Keats and the Romantic Sehnsucht

Abstract

These lines of Young's sound like a rapturously optimistic retort to Pope's disabused treatment of the selfsame dual Man as "The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!" But whether in wonder, or wry causticity, eighteenth-century thought was fully aware of the limitations of man. It does not seem to have believed that man ought to transcend them. The wisdom of the age can be heard in Pope's advice, "Presume not God to scan," an injunction, in fact, to silence the metaphysical instinct. The main purpose of man was to make life bearable and comfortable within the predicament imposed by God. The ideal was neither to be reached nor even to be known. If happiness was, to Pope and many others, "Our Being's End and Aim," it was simply the happiness of moral rectitude, social adaptation, and material well-being. It was variously described as "good," upleasure," "ease," "content." Its inferiority was acknowledged, but no higher bliss was believed to be possible. As Paul Hazard has said: "Leur bonheur était une certaine façon de se contenter du possible, sans prétendre à l'absolu; un bonbeur de médiocrite, de juste milieu, qui excluait le gain total, de peur d'une perte totale."