“Blank Splendour”: Keats, Romantic Visuality, and Wonder

SEAN DEMPSEY “Blank Splendour”: Keats, Romantic Visuality, and Wonder . . . Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes He stared at the Pacific . . .' I N HIS 1823 ESSAY “ON LONDONERS AND COUNTRY PEOPLE,” WILLIAM Hazlitt resists “Mr. Blackwood’s” definition of “Cockney” as “a person who has happened at any time to live in London, and who is not a Tory.”2 Instead, Hazlitt pictures the Cockney as “a person who has never lived out ofLondon, and who has got all his ideas from it” (155). For Hazlitt the ba­ sis for being Cockney is not political but ethical, ifwe understand ethics to be not simply a set of doctrines but also as incorporating those everyday habits and practices that establish a “complex set of relays between moral contents, aesthetic-affective styles, and public moods.”3 According to Haz­ litt, the landscape of the Cockney’s affect is mapped onto the landmarks of daily London life, and “the true Cockney has never travelled beyond the purlieus of the Metropolis, either in the body or the spirit. Primrose-hill is the Ultima Thule of his most romantic desires; Greenwich Park stands him in stead of the Vales of Arcady” (155). Hazlitt portrays the Cockney as being “confined to one spot, and to 1. These lines are taken from the first draft of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the holograph version of which appears in facsimile in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 87. 2. William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 1:155, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. A useful discussion of Hazlitt’s essay can be found in Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melan­ choly, 1790-1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 354—56. 3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xii. SiR, 52 (Spring 2013) 85 86 SEAN DEMPSEY the present moment” (155). For him, everything is near and seen in “hasty succession.” The world turns round, and his head with it, like a roundabout at a fair, till he becomes stunned and giddy with the motion. Figures glide by, as in a camera obscura. There is a glare, a perpetual hubbub, a noise, a crowd about him; he sees and hears a vast number of things, and knows nothing. He is pert, raw, ignorant, conceited, ridiculous, shallow, contemptible. His senses keep him alive; and he knows, in­ quires, and cares for nothing farther. (155—56) The Cockney feasts upon the ocular delights offered up by the “perpetual hubbub” of a vital cosmopolitan city. Even a shopman may be “nailed all day behind the counter: but he sees hundreds and thousands of gay, welldressed people pass—an endless phantasmagoria—and enjoys their liberty and gaudy fluttering pride” (160). Another may be a mere “footman—but he rides behind beauty, through a crowd of carriages, and visits a thousand shops” (160). For Hazlitt, these vivid glimpses of the always turning social world are valuable because they facilitate man’s recognition of himself as a “public creature” (177). This is important, because in addition to defining “Cock­ ney” another aspect of Hazlitt’s effort in “On Londoners and Country People” is to rebut Wordsworth’s portrait in the preface to “The Excur­ sion” of “men in cities as so many wild beasts or evil spirits, shut up in cells of ignorance, without natural affections, and barricaded down in sensuality and selfishness” (177). Hazlitt argues that this would be true if city dwellers were really disconnected from one another but such is not actually the case. The Londoner may know fewer details about other people’s private lives, but in London “he has better opportunities of observing its larger masses and varied movements,” because the city’s streets are a “stream of human life,” and “the public amusements and places ofresort are a centre and sup­ port for social feeling” (178). For the Londoner, “a playhouse alone is a school of humanity, where all eyes are fixed...