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did the dignity which luxury was meant to imply. The connection
between dignity and a luxurious style of life was at first not self–
evident-in France in 1670 the very phrase
«bourgeois gentilhomme"
was thought to be comical. In the English translation of the title of
Moliere's comedy,
The Cit Turned Gentleman,
it was funny too, but
the English laugh was neither so loud nor so long as the French.
Tocqueville believed that it was the relatively easy growth of the
English class of gentlemen, that is to say, the acceptance of the idea
that the outward signs of status eventually conferred real status,
which made an event like the Revolution of France unnecessary in
England. Yet in France as in England, the downward spread of the
idea of dignity, until it eventually became an idea that might
be
applied to man in general, was advanced by the increasing possibility
of possessing the means or signs of pleasure. That idea,
it
need
scarcely be said, established itself at the very heart of the radical
thought of the eighteenth century. And Diderot himself, the most
uncompromising of materialists, as he was the most subtle and delicate,
could not have wanted a more categorical statement of his own moral
and intellectual theory than Wordsworth's assertion that the grand
elementary principle of pleasure constitutes the native and naked
dignity of man, and that it is by this principle that man knows, and
lives, and breathes, and moves.
Nothing so much connects Keats with Wordsworth as the extent
of his conscious commitment to the principle of pleasure. But of course
nothing so much separates Keats from his great master as his
characteristic way of exemplifying the principle. In the degree that
for Wordsworth pleasure is abstract and austere, for Keats it is
explicit and voluptuous. No poet ever gave so much credence to
the idea of pleasure in the sense of "indulgence of the appetites, sensual
gratification," as Keats did, and the phenomenon that Sombart
describes, the complex of pleasure-sensuality-luxury, makes the very
fabric of his thought.
Keats's preoccupation with the creature-pleasures, as it manifests
itself in his early work, is commonly regarded, even by some of his
warmest admirers, with an amused disdain. At best it seems to derive
from the kind of elegant miniscule imagination that used to design
the charming erotic scenes for the lids of enamelled sweetmeat and
snuff boxes. At worst it seems to be downright vulgar in the explicit-
