More than any other poet of his time, Keats restored that faith in the pure enchantment of poetry that had all but disappeared from the English world with the passing of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. What Keats wrote remains unsurpassed for sheer felicity and natural magic.

Joseph Auslander

In the few unhappy years of his brief consumptive existence between 1795 and 1821, John Keats used the English language to create a world of pure beauty and magic. Left an orphan at fifteen, he turned for consolation to Homer, Virgil, Spenser and Shakespeare. At the age of eighteen and nineteen he wrote such mature monuments of literature as the poems Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to a Grecian Urn.

It may well have been he who with his love of beauty set in motion the great æsthetic movement that dominated British culture during the nineteenth century:

…”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The movement was a preoccupation with the formal elements of art for themselves rather than serving to enhance the content, “art for art’s sake”. Whistler’s famous Mother did not express filial devotion; for Whistler (1834-1903) it was Arrangement in Grey and Black. This led finally to abstract art, pleasing often to the eye, admired by the expert, but superficial when compared to a Rubilev icon, the statues of Chartres, or The Philosophers of Raphael. For Walter Pater (1839-1894), art aspired to the condition of music. To write a few sentences he would spend the whole morning carefully choosing some words written on pieces of coloured paper and spread over his table. Throughout the nineteenth century a conflict raged between those who, usually after a long stay in Paris, had adopted the revolutionary views current there and those who thought a picture should tell a story; between those who thought that beauty of form justified any novel or poem whatever its content and those who thought that literature should be moral.

Swinburne (1837-1909) could pour out a torrent of sparkling verse so intoxicating in its rhythm and alliteration that he once fell down in a fit during a recitation. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote prose poems, the most famous of which is The Nightingale and the Rose; others seem tawdry, as when one reads “Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry.”

Keats himself retained objectivity. He was looking for beauty and found it in nature, using his skill express it to perfection:

…[T]ender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs along the boughs,
But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket and the fruit-tree wild;

But following Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Whistler and Wilde were to consider art (and themselves?!) superior to nature, while Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1896), another short-lived youngster of strangely mature genius who burst in on the scene, created a weird and highly artificial Baroque or rococo world, as in The Abbé illustrating Under the Hill. Des Esseintes in Huysman’s A Rebours went further, enjoying the sensations he created in his own imagination, and even Wilde, while denying that art could be morally good or bad, admitted in The Picture of Dorian Grey that A Rebours was an evil book.

Goëthe had already taken a romantic view of the most unromantic classical Greek world and like him Keats sought escape into this ancient fantasy.

…What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

But unlike others, he did not seek in Ancient Greece a justification for sexual freedom. Perhaps he realized that it was not a world of fine character and joyous liberty. Family relations were psychotic, providing a vocabulary for psycho-analysts. The Greeks were not the “beautiful, wise, happy creatures, with free and natural customs” imagined by Lessing and quoted by Trevelyan. Orestes deliberately killed his mother. Alexander hardly enjoyed a happy home in his youth. Oedipus unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. The Furies wrought vengeance. All Greek history and legend is full of such hair-raising stories. The Greeks welcomed the freedom in Christ offered by St. Paul. Slaves were treated with abominable gratuitous cruelty; in pagan Athens a slave girl could be tortured as a matter of routine before giving evidence at a civil court case involving her master just to show her that the State could treat her worse than her owner could. Except in Nordic Sparta, women were not considered the equals of men, being either mere objects of physical passion or good and virtuous housekeepers like Odysseus’s wife Penelope. Greek legend tells of friendship between men rather than of romantic love between the sexes. If the object of love was superior, then the love was superior, which justified homosexuality (here we are not going to confuse our narrative by considering the Orphics, Pythagoreans, Socrates and Plato.) Romantic love of wild nature was something that Victorians, among them Tennyson, Swinburne and Pater, deeply ensconced in the comfort of bourgeois homes, attributed to Ancient Greece without any justification. The Ancient Greeks had to struggle against nature, and they produced nothing to be compared with glorification of God’s handiwork to be found in the Psalms, such as CIII, Bless the Lord, O my soul…

Victorian prudery should not be exaggerated. When men and women bathed apart, before sunbathing on public beaches, nudity was normal. But there is no doubt that after the boisterousness of medieval times, and despite the libertinism of the courts and high society, Calvinism and Jansenism brought a suffocating stuffiness into Western Europe, particularly among the rising bourgeois anxious to prove their respectability. From this, the honour in which Greece and Rome were held, with the classics being the basis of all education, provided a medium for an attack on Christianity and its supposedly repressive morality. If one exhibited a painting of a nude man and woman and called it Mr. and Mrs. Smith in their Garden near Clapham Common, one might go to prison, even though the subjects’ relationship was not immoral. But if one called the painting, say, Aphrodite and Hæphestus in a Garden in the Hesperides, one might get welcomed into the Royal Academy. Nude Greek statuary caused no offence.

So Swinburne would declaim in his revolt against Christianity as he knew it–
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,
And the world has grown grey with thy breath.
…Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean; but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.

Unlike certain of his successors, Keats, had he lived longer, would certainly not have been allured by dark beauty in evil. He would surely not have approved les Fleurs du mal of Baudelaire (1821-1867), which had such a dubious influence. Swinburne was fascinated by vice as a word and as a fascinating mystery, but without much attention to its real horror. One can only wonder what his “strange great sins” and sins “seventy times seven” could really mean.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the roses and raptures of vice.

Despite his attendance at trials of young men accused of immorality, when his artist friend Simeon Solomon (1845-1901) and his acquaintance Oscar Wilde went to prison he recoiled in horror. Allured by vice as a literary figment, he was shocked by its reality. Unlike the others, he was spared from discovering in rea life that evil is sordid and empty, and offers nothing. as It is famous how this outrageous rebel of his youth was in his last years nursed back into better health and into Victorian respectability in the house of the hospitable Watts-Dunton, under whose suffocating guidance he wrote patriotic, even chauvinistic, verse highly acceptable to the typical paterfamilias of his day but of little literary value. It is curious how Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), Wilde and Beardsley ended by submitting to the Catholic Church. Solomon and Wilde (though not Beardsley) had been lured into perversion and “vice”, apparently not realizing that Victorian British would not tolerate their deviations as French society tolerated those of Baudelaire or Verlaine.

Keats, who may be considered as having set all this artistic evolution into motion, died shortly before recognition burst upon him. He had said, “I am not afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” But he was among the greatest. And like Gray he had a calm view of approaching death. He said to the nightingale –

…[A] for many a time,
I have been half in love with easeful death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
With this Keats had a deep awareness of the passing of time and of the tragedies of the ages. To the Grecian urn, already survivor of millennia, he said –
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

N.B. Details and references concerning ideas treated above may be found in The Good Gorilla, Arnold Lunn, Hollis and Carter, 1944, and The Aesthetic Adventure, William Gaunt, Jonathan Cape.