination may have played, in passing, with symbols as allegorical figures of speech. But allegory may be forced out of anything. It is too often abused as a last refuge from obscurity.

through their ethical spectacles. They hunt for a moral issue where there is none.

The key to the puzzle is the meaning of the word "spiritualize" which Diana utters at the close. This commonly implies an elevation from the animal instincts to moral ideals. But Keats used it without any moral significance whatever. The episode with the Indian bacchante, supposed to be crucial, involves no remorse. "Spiritualize" has an æsthetic meaning only, and the senses are made the media of spiritualization. This word is the epitome of Keats' self-spun philosophy of Beauty. It is the open sesame to an understanding of his poetry.

"Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!" Every student of Keats knows of this exclamation, and pretty nearly every one associates it with Haydon's tale that the poet peppered his tongue in order to increase the delicious coolness of claret. The two things, as text and gloss, have given credibility to the fiction that Keats, with all his fine poetry, had an ignoble weakness for titillating his nerveends.

Keats peppered his tongue once; anybody might legitimately try that or a similar experiment. The exclamation, however, has been torn,

literally torn, from its context and made into debased currency; although its real meaning was all gold. Keats was at Burford Bridge when he wrote the passage about "spiritualize.” While there he also wrote a letter to Bailey, containing this much-quoted phrase, which discussed the two methods of attaining truth, the intuitive and the rational. In the midst of his argument he suddenly broke out, "Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!" And the exclamation, interpreted by its context, simply meant, "I should rather live in the emotions of the heart, stirred by the imagination's conception of beauty, than in the intellectual truth gained from the processes of logic." It is the impetuous cry of the poet for the intuitive perceptions of the higher nature. Other phrases, used synonymously for the life of sensations, are "a Vision in the form of Youth" and "ethereal Musings upon Earth." The garbled quotation thus turns out to be his first conscious endeavor to define the poetic in distinction from the philosophic mind.

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

he asked two years afterward in “Lamia.' Keats disliked rigorous analysis. The imagination to him was the supremely desirable faculty.

Imagination brought the vision of truth to the heart invested with sublime emotion, while logic brought it to the head, cold and barren. In this same letter to Bailey is the first formal statement of his æsthetic principle, in which Beauty is identified with Truth. "I am certain of nothing," he wrote, "but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth." He cited for illustration Adam's dream of Eve and his awakening to the reality in "Paradise Lost."

The exclamation and the æsthetic principle will help us to fix the precise meaning of “spiritualize." For in "Endymion" this line of thought is elaborated into a definite scheme of life.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases.

The argument then runs that if a beautiful perception is once made our own, it becomes a permanent possession; an inalienable power in the spirit to counteract the ills of human life. Instances of such things are the sun, the moon, the forest, clear streams of water, memories of the great dead. These, once seized and held, enter into our natures as haunting shapes of beauty: finer essences, which shed a cheering light amid the gloom of mortal depressions. They do not

pass with the hour. They abide with us, else we die die the death of the higher life.

Endymion himself, when making his confession to Peona on the bowery island, extends the argument. Happiness, he urges, is found in the divine fellowship of the soul with the supreme essence. It is obtained by some alchemic change and it results in releasing the soul from its earthly limitations. Of the ministrants to happiness, lowest of all are physical pleasures, like the perfume of a rose. Higher in the scale are delights like music, which wakens old memories, prophesyings and martial energies. Such influences lift us from the carnal level; "our state is like a floating spirit's." Yet there are more elevating ministrants than these. Highest of all are friendship and love; the one a substantial splendor, the other a winged power which lifts the soul into a radiance above earthly ambition. Love is "an ardent listlessness," an intensity in repose. It may be the creative beautifying force in nature. It is the power which transforms mortal man into an immortal.

When "Endymion" was on the press, Keats wrote to his publisher saying that this passage' about happiness had been ringing in his ears like "a chime a-mending" and he requested some