The Romantic Critics
[In the following excerpt, originally published in a different form in 1977, Parrinder compares areas of agreement and points of contention between the writings of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Keats, and the critical doctrines of Wordsworth and Coleridge.]
SHELLEY, HAZLITT AND KEATS
In his famous dictum about ‘negative capability’, Keats chooses Coleridge as his example of the non-poet irritably reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge had managed to convince himself that the poetic spirit, while deeply hostile to British empirical philosophy, could be subsumed under the higher reason of Kantian transcendentalism. Others did not agree. None the less, the theme of opposition to utilitarian doctrine is very widespread in the period, from Coleridge's Church and State to de Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley's ‘Defence of Poetry’. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry took on an urgency quite unknown in Johnson's time, for the ideological upheavals of the ‘age of revolutions’ had shaken customary beliefs about the nature and demarcations of culture. The metaphysics of Coleridge and the literary witch-hunting of the quarterlies suggest the variety of possible conservative responses to this situation. The revolution in literary values instigated by Wordsworth was, however, carried on by Keats, Shelley and their circle. Like many of their predecessors, they show signs of a deep frustration and insecurity about the position of the poet, but for them the frustration is a source of energy and a guarantee that they can only benefit from living in a revolutionary age. They respond with militant assertions of the ideals of literary culture, and with poetry fervently embodying those ideals. Shelley, in particular, is a prophet of humanism denouncing the tyranny of aristocratic government and bourgeois materialism. We have to distinguish here between the broad humanism of the romantics and the effect of their beliefs within the narrower sphere of poetry and criticism. After his death Shelley came to personify the charisma and magic of poethood for generations of Victorians who had no time for his political views. Though he failed in his revolutionary aims, the attitude of poetic absolutism which he asserted against Peacock's rational and ‘enlightened’ view of history found a much wider echo. It was symptomatic of the romantic revolt that the language of criticism became unpredictable, and its relation to rational thought problematic.
One of the ways in which romantic militancy and the breakdown of the eighteenth-century cultural consensus are reflected in language is in the redefinition of the word ‘poetry’. ‘Literature’, as we have seen, was redefined concurrently as an existing tradition or heritage of imaginative works, and this sense was established as normal. The mutations undergone by the word ‘poetry’ were more exotic and temporary. Essentially what took place was a species of linguistic imperialism, which was able to claim the sanction of Plato since a passage in the Symposium describes poetry as originally a generic term for the processes of creation and invention. Wordsworth declared that the philosophical opposite of poetry was ‘Matter of Fact, or Science’, and Coleridge stipulated that ‘All the fine arts are different species of poetry.’1 Elsewhere he suggested ‘poesy’ as the generic term and ‘poetry’ for the metrical art alone, but this distinction failed to stick. Once poetry came to denote a common quality of all the arts, a new importance was given in literary criticism to the problems of the relationship between the arts, and of the place of the poetic faculty in human nature as a whole. Hazlitt memorably tackles the former question, and Shelley the latter. The poets, in the meantime, found that the words ‘poetry’ and ‘poesy’ could be used with an easy evocativeness that was unprecedented. Hence the title ‘Sleep and Poetry’; lines like ‘Perhaps on wing of Poesy upsoar’, and ‘Framed in the silent poesy of form’; the kiss in Keats's ‘Isabella’ where Lorenzo's lips ‘poesied with hers in dewy rhyme’; and, at rock-bottom, Coleridge's grisly lines to his future daughter-in-law:
My Derwent hath found realiz'd in thee, …
The fair fulfilment of his poesy,
When his young heart first yearn'd for sympathy!
(‘To Mary Pridham’, 1827)
‘Poesy’ seems to have been the more ‘poetical’ form and rapidly became trivialised to mean fantasy, yearning or love-play. Apart from its wilder excesses, however, the extended definition of poetry implied a heightened sense of the poet's responsibility and mission. This in turn led to the romantic instability; messianic conviction alternated with failure and despondency.
Keats, for example, can sound very down to earth when it is a question of what he is actually writing: ‘I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry’, he says of Endymion. Yet a sentence earlier he writes that ‘the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering to [sic?] high above me.’2 The classic statements in his letters are meditations on what it is to be a poet (the ‘poetical Character’) rather than on poetic technique. Keats was both ambitious and fearful of becoming a poet; in his description of the poet as ‘the most unpoetical of any thing in existence’ and in the initiation scene of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ he seems alarmed by the prospect of losing his identity and submitting to an alien power. He often had to tell himself to keep his head, even if that meant renouncing poetic aspirations. ‘There is no greater Sin after the 7 deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet—… how comfortable a feel it is that such a Crime must bring its heavy Penalty?’ he wrote priggishly of Leigh Hunt.3 This is a reminder that the intensely literary pretensions to which Keats gives classic expression were almost commonplace among his fellow-writers. It was necessary to be a great poet; simply to be a poet was not enough. In an 1817 letter to Haydon, another artistic pretender, Keats announced his choice of Shakespeare as his presiding genius. Shakespeare came to seem his special good fairy in the struggle between his reverence for the literary past and his search for authentic self-expression. As a romantic literary poet, Keats felt his relation to his predecessors not as a public but as a peculiarly private relation. When he announced his rejection of the Miltonic mode of the first ‘Hyperion’ (‘Miltonic verse can not be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour’), he said bluntly that ‘I wish to give myself up to other sensations.’4
The contradiction between the poet's sense of high calling and public responsibility and the private and unique character of his struggle to develop, is surely what accounts for the difficulties the romantics experienced in handling the traditional literary genres. Wordsworth, despite the influence of Milton, created new models for the long poem in The Excursion and (far more radically) in The Prelude. But Keats and Shelley sought poetic fame in forms far closer to traditional tragedy and epic, though their real concerns lay elsewhere. Shelley's Preface to Prometheus Unbound expresses the literary alienation that is central to their work:
This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.
In traditional terms the inspiration should have produced an ode, not an epic verse drama. Prometheus Unbound strives after a consciously revolutionary, symbolic form to accommodate its author's visionary humanism. Keats's ‘Fall of Hyperion’ seems to me a more successful poem, though Keats was less aware of the problem of generic alienation and so left the poem unfinished and, surely, unfinishable. The personal inspiration which he brought to the classical fable seems exhausted by the scene with Moneta, and in telling the story of Apollo he would simply be covering the theme of poetic initiation twice over. Both poems are expressions of their authors' belief in the public and monumental status of great literature. Yet in the lyrics of Keats and Shelley, and in some of the criticism of their contemporaries, a new evaluation of the poetic art quite independent of the public, classical genres was emerging.
SHELLEY'S ‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’
Shelley's ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821) is the most outspoken of the romantic assertions of the public function of poetry. It was written, so he told Peacock, in a ‘sacred rage’ to vindicate the ‘insulted Muses’ against his friend's challenge in ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820).5 Peacock's essay is a satire on his contemporaries (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, Byron, Moore and Campbell are all named targets) written in the form of a pastiche of Enlightenment historiography. He sees poetry as a product of man's earliest civilisations and posits an iron age followed by a golden age (the classical flowering of tragedy and epic) followed by a silver age and, finally, an age of brass. There is little in his outline of cultural history that was not anticipated by the Scottish primitivists of the eighteenth century. But Peacock presents it with great verve and dash, and adds an extra turn of cynicism, as when he attributes the rise of poetry entirely to the savage's need to flatter his chieftain. His attack on the modern age is a reductio ad absurdum of arguments that had already been brought against Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth's return to nature, he asserts, is the second childhood of the art, a hopeless and puerile raking over of the past which serves as a prelude to poetry's final extinction. The backward-looking, semi-barbarous modern poet has been left stranded by the progress of the mechanical and social sciences, and has nothing to contribute to social utility: ‘The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.’ Even the pleasure that he gives is not enough to ensure his survival, since there are enough good poems already, and anything still to be produced must be worse than what already exists.
Peacock is in no doubt about who are the real revolutionaries of contemporary poetry, but he writes off their movement as a predestined failure. The shallow determinism of the position he adopts can only really be refuted by an unanswerable demonstration of the power and creativeness of the present generation. This explains Shelley's anxiety to destroy his friend's position, and the impotence of mere arguments to do so. Moreover, Peacock's espousal of utilitarian values—however much this has a merely debunking intention—challenges his antagonist to declare his own attitude to utilitarianism. Shelley, as poet and political revolutionary, mounts his defence from the left, and argues that poetry belongs in the van and not in the rearguard of social progress; hence his arguments do not ultimately conflict with a rational and enlightened utilitarian standpoint.6 What these arguments lack he tries to make up with the rapt and imperious utterance of a ‘sacred rage’.
The ‘Defence’ opens with the contrast of reason and imagination. Peacock had said that poetry, once the ‘all-in-all of intellectual progression’, had been left behind by the development of reason and science. Shelley replies that as the ‘expression of the imagination’, poetry is ‘connate with the origin of man’. Its origins are found in the pleasure we take in imitation, whether in dancing, singing or creating a language. Thus Shelley replaces Peacock's debunking historical account of poetry's genesis with an anthropological explanation grounded in the universal nature of man. If he is right, either poetry must retain its original centrality in modern society, or we have ceased to be fully men. For Peacock, such centrality belonged to ‘semi-civilized society’, whereas Shelley summons all his faith, ingenuity and power of persuasion to the task of asserting that it still persists and that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators’. He does so by adopting the extended neoplatonic definition of poetry and writing a panegyric on human creativity throughout history, giving all the credit to poets as they come highest in the hierarchy of creative spirits. The difficulties in the way of such an argument are airily disposed of. Shelley asserts, for example, that the superiority of poetry in the restricted sense over other modes of social activity is proved by the fame of the poets, which is only exceeded by that of ‘legislators and founders of religion, so long as their institutions last’. The latter, however, are artificially bolstered up by the flattery of the vulgar, and by the fame which is rightfully theirs ‘in their higher character of poets’! Very soon, in fact, the distinction between reason and imagination becomes of use only as a weapon against ‘mere reasoners’; Shelley describes Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as ‘philosophers of the very loftiest power’, and claims that poets excel all others in political, social, ethical and religious insight. Reason and imagination are certainly merged in the ‘Defence’ itself, which opens with a parade of distinctions and definitions, but ends in pages of impressionistic rant. Poets, we discover, may be not only the rulers of society but autocrats who justifiably present a watered-down version of the truth for popular consumption (‘Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour’). And Shelley himself is a super-autocrat who can award or withhold the title of poet at will (Rousseau was a poet, but Locke, Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire were ‘mere reasoners’). If we read it, as we must, as special pleading, the ‘Defence’ is unconvincing and somewhat repellent.
There is more to be said than this, since the ‘Defence’ at best—as in the section on Milton—is an eloquent affirmation of human freedom. Peacock sees poets as slaves to history, and Shelley reacts by airlifting them into the permanent world of the human spirit. The historical narrative in the ‘Defence’ is devoted to showing that poetry is immanent in history without ever being fundamentally corrupted by it. The poets unveil the essential morality of their societies, rather than having to abide by that morality as the Augustans thought. They teach love and mutual sympathy to their fellow-men, with measurable effects: ‘the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect or universal form, has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit.’ The spirit of poetry, as is evident here, can withdraw from a world unsympathetic to it, and Shelley's history of culture is a narrative of the fluctuating presence of the poetic spirit. He dismisses the usual historical and religious explanations of the Dark Ages, for example, since it was the ‘extinction of the poetical principle’ that really counted. After the eleventh century, things began to improve as the ‘poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems’ began to manifest itself. But the historical role of poetry, though something of which Shelley is proud, is not quite the essence of the art as he sees it. ‘Let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of poetry and its influence on society’: ‘betrayed’, because the primary reality of poetry is its permanence and eternality; only secondarily is it manifested in history. Thus Shelley can speak of ‘that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world’. His outlook is fundamentally idealist and anti-historical, however useful as a corrective to Peacock's vulgar brand of historicism. And his veneration of poetry as something at once above history and decisively engaged in history is evidently of a religious kind; it is no accident that he describes poets as ‘hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration’. The ‘Defence’ is, in T. E. Hulme's term, ‘spilt religion’, but it is also a bold attempt to expropriate what is worth keeping in actual religions, especially Christianity, in the name of poetry. Shelley both discredits Christian transcendentalism and borrows metaphors from it freely for his eulogistic rhapsodies. Thus he can be misread as saying that poetry is spiritual and other-worldly, whereas these are never more than the metaphors of his evangelical humanism. For all this, the ‘Defence’ must be read more as a hymn to the ideal unity of humanist values, than as any kind of poetic analysis or programme. It might have served as a rallying-call to contemporary poets, but it remained unpublished until 1840, eighteen years after his death.
HAZLITT AND KEATS
Shelley's criticism rests on the conviction that poetry and philosophy are essentially at one; the poet, in his view, is virtually omnipotent. Keats was more cautious and hesitant in assuming the prophetic stance. ‘An eagle’, he wrote, ‘is not so fine a thing as a truth.’ Keats's sense of the rival claims of poetical justice and social justice is paralleled by the frank acknowledgment of such a conflict in the criticism of William Hazlitt. Hazlitt's work is distinctly uneven, but he was an original critic, not merely an indefatigable literary politician and a populariser of stock romantic attitudes. The complexity of his response to poetry is evident from his contrast of poetic and political values in his essay on Coriolanus in The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817). It was a passage which achieved some notoriety: Gifford derided it in the Quarterly, Hazlitt hit back in his Letter to William Gifford (1819), and Keats was sufficiently moved by the reply to copy out a long extract in his journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law (February-May 1819). Hazlitt had originally argued that in portraying the conflict of leaders and led in ancient Rome, Shakespeare ‘seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question’, and ‘spared no occasion of baiting the rabble’:
What he says of them is very true: what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it. The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry: … The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle.
The antitheses are suspiciously neat but none the less effective. Hazlitt was a republican, proud of his political consistency and a merciless critic of the apostasy of Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was also an advocate of the romantic imagination in poetry. In writing of the interests of poetry as essentially opposed to democracy he was giving hostages to the enemy, but he was able to turn this weakness into a strength—partly by habitually separating literary from political criticism, and partly by the vigour of his polemics against the Lake school, who from his point of view had the worst of both worlds by adopting the ‘arbitrary side of the question’ in politics, and the levelling principle in poetry. Hazlitt's is a parliamentary mind, conscious of his allegiances and capable of switching between cross-bench negotiation and vitriolic abuse of the other side. He is prepared to concede the Tory affiliations of Coriolanus if that will aid a romantic interpretation of the play. While recognising and revering the imperiousness of the poetic imagination, he later made it clear that the imagination was not a party-political weapon, but belonged in a higher sphere: ‘When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use.’7 This suggests the essential ambiguity of his position. Though he was habitually and often pungently aware of the ideological tendencies of art, his criticism played an influential part in the nineteenth-century retreat into an aesthetic kingdom separate from everyday life.
Hazlitt attacked poets like Coleridge who meddled in politics; they lived ‘in an ideal world of their own’, and could only bring confusion into public affairs.8 He attacked Shelley, a fellow republican, for his intellectual unreliability and extremism.9 But he also attacked the utilitarians, Shelley's ‘reasoners’, for the inhumanity and self-interestedness of their abstract rationalism. His dissection of the Lake school in the lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ is done with a brilliance and perversity which puts it in a class by itself. The true motive of ‘these sweeping reformers and dictators in the republic of letters’, he asserts, is the madness of egotism:
They took the same method in their new-fangled ‘metre ballad-mongering’ scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes—of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringing society back to the savage state: so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it. A thorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropy is jealous of all excellence but his own … He tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him, with ‘the bare trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.’ He sees nothing but himself and the universe.
This surely is the sort of line that Burke, whom Hazlitt much admired, might have taken. Analysis reveals an extraordinary mixture of motives in it. Though personal animus is undoubtedly present, the attack on Wordsworth's egotism is consistent with his analysis of the ‘intellectual egotism’ of The Excursion in The Examiner four years earlier—an analysis which stands behind Keats's phrase for Wordsworth's style, the ‘egotistical sublime’. But it may be argued that the imperiousness of Wordsworth's poetic attitude is precisely what is to be expected of that ‘exaggerating and exclusive faculty’, the imagination. Though a political radical, Hazlitt seems to prefer the status quo in literature to a new initiative such as Wordsworth's. There is a brooding pessimism in his outlook, which sometimes becomes the bitter pride of the last adherent of a lost cause.
Hazlitt as a cultural critic too often seems to be writing from a position of self-defence. He distinguished between the diffusion of taste, the object of the periodical press of his own time, and its improvement—there was no principle of universal suffrage in matters of taste. As an art critic, he attacked public patronage of artists and the institution of the academy—genius would make its own way in the world, and there was no point in encouraging the second-rate—but supported the setting up of a national gallery. Public taste might be improved by ‘a collection of standing works of established reputation, and which are capable by the sanctity of their name of overawing the petulance of public opinion’.10 Late in life he became still more outspoken against the philistinism of public taste:
I would rather endure the most blind and bigotted respect for great and illustrious names, than that pitiful, grovelling humour which has no pride in intellectual excellence, and no pleasure but in decrying those who have given proofs of it, and reducing them to its own level.
(‘On Reading New Books’, 1827)
In the matter of culture, then, Hazlitt himself leant towards the ‘arbitrary side of the question’. And he was essentially a man of letters: the choice is like a confession. Political passions infused his writing (his final work was the Life of Napoleon) but they do not seem to have moved him to political action. There is a certain realism about the literary democrat who turns against the mob in these circumstances. It costs him more than other people to do so, so that the result is a heartfelt and not a supercilious response. None the less, the alternatives painted by Hazlitt are so rigid that the passage seems little more than a cry of frustration. We must conclude that for all his intelligence and mastery of the telling phrase and the cutting polemic, Hazlitt lacked the pertinacity of a genuine social thinker.
As a strictly literary critic his claims are stronger, though he is at his best in discussing two areas of writing which do not involve the conflict of poetry and philosophy at its sharpest. The first of these is realistic fiction, and the second the meditative or musical lyric. Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers contain a superb discussion of the eighteenth-century novel, which he warms to as a more human and democratic art form than poetry. Best of all is his appraisal of Hogarth (a curious inclusion, in some ways) whom he sees as the culmination of English realism. Hogarth, however, is a representative of the ‘familiar style’ in painting, falling short of the ‘grand style’ because he lacks an imaginative and ideal dimension. Hazlitt finds the same falling-short in a ‘painterly’ poet like Crabbe, and in the art of painting in general. Though an excellent art critic and a fine judge of the realistic mode, he looked upon realism as firmly subordinated to the mode of imagination.
His fullest statement of the imaginative nature of poetry comes in the essay ‘On Poetry in General’, the first of the Lectures on the English Poets (1818). Read superficially, this essay seems no more than a vague romantic rhapsody; it is an oration rather than a treatise, presenting an impassioned list of the attributes of poetry in an appropriately florid and extravagant prose. But though his method is metonymic rather than definitive, Hazlitt intended his statements to be rationally defensible (he defended them vigorously against the legalism of Gifford), and at times they are effective and precise. The ‘general notion’ of poetry with which he opens sounds Shelleyan in its expansiveness, though it actually says a good deal less than at first appears:
Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in a motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that ‘spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun,’—there is poetry, in its birth.
It is not that poetry subsists in the wave of the sea or the growth of the flower; rather, these can inspire us with a poetic ‘sense of beauty, or power, or harmony’. Hazlitt opposes poetic power to the mere representation or description of an object. Poetry is the result of internal processes of apprehension and contemplation:
It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power.
The difference from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's accounts of imagination is that they tended to stress its cognitive and visionary nature, while Hazlitt presents it as a wholly aesthetic process, appealing to a particular (and, of course, particularly desirable) kind of sensibility. His distinction between imagination and description is strongly reminiscent of Schlegel's and Schiller's contrasts of the ancient and modern spirit; Hazlitt, in their terms, is claiming poetry as an essentially modern or romantic art-form.11 He goes on to discuss the differences in aesthetic potential among the fine arts. Poetry is more imaginative than painting: ‘Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies.’ Here again is the distinction between the expression of the reflective mind and the mere pictorial representation of objects. Poetry is further enriched, however, by its possession of the quality of harmony, which is associated with the third of the fine arts, that of music. Hazlitt calls poetry the ‘music of language’:
Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;—wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it—this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also.
If this is peculiarly evocative, it is surely not because it is generally applicable to poetry, but because it is an uncanny prediction of the concentrated lyric poetry of the nineteenth century. The passage virtually provides the formula of Keats's Odes.
Modern scholars are agreed that most of Keats's theories were developed from Hazlitt, and that his poetry was in some respects a deeply theoretical endeavour, but I am not sure that all the connections have yet been made.12 In general, Hazlitt may have prompted Keats to discover how natural objects could be treated in a poetry of refined and synaesthetic, rather than directly moral or sensual, appeal; the ‘Odes’ avoid both the stolidness of Wordsworth and the cloying richness of Endymion.
There is a more precise point of connection between ‘On Poetry in General’ and Keats's ‘Odes’. It springs from a passage discussing the Elgin Marbles, which were of such consuming interest to Hazlitt, Keats and their circle:
It is for want of some such resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart … By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.
Ian Jack has written that ‘It would be curious to have the comment of Keats on this passage.’13 I would argue that in effect we have that comment: it is the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The difficulty that Keats appears to have missed the first of Hazlitt's lectures, though he became a regular attender later on in the course, may be overcome by supposing either that he read it in manuscript or book form (the Lectures were published several months before the ‘Ode’ was written), or that he knew Hazlitt's earlier and more diffuse discussion of the Marbles in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the ‘Fine Arts’ (1817). As for the difference between a vase and a sculptured frieze, this is a complication, but no more. Ian Jack identifies the heifer led to sacrifice in Stanza IV as that in the South Frieze of the Elgin Marbles. Keats's ‘Attic shape’ surely stands for the whole of Greek plastic art, as does Hazlitt's account of the ‘Greek statues’, written in the tradition of German analyses of the Hellenistic spirit.
The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is a poem about the relations between the arts, which comes directly out of the aesthetic debate of its time. Keats calls the Urn a ‘Cold Pastoral’; that is his concession to Hazlitt's viewpoint, but it is belied by the very choice of the Urn as subject for a poem. The poem reveals the nature of the Urn's ‘sympathy with us’, and yet Keats is, so to speak, cheating by weaving around the Urn the expressive harmonies of another medium. Finally the ‘silent form’ speaks:
Cold Pastoral!
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.
Hazlitt had described the forms of the Elgin Marbles as a ‘reproach to common humanity’, but the Urn is a friend to man and does not reproach. Far from rejecting our admiration, it holds it spell-bound. None the less, the Urn's message reveals its own self-sufficiency and aloofness from human considerations, since no mundane ‘philosophical’ sense can be attached to the words ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”’. We should, of course, notice the wonderful contextual subtlety with which Keats has hedged around the Urn's flat statement, which could be seen as at once a rebuke to Hazlitt's brash impatience with the Greek statues, and as a tacit confirmation of his general principle that the values of the imagination are paramount only within the ‘aesthetic’ realm. What Keats conveys is not an objet d'art speaking to us directly, but a poetic statement put in the mouth of another art and then translated back into the art of language; the statement is not didactic but oracular, a direct ‘expression of the imagination’ reported to us by an admirer rather than authored by Keats himself.
Keats's poem expresses the full allure of aestheticism, without quite taking the leap into vulgar commitment. Similarly, Hazlitt's essay steeps itself in the literary emotions and in less sensitive hands than Keats's could be made into a thoroughgoing aesthete's charter. The essay can offer some general guidelines to the other Odes, directing us to their more symbolistic features. The idea of poetry as the ‘music of language’ is present in the third stanza of ‘To Autumn’, where the first two lines invite us to number the poem itself among the songs of autumn:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
The list of autumnal sounds that follows is introduced by two lines of landscape-painting describing the sunset; once again, the three art-forms are fused. In the ‘Ode to Psyche’, the poet offers himself as choir, priest and builder of a temple for the goddess of his choice. Psyche is forgotten and unworshipped, the ‘latest born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy’. The poet, and he alone, can commemorate her and restore the ‘faded hierarchy’; but the music, painting and architecture of the temple subsist in ‘some untrodden region of my mind’, so that this revival, so typical of the solipsistic use of classical motifs by the romantic poets, can be an imaginative achievement only. The ‘Nightingale’ Ode is, again, a poetic brooding and dwelling upon its subject, weaving together visual beauty, musical harmony and the ‘magic casements’ of literary tradition in its striving for the maximum intensity. These are all intensely literary poems, not in the simple name-dropping sense (though literary names are dropped throughout Keats's minor verse), but in their presentation of nearly all experience in terms evocative of literature and the other arts. This process of aesthetic mediation involves a new poetic diction which deliberately transmutes life into art, sensation into dream and message into oracle. Hazlitt's view of the opposition between imagination and social concern helps to illuminate the secular other-worldliness of Keats's poetry, his fascination with the Immortals and with a supremely sensual initiation into mysteries that transcend the world of the ordinary senses. In a few great poems, Keats was able to choose the ground on which to reconcile the warring poles of critical dialectic. In life, however, he, like Hazlitt, remained struggling irresolutely between poetry and philosophy.
HAZLITT AND DE QUINCEY
Hazlitt's influence on Keats was the last and most fortuitous of the interactions between criticism and original creation which so profoundly mark the romantic period. The points of similarity between them initiate the line of development from romanticism to aestheticism, which emerged as a conscious movement in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Keats was undoubtedly able to overlook the journalistic flaccidity and the amount of borrowed finery that creep into Hazlitt's writing. For Hazlitt's critical personality is evidently that of the bookman rather than of the more refined and fastidious aesthete. He may have been the first to describe critics as ‘middlemen’, and he plays at least four roles with varying success in his criticism—those of polemical reviewer, aesthetician, literary connoisseur and public educator. His literary surveys are probably most read today, although they were composed in a great hurry to meet a public demand. The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays and all three lecture-courses came out between 1817 and 1820. These lectures contain some splendid passages, but they also tend to lapse into the superficiality of literary history without tears.
In his comments on the task of criticism, Hazlitt invariably speaks for the impressionistic method of the connoisseurs and bookmen whose ethos was sketched at the beginning of this chapter. He believed that the appreciation of poetry was a matter of ‘instantaneous sympathy’, and that the literary imagination delighted in ‘power, in strong excitement’ at the expense of humanity and principle.14 The critic's task was to express the joys of poetic excitement and passion, when taken under licence and in moderate draughts. Hazlitt deplored Johnson's incapacity for ‘following the flights of a truly poetic imagination’,15 and attacked the analytic methods of Dryden and the French:
A genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work: here we have nothing but its superficial plan and elevation, as if a poem were a piece of formal architecture … That is, we are left quite in the dark as to the feelings of pleasure or pain to be derived from the genius of the performance or the manner in which it appeals to the imagination.16
It is only one step further to the Pavlovian responses of Lamb, when confronted by a passage from The Revenger's Tragedy: ‘I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot flush spread my cheeks.’17 This is a translation of the ecstatic response of the romantic poet to literary experience into the domestic language of bookish sensibility. Hazlitt usually works on a more intellectual or comparative level than this; he praises writers for their ‘poeticality’, their ‘gusto’. He describes his aim in his lectures as being to ‘read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor to puzzle myself with pedantic rules.’18 This combines Lamb's desire to make his private experience public (his remark on The Revenger's Tragedy is the kind of intimate confidence that carries no risk) with a lightly pedagogic concern. A great deal of nineteenth-century criticism exists somewhere between these two alternatives, and Hazlitt's own work is weaker and more patchy where—as in The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, which were not delivered as lectures—the pedagogic motive is lacking.
A different blend of cognitive and affective elements is found in his collection of ‘Contemporary Portraits’, The Spirit of the Age (1825). These essays combine vivid portraiture with an intellectual apparatus of concepts—such as mechanism and impulse, method and imagination, authority and democracy—which serve to relate the individual sitter to the Zeitgeist or ‘Spirit of the Age’. At his best, on Bentham, Malthus, Jeffrey or Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt clearly anticipates the cultural criticism of Carlyle and Mill. But he never gets down to a precise exposition of the ‘Spirit of the Age’, or straightforwardly declares his own attitude to it. He is very much the reporter, hedging his bets. Wordsworth's levelling genius is a ‘pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’, but then so is the Edinburgh Review. Hazlitt may be dissociating himself from both, but just where he stands is uncertain—why, except as his patron, should Jeffrey be so much more favourably treated than Wordsworth? The volume was published anonymously, and it may be that Hazlitt took pleasure in intriguing his readers while exploiting the idea of the Zeitgeist for all it was worth. Where his own preferences do emerge, they suggest an impulse towards literary escapism. The carriers of the Zeitgeist such as Wordsworth and Jeffrey are portents to be wondered at, but they cannot exactly be liked; and old enemies such as Coleridge and Gifford are treated as harshly as ever. The tart edge to Hazlitt's commentary on his times is only forgotten in his final essay on Charles Lamb and Washington Irving (‘Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon’). He affectionately portrays Lamb as an antiquarian who prefers ‘byeways to highways’, a poetic soul who is untainted by the ‘Spirit of the Age’ and stands aloof from its animosities. Hazlitt, too, seems to be hinting that life is best when one can take flight on the wings of imagination. His gallery of ‘contemporary portraits’ ends with two sentences (they refer to the dramatist Sheridan Knowles, another friend of Hazlitt's) which conjure us out of the contemporary world altogether:
We have known him almost from a child, and we must say he appears to us the same boy-poet that he ever was. He has been cradled in song, and rocked in it as in a dream, forgetful of himself and of the world!
Long disappointed in his political hopes, and embittered by a series of desertions from the republican cause, Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age seems emotionally incapable of feeling at home in the contemporary world. Intellectually he responds to it; but finally he can only gesture towards a resting-place in the cult of childhood and literary reverie. Once again he was putting his weight behind that withdrawal of the poetic sensibility from social concerns which constitutes romantic decadence.
As a contrast to Hazlitt's escapism, we may look finally at Thomas de Quincey—famous for his opium reveries, and yet a very practical and socially committed literary critic. De Quincey's most famous essay, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1823), seems at first to be an ordinary product of bookish impressionism. ‘From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth’; this is how it opens. But what follows is not an exercise in buttonholing intimacy, but a meditation of Wordsworthian discipline and austerity. De Quincey goes on to outline the solution of a critical problem that has puzzled him for twenty years. He shows how the knocking at the gate intensifies our sympathy with the complex feelings of the murderers, and distracts us from simple horror at their crime. This is a superb empirical demonstration of the ‘manner in which it appeals to the imagination’—the kind of criticism which Hazlitt recommends, but can never achieve with such force. Nearly two decades later, when Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb were dead, de Quincey reemerged as a critic of far broader literary and cultural interests. His Reminiscences of the Lake Poets, his remarks on the poetic diction controversy and his distinction of knowledge and power show him as the critical heir of Wordsworth and Coleridge, reinterpreting in rational terms the prophetic insights of romantic poetry. In an essay on ‘Goldsmith’ (1848), de Quincey reasserted the international character of great literature and its embodiment of a kind of power which is a challenge and an alternative to the social power wielded by the state. Literature, he argued, was a force tending towards international brotherhood and cultural unity, and this was why poets were so often slighted in their own homeland. This idea owes much to Wordsworth, and clearly anticipates Arnold; it represents a critical approach in complete contrast to Hazlitt's disillusionment and solacing aestheticism. Thus de Quincey, unlike Hazlitt, proved able to respond to the new energy of social thought and the revival of liberal hopes in the 1820s and 1830s, so that his final incarnation was as a minor Victorian sage and not as a romantic critic. The mixture of public educator and private daydreamer in both Hazlitt and de Quincey sums up the essence of the nineteenth-century literary culture which their generation had done so much to create.
Notes
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Coleridge, Miscellanies, Aesthetic and Literary, ed. T. Ashe (London, 1892), p. 6.
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The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1935), p. 52.
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Ibid., p. 31.
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Ibid., p. 384.
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Quoted in Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Browning's Essay on Shelley, ed. H. F. Brett-Smith (Oxford, 1921), p. xiii.
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See J. Bronowski, The Poet's Defence (Cambridge, 1939), p. 82, for an interesting examination of this point.
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Hazlitt, A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. in Complete Works, IX, p. 50.
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Hazlitt, Complete Works, XVI, p. 137.
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Ibid., p. 268.
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Ibid., XVIII, p. 101.
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For Hazlitt's derivation of this idea, see his essay ‘Schlegel on the Drama’, Complete Works, XVI, pp. 62-4.
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On Keats and Hazlitt, see Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford, 1967); Stephen A. Larrabee, English Poets and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943), pp. 223ff.; and Kenneth Muir, ‘Keats and Hazlitt’, in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Muir (Liverpool, 1958), pp. 139ff.
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Jack, Keats, p. 72.
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Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, in Lectures on the English Poets.
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Hazlitt, Complete Works, VI, p. 49.
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Hazlitt, ‘On Criticism’ in Complete Works, VIII, p. 217.
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Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (London, n.d.), p. 158n.
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Hazlitt, Complete Works, VI, p. 301.
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