or if the word create be too strong, to unify and idealize." This perhaps would sum up fairly well Keats's thoughts as to the creative imagination. He would have added, as he matured in intellect, that the authenticity of these creations must be governed by the extent to which the poet knows the world of men. But the creations of the imagination are none the less real because they are thus limited. No, "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not." That is, what the imagination constructs for itself as reality is truth. Note the real significance of certain phrases in the letter quoted: "Now to me manners and customs long since passed, whether among the Babylonians or the Bactrians, are as real, or even more real than those among which I now live." "Even more real," Keats says, for he ever trusted to the light of imagination more fully than to the voice of reason. And things imagined are never reasoned; they are felt. To Keats, things of the mind, creations of the imagination, were as real as to Wordsworth when he wrote: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields, like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main - why should they be Or a mere fiction of what never was? (The Recluse, 11. 799–808.) In his Sartor Resartus, Carlyle has most vigorously and succinctly expressed a similar idea: To clap on your felt, and, simply by wishing you were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap on your other felt, and, simply by wishing you were Anywhen, straightway to be Then! This were indeed the grander: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the first century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depths of that late Fire. Or thinkest thou it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blinded summonest both Past and Future, and communist with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are. Pierce through the time-element, glance into the Eternal, Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man's soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: that Time and space are not God, but creations of God; that with God as it is a universal Here, so it is an everlasting Now. And again: Was Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether it were formed within the bodily eye, or without it? In every the wisest Soul lies a whole world of internal Madness, an authentic Demon-Empire; out of which, indeed, his world of Wisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as on its dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind. Keats's belief is quite as thorough-going as Carlyle's. So far from depending upon the sensuous world about him for mental food and spiritual substance, he asserts in effect that the poet's power rests largely on a subjective basis, upon his ability to create from the materials of his own brain, his intellect operating upon things of the visible world, in close relation with ideal truth and beauty, a new spiritual reality that embraces and comprehends both the known and the unknown verities, like, yet unlike, each-ethereal substance "greater even than our Creator himself has made." Of this the world of environment need furnish but a fractional part; yet, let us remember how vital a part it is. The world we see is entirely real, and, though it is but a small portion of a much larger unseen whole, a thorough knowledge of it is necessary to an understanding of the ideal entity to whose inner workings it gives the clue. Such is the power of creative imagination, a seeing, reconciling, combining force that seizes the old, penetrates beneath its surface, disengages the truth lying slumbering there, and, building afresh, bodies forth anew a reconstructed universe in fair forms of artistic power and beauty. CHAPTER VIII WHAT IS BEAUTY? I "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. "To see things in their beauty," writes Matthew Arnold rather enigmatically of this passage, " is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it." One wishes the great critic had gone on to explain what Keats means by seeing "things in their beauty." To know that would be to hold the key to Keats's aesthetic philosophy. For it was the yearning passion for the beautiful that held the young poet steadily to his course. "I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful," he once declared to Richard Woodhouse, in a moment of warm confidence, even if my night's labours should be burnt every Morning, and no eye ever shine upon them." He looked to this passion as the infallible sign of his fellowship with the poetic genius of all time; it was to him the way to vision, power, and truth. "If I should die," he wrote to Fanny Brawne, as he lay sick shortly before his death, "I have left no immortal work behind me-nothing to make my friends proud of my memory but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd." Beauty, with Keats, was not only the open sesame to poetic life and truth, it was truth itself: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not." As we have seen in the last chapter, the method of the imagination as opposed to reasoning and the scientific approach is that of emotionalized intuitive perception. A sense of spiritual reality which the mind apprehends imaginatively, then, or immediately rather than indirectly, is Beauty; this is also Truth. When Keats refers to Beauty in this sense, so far from limiting himself to mere sensuous beauty, he is speaking of something entirely outside the realm of the sensuous, except as physical objects may be its expression; he means enduring universal truth—the Idea as it were. The view that this beauty might be not only perceived, but even created by the imagination, Keats held to the end, but with conditional modifications. He believed in it just as earnestly in March, 1819, when he declared," Beauty is truth, truth beauty," as when he asserted his faith in the powers of imagination to seize or even create beauty, in 1817, but long before that he had learned to qualify specifically that the imagination should be trained and disciplined by close contact with the world of men. He had discovered through experience the wide gap between the futile soaring of uneducated Fancy into this dream world, and the sober flights of an imagination loaded with the stored-up wisdom of life. The first ends in a vision of mawkish unreality, the second in revelations of high truth. So in later years, Keats would have said, "What the wise Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth." In other words Beauty is truth arrived at through the intuitive perception of an intellectualized imagination—an imagination weighted with experience, with thought, with judgment. With reference to a work of art, Beauty is the emotional recognition of the life-truth revealed there. Indeed, this beauty is the very essence of truth, for it is truth unclouded by such extrinsic considerations as time or place or moral relationships; it is truth subjective and emancipated; it is truth eternal, an immortal verity of the everlasting universe. I can best show what I mean by turning to the evidence Keats himself has left us as to his conception of Beauty. When the German critic Wincklemann first came into contact with Greek art his interest at once centered in form. That which attracted him most as characteristic in the work of Phidias, Praxiteles, and the rest was a harmony of propor |