'A Weight, a Variousness and Richness Unavailable'

“You know my ideas about Religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject, merely for one short 10 minutes, and give you a page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack o’ Lantern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance.” 

That’s John Keats in a letter to his sometime-friend Benjamin Bailey (1791-1853) on this date, March 13, in 1818. Over the weekend, Joseph Epstein gave me a useful phrase – “faith envy.” The subject was the nature of belief and its relation to literary genius. I was responding to Epstein's latest in Commentary, “God, Literature, and Anton Chekhov,” which concludes:

 

“The very godliness that is missing from Chekhov’s writing lends to fiction an aura of mystery, a weight, a variousness and richness unavailable without it. Without the possibility of a higher power, determining fate, dispensing an ultimate justice, characters in novels and stories tend to go flat, their destinies robbed of interest. Perhaps even vastly talented people, as Isaac Bashevis Singer had it, cannot be atheists.”

 

Like Chekhov, Keats was trained as a doctor. Both died young from tuberculosis (Keats at twenty-five, Chekhov at forty-four), and neither was tormented by his failure of belief. Each could reasonably be described as agnostic, which is not a monolithic term. Rather, it’s nuanced, with meaning shifting over time. It’s safe to say it’s not Rock-of-Ages orthodoxy. In an earlier letter to Bailey dated November 22, 1817, Keats had written:

 

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination–What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth–whether it existed before or not–for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

 

Bailey was a country parson and an ungifted poet. The editor of The Letters of John Keats (Harvard University Press, 1958), Hyder Edward Rollins, describes him as “stuffy” and “pompous,” and says Bailey was “without any poetic inspiration at all.” A lasting rift would develop between the poets in 1819. Keats follows the passage quoted at the top with this:

  

“As tradesmen say everything is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a Nothing. Ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and nothings. Things real, such as existences of Sun moon and Stars—and passages of Shakspeare.—Things semireal, such as love, the Clouds etc., which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings, which are made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—which, by the by, stamp the Burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds, insomuch as they are able to ‘consecrate whate’er they look upon.’”

 

In a footnote to the italicized phrase, Rollins refers us to lines from Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: “Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon.” Shelley claimed to be an unambiguous atheist, certain of his knowledge.