FATE OF PLEASURE
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ness of its concern with luxury. The word itself had a charm for
Keats, and in his use of it he seems on the point of reviving its
Middle English meaning, which is specifically erotic and nothing
but erotic; for Chaucer,
luxures
were lusts and
luxurie
was licen–
tiousness. Women present themselves to Keats's imagination as
luxuries:
«All that soft luxury/that nestled in his arms."
A poem
is
described as
«a posy/Of luxuries, bright, milky, soft and rosy."
Poetry
itself is defined by reference to objects of luxury, and even in its
highest nobility, its function is said to be that of comforting and
soothing.
Nor is the vulgarity- if we consent to call it that- confined to
the early works; we find it in an extreme form in a poem of Keats's
maturity. The lover in
Lamia
is generally taken to be an innocent
youth, yet the most corrupt young man of Balzac's scenes of Parisian
life would scarcely have spoken to his mistress or
his
fiancee as
Lycius speaks to Lamia when he insists that she display her beauty
in public for the enhancement of his prestige. Tocqueville said that
envy was the characteristic emotion of plutocratic democracy, and
it is envy of a particularly ugly kind that Lycius wishes to excite.
«Let my foes choke:'
he says,
«and my friends shout afar,/While
through the thronged streets your bridal car/Wheels round its dazzling
spokes."
I am not sure that we should be at pains to insist that
this
is wholly a dramatic utterance and not a personal one, that we ought
entirely to dissociate Keats from Lycius. I am inclined to think that
we should suppose Keats to have been involved in all aspects of the
principle of pleasure, even the ones that are vulgar and ugly. Other–
wise we miss the full complication of that dialectic of pleasure which
is the characteristic intellectual activity of Keats's poetry.
The movement of this dialectic is indicated in two lines from an
early poem in which Keats speaks of
«the pillowy silkiness that rests/
Full in the speculation of the stars"-it
is the movement from the
sensual to the transcendant, from pleasure to knowledge, and know–
ledge of an ultimate kind. Keats's intellect was brought into fullest
play when the intensity of his affirmation of pleasure was met by the
intensity of his skepticism about pleasure. The principle of pleasure
is
for Keats, as it is for Wordsworth, the principle of reality-by it, as
Wordsworth said, we
know.
But for Keats
it
is also the principle of