"Truth-Beauty" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the Elgin Marbles
Author(s): James A. Notopoulos
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1966), pp. 180-182
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3720744
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'TRUTH-BEAUTY' IN THE 'ODE ON A GRECIAN URN'
AND THE ELGIN MARBLES
The story of the Elgin Marbles contains a hitherto unnoticed
Keats's Ode. They have figured as an iconographic source of the '
the skies'. Previously, on the occasion of Benjamin Robert Haydo
of Keats to the Elgin Marbles on I or 2 March 8I 7, they inspire
marble sonnets, which contain a glowing tribute to Haydon and
reaction to the beauty of the marbles.1 That they are intimately con
'truth-beauty' aphorism has escaped the notice of the immense a
scholarship on this Ode.2 Because the 'truth-beauty' aphorism h
confined to Keats's own reflection on poetry and philosophy, as
statement it has caused trouble for many critics who fail to see a
tionship of the lines with the rest of the Ode.3 I shall show herein t
'truth-beauty', at the time of the composition of the Ode, was intim
with the Elgin Marbles. These words constituted the new aesthet
Marbles proclaimed by Haydon in his fight against Payne Knigh
priest of the Society of the Dilettanti, depreciated the marbles,
Greek but Roman copies of the time of Hadrian, and obstructed thei
Parliament.4 Finally, I call attention to the fact that in introduc
Elgin Marbles Haydon firmly imbued him with the new credo of
new aesthetics of 'truth-beauty' of the Elgin Marbles, I believe, fuse
own conception of poetry, of which we have foreshadowings in
produce an 'ut pictura, poesis' kind of poem, the best of its kind in
Before one can grasp the revolution in aesthetics produced by t
of the Marbles into England,5 he must note that the standard re
Greek art were Roman copies, such as the Apollo Belvedere, Venu
Laocoon and others brought back from Rome to English country
and Winckelmann constituted the basis for the old aesthetics.6 The b
Elgin Marbles to England dethroned old idols and humiliated P
1 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, edited by W. B. Pope (Cambridge, Mass.
The Letters of John Keats, edited by H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), I, 33.
to hereafter as Diary and Letters respectively.
2 A sampling of contemporary scholarship on Keats's poem may be seen in H
Well-Read Urn; An Introduction to Literary Method (New York, I958).
3 C. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, I947), pp. 140-1; C. M. Bow
Imagination (1949), pp. I44-8.
4 M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 1945), pp. 18
5 A. H. Smith, 'Lord Elgin and His Collection', Journal of Hellenic Studies, x
iv-vI, The Marbles in London, pp. 294-355; Clarke, pp. I9I-9.
6 The aesthetic treatment of Greek art prior to this is embodied in Winckelman
Kunst des Alterthums (1764). It was known in England through an English transla
Henry Fuseli, who was a friend of Haydon (For Fuseli's life and work see A. F
Heinrich Fiissli, Dichter und Maler, 1741-1825 (Zurich and Leipzig, I927)). The
art expressed by Winckelmann was 'The universal, dominant characteristic of G
finally, is noble simplicity and serene greatness in the pose as well as in the expression
inspired Lessing in his Laocoon. Winckelmann foreshadows Haydon in his statem
Nature which votaries of the Greeks find in their works, but still more, something
ideal beauties, brain-born images, as Proclus says' (Reflections on the painting and sculp
With instructions for the Connoisseur, and An Essay on Grace in Works of Art. Transla
original of the Abbe Winckelmann, Librarian of the Vatican... by Henry Fusseli, A. M.
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JAMES A. NOTOPOULOS
i8i
The hierophant of this new conception of Greek art, Haydon, emerged as a hero
for Keats whose lines in the sonnet to him,
How glorious this affection for the cause
Of stedfast genius, toiling gallantly!
What when a stout unbending champion awes
Envy, and Malice to their native sty?
Unnumber'd souls breathe out a still applause,
Proud to behold him in his country's eye.l
glorified Haydon's fight for the new aesthetics, to which Knight, the Royal
Academy,2 and the leading antiquarians and artists of the time were blind. Keats
paid a similar tribute to Haydon in a letter dated 3 October 1819:
I shall go on with patience in the confidence that if I ever do any thing worth remembering the Reviewers will no more be able to stumble-block me than the Academy could you.
They have the same quarrel with you that the scotch nobles had with Wallace - The fame
they have lost through you is no joke to them. Had it not been for you Fuseli would have
been not as he is major but maximus domo.3
Haydon's battle, especially his rally cry of 'truth-beauty' against Payne Knight,
left a deep impression on Keats.
This story is told both in Haydon's Autobiography and Diaries. Soon after the
arrival of the Marbles in England he received permission from Lord Elgin to make
drawings of them. From I8IO on, the diary is filled with entries4 noting the long
hours he spent drawing them; he constantly noted their 'truth to nature' and their
'ideal beauty'. He saw in them ' . . . the union of the truth of Nature with their
highest ideal beauty', a view repeated with variations.5 When the leading sculptor
of the period, the Italian Canova, visited England to see the Marbles he confirmed
Haydon's evaluation word for word.6 Canova wrote to Elgin: 'I admire in them
the truth to nature united to the choice of the finest forms.'7 Haydon was vindicated. He writes: 'Canova, the great artist of Europe, began to repeat word for
word, what I had been saying for seven years.'8 'Truth-beauty' became for Haydon
the voice of the Elgin Marbles 'to arouse the art of Europe from its slumber in the
darkness.'9 The words 'truth and beauty' introduce and conclude Haydon's
account of his duel with Payne Knight:
It was also about
against the Elgin
ready to fight to
was natural that I
this time [1815] that whispers and rumours began to spread in the art
Marbles, and very quickly reached my ears. I was up in a moment, and
the last gasp in their defence, for having studied them night and day it
should feel astonished at hearing from various quarters that their beauty,
truth, and originality were questioned by a great authority in matters of art.
Payne Knight's opinion seemed to have made but little impression on any of the members,
and from conversing with many of them I found on the contrary that they were fully alive
to their beauty and truth.10
1 The Poetical Works of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman (Oxford, I931), p. 40: Sonnet
addressed to Haydon.
2 For Haydon's attack on the Royal Academy see The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin
Robert Haydon (1926), I, I27-30.
3 Letters, II, 220. For Fuseli's obtuseness in appreciating the Elgin Marbles see Autobiography,
i, 67, 365.
4 Diary, ii, Index, s.v. 'Elgin Marbles', p. 532. 8 Autobiography, i, 226.
5 Autobiography, i, 67, 235; Diary, ii, I6, 275. 9 Autobiography, I, 67.
6 Autobiography, I, 224-6; Diary, I, 481-3, 485. 10 Autobiography, I, 205, 230.
7 Report of Select Committee on the Earl of Elgin's Collection, I816, p. xxiii. Phrases in italics, here
and in the following quotations, are mine.
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I82
The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and the Elgin Marbles
Haydon, furthermore, conceived of truth and beauty as closely interrelated. A
series of statements show him approaching Keats's aphorism:
It is the union of nature with ideal beauty ... that rank at once the Elgin Marbles above
all other works of art in the world.1
But nothing can exceed the expressions of the heads [of the Elgin Marbles], the Artists
only imagined they were leaving out what obstructed ideal beauty when it would only
have given it more truth & unity.2
I felt the future, I foretold that they would prove themselves the finest things on earth,
that they would overturn the false beau-ideal where nature was nothing, and would
establish the true beau-ideal, of which nature alone is the basis.3
Since nature for Haydon always meant 'truth to nature' and 'ideal beauty' could
only rest on 'truth to nature' we see the starting point of an aesthetics that ulti-
mately converges on Keats's aphorism.
That Keats's personal introduction to the Marbles by Haydon involved the new
credo of 'truth-beauty' and that it was accompanied by a lecture through details
in the Marbles which illustrated this quintessence of Greek art is a natural
assumption. The autobiography of Haydon reveals him to be too proud a
hierophant to have omitted this instruction.
In the light of all this evidence the 'truth-beauty' of Keats's Ode takes on a
hitherto unsuspected relation to the Elgin Marbles. For Keats and the contemporary readers of the Ode the phrase, whatever its other sources and connotations
might be,4 was associated with Haydon's new gospel of Greek art. All the evidences
of Greek art that Keats had seen, all descriptions of iconographic scenes from
Greek art that Keats had read in previous English poets now converged their rays
and were refracted through the new aesthetics of the Elgin Marbles. Without this
context Keats's aphorism, as critics have rightly pointed out, becomes a mere
metaphysical proposition, inorganic with the rest of the Ode. Keats's 'own
meditations on the nature of his art'5 need the correlative of Greek art, for it is an
'ut pictura, poisis' kind of poem. The aphorism is entangled with both.
The Ode can be an organic whole only if 'truth-beauty' is related to Greek art
and interpreted by analogy to our knowledge of classical urns, which in ancient
poetry speak to the passer-by who often, as Keats here, asks questions of the urn.6
Keats asks questions of the urn as its scenes kaleidoscopically revolve before him.
The urn replies both to the poet and to the generations to succeed him the essence
of Greek art, truth-beauty and their identity. It does not reply to his specific
questions in the previous stanzas but in an epigram aphorism, as ancient urns do
which often summarize the dead men's philosophy. All art, whether pictorial or
verbal, involves the aphorism of the Grecian urn, whose prisms of the earthly and the
permanent, truth and beauty reflect one light, eternity where truth and beauty are
one. This, and not specific answers to the poet's questions, is all that men need to know.
HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT JAMES A. NOTOPOULOS
1 Autobiography, I, 235. 2 Diary, II, 275. 3 Autobiography, i, 67.
4 For five passages from Keats's letters dealing with 'truth-beauty' see Bowra, The Romanti
Imagination, pp. 146-7; cf. N. F. Ford, The Prefigurative Imagination of Keats; A Study of the Beau
Truth Identification and its Implications (Stanford, I95I); T. L. Hood, 'Literary Materials of the
on a Grecian Urn', Trinity College Library Gazette (Hartford, Conn.), II, Dec. 1958, pp. 3-I7.
5 Bowra, p. 146.
6 Cf. Ovid, Tristia, IIn, 3, 71-7; The Oxford Book of Greek Verse, Nos. 215-22, 662, 679, 688-96.
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