That uncertain feeling
John Casey Keats and Embarrassment Christopher Ricks (Oxford University Press 0.75) Hegel thought that one great outward manifestation of the human soul was the' transparency of the human skin which allows movements of the blood to be visible throughout its entire surface. He contrasted man in this respect with the animals whose skin forms part of an opaque, concealing sheath. The capacity of the human skin to flush and blush gives us a direct glimpse not only of the movements of blood "the real fount of life made visible" but direct access also to the movements of human feeling. Our sense of what it is for human beings to be powerfully moved is enriched by their Capacity to blush. Blushing is not just a signal -as it is when a monkey reddens preparatory to attacking but an expression; and although it is involuntary it is
peculiarly telling in revealing the real character of a man's feelings and sensibility. Blushing also interested Darwin who, like Hegel, pointed out that animals cannot blush. But as Darwin saw, this is not just because animals are thick-skinned, but because blushing proceeds from the peculiarly human capacity for "selfattention," and hence from those states of mind which self-attention makes possible shame, guilt and embarrassment. Embarrassment then, and the blush which is its characteristic expression, is not just an odd extra capacity of human beings which they could just as well have done without, but is linked with those features which fundamentally distinguish man from the animals, and with man's moral nature.
Christopher Ricks entitles his book Keats and Embarrassment, and in the course of it he draws upon Darwin and upon the work of various social psychologists who have investigated embarrassment, blushing and related phenomena (such as enuresis). But this is certainly not a psychological investigation of Keats. It is a work of literary criticism and (quite unembarrassedly) of moral biography. Ricks says that his intention is to "get closer to a sense of (Keats's) special goodness as a man and as a poet." The presence of embarrassment and of the embarrassing in Keats is itself a function of Keats's sensuousness, of his capacity to surrender to an infantile, absorbed mode of experience. Ricks is triumphantly successful in showing how this sensuousness is a strength and not a weakness in Keats, and how it is linked with another sort of strength that Ricks wants to call 'moral.' He wants, in fact, to show the connection (in Leavis's words) "between Keats's sensuousness and his seriousness."
Keats never (except at his weakest moments) lapses into sensuousness. His sensuous awareness is always an awareness also of emotional possibilities and impossibilities which may be disturbing or disconcerting. Take the lines in Endymion about Niobe, all of whose children have been killed. Her "caressing tongue/Lay a lost thing upon her paly lip". The physical details of Keats's tasteless' description of Niobe express frantic and embarrassing grief. Arl the grotesque, disturbing quality of til; grtet in its abandoned physical manifestatill makes it impossible for the reader simplY sympathise with Niobe. He is aware also.01 the alien quality of her grief, that it is a grle, experienced by another, the intensity of whl.a' may embarrass and repel, as well as invIts imaginative identification. Keats's insistents upon representing the physically grotesaas here is also an insistence upon the necessalli distance between the reader and the object a his sympathy. Ricks draws a suggestive contrast between Keats and Byron in their treatment of the embarrassing. Byron always keep embarrass' ment at a distance, always insists upon a Poise that controls and even denies the possibitit) of identification with another's embarrass; ments and griefs. Or again, the famo°' description of sexual intercourse in Lucret0. (in Dryden's translation), full of physical de. tail though it is, achieves a cool, philosophiCa remoteness that is the antithesis of Keats. Fa Keats a determined and conscious absorptior in slippery blisses, Pleasure's nipple, alit blooming plums melting between infants gums is a way Of grasping emotional reali0 Keats never really 'surrenders' either to sen suousness or to the vision of sensuality. Byt°. talked with a magnificent, coarse contempt 0, Keats "always f-gg-g his Imagination" and ° his "p-ss a bed poetry." But Keats's imagn13, tive identification with a fantasy nearly al, ways reinforces his sense of reality. When 11' presents Madeline, in 'The Eve of St Agnes', hoping for "visions of delight," he suggests 0'. the same time the discipline necessary for tbe dream: She "dares not look behind, or all ths charm is fled." Ricks argues that the In°P Keats seems absorbed, in an apparently in fantile way in his vision, the greater in fact his sense of actuality. The Romanti` imagination goes to extremes of both subjec, tivity and objectivity (the blush which is botr, utterly objective, a fact of the movement 0; blood, and utterly subjective, an expression self-attention, is therefore a fit object 0' Romantic interest). But Keats holds the sob' jective in a constant relation to the object and the guarantee of his doing that is 11 intense, often embarrassing sensuousnese, The more we are invited to become absorbel, in the Keatsian vision the more is there t11` possibility of our being disturbed by thos; physical details that make us aware of 0°. distance from what is being described. Tilt, sense of objective reality is intensified as direct consequence of the power of subjectiv! imagination. This is supremely true in 'Ode 0) a Grecian Urn' where an explicit theme is power of imagination to deny a fundament feature of our experience time and chang`, The denial is taken as far as it could be (as Oil as it is in Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium') 3111 yet the total effect of the poem is to reinfor0 and affirm our sense of the transitory. Ricks is, then, attempting somethin1 extremely ambitious. He is trying to define 01 nature of Keats's magnanimity, and to sh; how it is both an imaginative and what .,08 would want to call a 'moral' achievement. is exploring the roots of Keats's 'sympathetl imagination' and showing what a comPie thing it is, how balanced between identific3'e tion and revulsion, the generous and 01e rejecting. This complexity adds up to what bir (like Leavis) sees as Keats's seriousness. drawing out this complexity Ricks showS Empson-like brilliance in trapping all relevant (and sometimes the less relevatli implications of words, of squeezing the 0.4 oozings of suggestion, of weaving Keats,; experience of life into an almost seamle',,, robe. In doing this he is always extrernec'', intelligent, frequently witty, and only casionally excessive. (His elaboration of t"n phenomenology of the Keatsian imaginatta:, sometimes suggests the, possibilities of
remorseless cataloguing that the reader is relieved that he does not quite follow up, for example, "Our mixed feelings about freckles create another Keatsian instance, but a more important one is nostrils".) Ricks is not at all embarrassed at the possibility of appearing moralistic. He insists forthrightly that Keats's poetry, though not didactic "is concerned to educate our thoughts, feelings and sympathies." The magnanimity of Keats that he delineates, although irreducibly a quality of Keats's poetic imagination, is also to be seen as manifested in his life. And Ricks's use of the letters is one of the best things in the book.
In going in this way to the roots of Keats's creative imagination Ricks has produced a highly original, beautifully written book. He wants, finally, to argue that "we can praise and value works of the imagination as we Should praise and value behaviour" — a conclusion that makes him at one with Dr Leavis (a presence which Ricks several times acknowledges). The conclusion may be unfashionable, and may not be entirely right, but Ricks has given a powerful and persuasive account and example of what it means.
John Casey is a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
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