To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?’
There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction — a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry: —
‘Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of battle.’
How much of the charm is in the valley!
There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his everyday vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November the 22nd, ‘I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon— “you a’ seen the Moon” — came down and wrote some lines.’ ‘Whenever I am separated from you,’ he continues, ‘and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric — but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:’ the whole, that is, of Endymion. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. ‘I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets — they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally — in the intensity of working out conceits:’ and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from them and from Venus and Adonis. Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Reynolds see a sample of Endymion, ‘By the Whim-King! I’ll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.’ — The stanza he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not been there indeed, to give his vote contra.
On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from Endymion to the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent: —
You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, — you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away — I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour, — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this— ‘Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit’ — and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction — for I assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole Week — and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times — thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.
Readers of Endymion will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of Endymion in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how ‘One of shape divine’ took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise: his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seem’d fair in all the World, seem’d now
Mean, or in her sum’d up, in her contain’d
And in her looks, which from that time infus’d
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her Air inspir’d
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
She disappear’d, and left me dark, I wak’d
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn’d
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable.
It was no doubt this second of Adam’s dreams that was chiefly in Keats’ mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, ‘continually running away from the subject,’ or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of ‘Sensations’ as opposed to ‘Thoughts’ he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion: what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls ‘ethereal musings.’ And now let the poet speak for himself: —
O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth — whether it existed before or not, — for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream, he awoke and found it truth: — I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning — and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is ‘a Vision in the form of Youth,’ a shadow of reality to come — and this consideration has further convinced me, — for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine, — that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam’s dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great things with small, have you never, by being surprised