Stopford A. Brooke

Page 3

Look now at this island of ours in and about 1820.  No high emotion of any kind, such as lifts a nation above itself, pervaded it: there was no ideal aim before society, little care for the welfare of fellow-citizens among employers or landlords, no forward hope or faith in the bettering of the world.  A few desired higher things, but they were fewer even than those eight thousand who had not bowed in Israel the knee to Baal.  There was plenty of intellectual discussion, of analysis of human nature by philosophers, but scarcely any new literature, moved by love of human nature, arose at this time, nor was there any new form of imaginative penetration into the passionate aspirations of mankind.  What literature of this kind existed was in the writings of men who, like Scott, had lived on from the last generation into this period.  Criticism, also, which proved everyone wrong but the critic and his crew, was indeed plentiful, but there was little or no creation, and what there was, was thought to be a revolting birth.  When Keats did begin to create, the critics howled, as if they had seen a monster.  Scarcely anything is more amusing or more sad in literary history than the critics' reception of Keats, the creator.  Beauty rose before them in his poetry, like Aphrodite, and the apes turned from her with a malicious sneer.  Then Byron, sick of this world of critical reasoning on premises invented as truths by the philosophers and critics themselves, sick of his own sensualities, sick of a materialized world, fled to Greece to die for liberty.  Shelley was driven to Italy; his name and work were blackened by Edinburgh and London; and the religion of the day screamed at the man who, alone in a loveless world, proclaimed the essentials of Christianity as the foundation of life.

It was no wonder that Keats, gazing on this world barren of passion, hope, and aspiration, where the bones and remnants of the noble ideas which had enkindled the poetic outburst of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, lay dry and strewn on the desert, like a caravan overwhelmed by thirst, cried, in the sonnet which preceded the poems of 1817--

"Glory and loveliness have passed away."

"How," he thought, "shall I redeem men from this death and misery which they think life and happiness?  With what shall I bind them together again?  What religion shall I proclaim?"  And he answered his question by preaching the religion of beauty.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
We know on earth, and all we need to know."

"Then how shall I make men know and feel what beauty is, and awake the worship of her?  There is nothing in my country, nor in the present time, to stir the love of beauty in a single soul; there is nothing, except the beauty of the natural world, which moves me.  Therefore I go back to the past.  I will paint the loveliness, the passion, the heroism of the Greek world, and of the days of chivalry and romance; and the forest full of elves; Saturn lying among the green senators of the woods; Apollo singing in Delos; Endymion embraced on Latmos; Isabella weeping sore for her slain lover; Madeline flying on St. Agnes' Eve with Porphyro; and all the sights and sounds of eternal Nature in her youth and loveliness."

And this he gave to us, but the revelation of beauty fell dead on the world to which he spoke.  Keats prophesied, but no ear could hear his prophecy.  Nor indeed, standing alone, unmixed with mighty moral aims, unaccompanied with the deep interests of mankind, without joining loveliness to its immortal fountain in the duties of man and in the love of God, having no vital roots in the present, only replanted, like cut flowers, from the past, could his prophecy or his religion of beauty kindle the world in which he lived, or engender new poets in that world.  This was his own opinion.  Both in his letters and in some of his last poems, he spoke of the necessity of getting into inspiring touch, not only with the past, but with the present humanity.  "I have not been human enough," he thought.   "I need another and a deeper emotion from sympathy with the living."   And had he lived, he would have attained this end, and won even a loftier seat on Parnassus than that he holds.  And this experience of Keats' adds another proof to the truth that, in every age, the highest, the imperial poetry, must find its motive and its passion in the existing thoughts and passions, acts and aspirations of the world in which the poet lives.  Poetry about the past, poetry not vitally connected with the present human life, as the nerves are with the muscles, is pleasant, lovely, if a great poet like Keats write it, but if small poets write it, it becomes mere melodious words, with a false semblance of passion in it; and finally ends in thin and ghostly verse, faint and fainter, till it disappears.  If, again, a great poet, like Keats, write it, his work is finally taken up into the whole body of song, but then it has no children during the poet's lifetime.  Similar conditions of society may in the future produce a similar kind of poetry in the hands of a future master of song, but whenever such poetry is written--only about the beauty and glory of the past--it ends with itself.  Its religion of mere beauty breathes and burns and charms--and dies; and the ten years which followed the death of Keats were years in which poetry faded into mere sentimentalism and melody; and literature blossomed into a plenteous crop of the crab-apples of sour and foolish criticism.  Criticism sat in the throne of Creation, and the throne must have longed for  its rightful lord.