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was "the most Shaksperean spirit that has lived since Shakespere," as if "Shaksperean was an adjective of general connotation; and we were all bound to know what meaning he himself attaches to the word. Again, he commits himself to the following opinion :

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Poetry had always come to Keats as he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now that it came of a quality like this (the poem of Isabella), he had fairly earned the right, which his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay, those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two kinds of writing comparable."

If they are not comparable-as Isabella and the Epistle to Arbuthnot are not-why compare them? On the other hand, where the author of The Cap and Bells enters into competition with the author of The Rape of the Lock, and does what he can to merit the fame of a satirist, does Mr. Colvin really think that Keats has "fairly earned the right to look down on the fine artificers of the school of Pope"? No one whose judgment was worth taking into account would urge that the poetry of Pope could be put into the same class as the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton; but when it comes to be a question of weighing, as Mr. Colvin does, the merits of the school of Pope against those of the school of Keats, honoris causâ, there are arguments to be considered which appear to be omitted from his calculation. We ought to consider how far the respective aims of Keats and Pope were poetically right, judged by the work of standard poets; and how far each was successful in attaining the object at which he aimed. Mr. Colvin has told us what Keats' aim was, and in what way he has influenced the course of English poetry; the question is still open for consideration, whether his aim was just and his influence beneficial.

"It remains," says Mr. Colvin, "to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence been operative. First, on the subject-matter of poetry in kindling and informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and also in equal degrees the love both of classic fable and of romance. And secondly, on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of execution-a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he speaks of loading every rift of a subject

with ore.' We may define it as the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of phrase."

Now as to the subject-matter of Keats' poetry, what is it exactly that Mr. Colvin means when he says that his influence was felt chiefly "in kindling and informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake"? He can scarcely mean that Keats was the first of modern poets to awaken a love of external nature, for the author of Endymion cannot compare with Wordsworth, or even with Cowper and Thomson, in the close and accurate observation of physical phenomena. Nor is it to be supposed that Mr. Colvin meant to attribute to Keats' work anything of that realism in the representation of human nature which distinguishes the poetry of Crabbe, as it does the pictures of the Dutch painters. It is plain that the point of his criticism—and I think it is a just one-lies in the phrase, "the poetic love of nature for her own. sake." In the work of all great creative poets, two main elements are distinctly visible, one of them the subject-matter that they get from their study and observation of the external world, the other the ideal form in which their own imaginations clothe this matter, adding to it extension, elevation, and perfection, but presenting it with such propriety as to leave the impression on the minds of their audience that the ideal creation is a reflection of general experience. In the highest poetry there is always a just balance between the elements contributed from within and from without, and this is what we mean when we say that a poet is great in the representation of nature. Homer gives this ideal representation of nature. As Johnson says: "Minute inquiries into the force of words are less necessary in translating Homer than other poets, because his positions are general, and his representations natural, with very little dependence on local or temporary customs, or those changeable scenes of artificial life which, by mingling original with accidental notions, and crowding the mind with images which time effaces, produces ambiguity in diction and obscurity in books."

The representation of ideal nature is what Shakespeare gives us in his practice, as he enforces it in his theory, when he speaks of "the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." Ideal nature is shown in the creation of those genuine poets, though of a lower order, who deal with "the changeable scenes of artificial life.' Mr. Leslie Stephen-no very enthusiastic lover of Pope-commenting on the idealising method of his satire says: "Prosaic commentators are always asking who is meant by a poet, as though a poem was a

legal document. It may be interesting, for various purposes, to know who was in the writer's mind, or what fact suggested the general picture. But we have no right to look outside the poem itself, or to infer anything not within the four corners of the statement. It matters not for such purposes whether there was or was not any real person corresponding to Sir Balaam, to whom his wife said, when he was enriched by Cornish wreckers, “Live like yourself"

When lo! two puddings smoked upon one board

in place of the previous one on Sabbath day. Nor does it even matter whether Atticus means Addison, or Sappho Lady Mary; the satire is equally good, whether its objects are mere names or realities." Most true. The ideal element in poetry of this kind is limited, but it is proportioned to the subject-matter, which is itself justly selected from the external world, and accurately observed.

Modern practice is something quite different from this. The most superficial reader must be struck in reading the characteristic poetry of the present century to observe how small is the element derived from external nature, in other words, the subject-matter, compared with what is contributed by the imagination of the poet. It is a commonplace of criticism, for instance, that the various. heroes of Byron, though their action is quite intelligible, and in its way natural enough, are mere embodiments of the poet's own changing moods. Shelley's dramatis persone bear, as a rule, the most shadowy resemblance to the beings of flesh and blood whom they are supposed to represent, being in fact but phantoms of his own philosophy. In Keats the same phenomenon shows even more strikingly, because he was in a sense more of a creator than either Byron or Shelley. Setting aside Hyperion, in which the characters, such as they are, are superhuman, there are in Keats' creative poems, eight leading figures-Endymion and Cynthia, Lamia and Lycius, Isabella and Lorenzo, Madeline and Porphyro. All these different couples are represented as engaged in one sole kind of action, that is to say, they are all in love. They are all exhibited in the same kind of relation to each other, that is to say, they are pining away for love. They might all be of the same sex; the men are as effeminate as the women. Passing to subordinate figures, the two murderous brothers in Isabella are, of course, taken from Boccacio; they have a picturesque sitting in Keats' poem, but no characters beyond what is to be found in the original; while old Angela, in the Eve of St. Agnes, also admirably introduced with a view to pictorial effect, is, in point of dramatic interest, merely a pale reflection of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. We have but to recall the characters in Pope's poems, Timon, Atticus, Atossa, Chloe, Wharton, Sporus,

Sir Balaam, Cotta, Heloise, to perceive how far more varied was his conception of human nature, even within the narrow range his observation covered, than that of "the most Shakespearean poet since Shakespeare"; in the presence of the vast and various vitality of Shakespeare's own creations-Othello and Falstaff, Henry V. and Hamlet, Claudio and Macbeth, Beatrice and Imogen, Constance and Portia, Bottom and Titania, Caliban and Prospero-it certainly does seem as if Mr. Colvin had selected as inapposite a phrase as could be found to designate the true nature of Keats' genius.

Again, as to Keats' method of representing nature, it appears to me that neither the poet himself nor his latest biographer realise the fundamental difference between his genius and that of the greatest standard poets. Thus, says Mr. Colvin :—

"Acute as was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired not mainly by their own personality, but by the world of men and things outside them. He realised clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility to external impressions was apt to overpower in him not practical consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. 'As to the poetic character itself,' he writes, '(I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self-it is everything and nothing; it has no character; it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated; it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and fitting, some other body. . . If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature.

I confess that this passage, which Mr. Colvin quotes as a proof of what he calls in one place "the Protean quality of Keats' mind," and in another his "all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind," chiefly strikes me as showing both the poet's immaturity of thought and his want of insight into the real nature of his own. genius. It is true that the greatest poets sink their personality in their creations, but is there a shadow of truth in the assertion that they have "no selves" (in other words no moral sense), that, for instance, we cannot divine from the Iliad what Homer loved or loathed, or from the plays of Shakespeare, what he himself believed

or professed in matters of religion, taste, and even of politics? In poets of the highest order there is nothing of that supine and feminine impressibility which Keats supposes to be the mark of the poetic character. On the contrary all of them form the designs of their ideal representations of nature from a moral order and system existing in their own minds. Even if we do not go so far as to find, as Horace did in Homer, more moral philosophy than in the works of Chrysippus and Crantor put together, it is plain that the author of the Iliad and Odyssey was master of the full sum of social experience and knowledge in his own age. What may be inferred indirectly from Homer's work is palpably true of the Greek tragedians; it is true of Aristophanes, the Conservative partizan of Athens; true of Virgil, the mouthpiece of Imperial Roman patriotism; of Dante, the mirror of medieval thought; of Milton, who laid the foundation of his epic in the religion of his country; of Shakespeare, of whom Johnson so finely says that, from his plays "a hermit might estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of love." All these men faced Nature in a masterful spirit, making imagination the servant of religion and reason; not one of them composed in the spirit which Keats speaks of as the source of his own inspiration, and wrongly imagined to be the fount of all poetry.

What though I am not wealthy in the dower
Of spanning wisdom; though I do not know
The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow
Hither and thither all the changing thoughts

Of man: though no great minist'ring reason sorts

Out the dark mysteries of human souls

To clear conceiving; yet there ever rolls

A vast idea before me, and I glean

Thereupon my liberty; thence, too, I've seen
The end and aim of Poesy.

Nature was to Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare a mixed scene of good and evil, which was to be represented in an ideal form by the light of faith, philosophy, and common-sense; to Keats, she was a weird phantasmagoria, pouring impressions into his mind, which he afterwards reduced to an ideal form by the admirable artistic instinct which he undoubtedly possessed.

Instead of its being true that, as a poet, Keats' shows "no self" in his works, in no poetry is the personality of the writer more manifest than in his: in none does the ideal creation spring more evidently from introspection and self-consciousness. His character determined his method of composition, as his method of composition imposed a limitation on his genius. A certain morbidness of fancy-due, probably in great part, to physical causeshaunted him, which did not, indeed, like the imagination of Shelley, force him to take ideas for facts, but which, producing in him a

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