176
LIONEL TRILLING
sights and odors, and to sexual fulfillment and sleep. The poem then
goes on to say that, as the poet grows older, he
will
write a different
kind of poetry, which is called nobler; this later kind of
poetry
is
less derived from and directed to the sensuality of youth and is more
fitted to the gravity of mature years, but it still ministers to pleasure
and must therefore be strict in its avoidance of ugly themes; it must
not deal with those distressing matters which are referred to as
"the
burrs and thorns of life";
the great end of poetry, we are told, is
"to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man."
Such doctrine from a great poet puzzles and embarrasses us. It
is, we say, the essence of Philistinism.
The conception of the nature and function of poetry which
Keats propounds is, of course, by no means unique with him-it can
be understood as a statement of the common assumptions about art
which prevailed through the Renaissance up to some point in the
nineteenth century, when they began to lose their force.
1
Especially
in the eighteenth century, art is closely associated with luxury-with
the pleasure or at least the comfort of the consumer, or with the
quite direct flattery of his ego. The very idea of Beauty seems to
imply considerations of this sort, which is perhaps why the eighteenth
century was so much drawn to the idea of the Sublime, for that word
would seem to indicate a kind of success in art which could not be
called Beauty because it lacked the smoothness and serenity (to take
two attributes from Keats's catalogue) and the immediacy of gratifi–
cation which the idea of Beauty seems to propose. But the Sublime
itself of course served the purposes of egoism- thus, that instance of
the Sublime which was called the Grand Style, as it is described
by its great English exponent in painting, Sir Joshua Reynolds, is
said to be concerned with "some instance of heroic action or heroic
suffering" and its proper effect, Reynolds explains, is to produce the
emotion which Bouchardon reported he felt when he read Homer:
1. One of the last significant exponents of the old assumptions was the young
Yeats. He was "in all things pre-Raphaelite"- a partisan, that is, not of the
early and austere pre-Raphaelite mode, but of the later sumptuous style,
tinged with a sort of mystical eroticism- and he stubbornly resisted the
realism of Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, which was being brought back
to England by the painters who had gone to study in Paris. His commitment
to the "beautiful," as against truthful ugliness, was an issue of great moment
between him and his father.
