THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
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holds his place in our imagination is that in him the sense of evil
and the sense of self are in so delicate and continuous a reciprocation.
And the ground of Keats's greatness, I have come to feel, is that
Keats, perhaps uniquely in the last hundred years, maintained a
precarious reciprocation of self and evil similar to Shakespeare's. He
did this in a more conscious way than Shakespeare found necessary,
and called to his aid in the affirmation of self against the knowledge
of evil his intense imagination of pleasure-{)f pleasure of all kinds,
the simplest and most primitive, such as eating and drinking, as well
as the highest-and he boldly put pleasure, even contentment, at the
center of his theory of poetry, and spoke of poetry telling heart–
easing things. It is just for this reason that some readers denigrate
him;
they quite miss the intensity of his sense of reality, for where
they make a duality of the principle of pleasure and the principle of
reality, Keats made a unity- for him pleasure was a reality; it was,
as Wordsworth had taught him, the grand principle of life, of mind,
and of self. And it was this commitment to pleasure that made it
possible for him to write the greatest c-xposition of the meaning of
tragedy in our literature.
When we are so eager to say how wrong Howells was to invite
the novelist to deal with the smiling aspects of life, we have to ask
ourselves whether our quick antagonism to this mild recognition of
pleasure does not imply an impatience with the self, a degree of
yielding to what Miss Arendt calls the irresistible temptation of dis–
integration, of identification by submission to the grandeur of his-–
torical necessity which is so much more powerful than the self. It is
possible that our easily expressed contempt for the smiling aspects and
our covert impulse to yield to the historical process are a way of
acquiring
charisma.
It is that peculiar
charisma
which has always
been inherent in death. It was neither a genteel novelist nor a
romantic poet who most recently defended the necessity of the
smiling aspects and the heart-easing things-Dr. Bruno Bettelheim
was first known in this country for
his
study, made at first hand, of
the psychology of the inmates of the German concentration camps.
Dr. Bettelheim recently found occasion to remark that "a fight for
the very survival of civilized mankind is actually a fight to restore
man to a sensitivity toward the joys of life. Only in this way can man
be liberated and the survival of civilized mankind be assured. Maybe
