A NEW STUDY OF KEATS.*

Tuotroa nothing can really justify either the "few words" with which modern fashion thinks it decorous to introduce all classical writers, or the illustrations with which it encumbers especially the poets, the latter are most tolerable when, as in the volume before us, they decorate a page here and there without paying much heed to the text, like book-plates that have broken loose from the cover and strayed into the book, and we are ready to palliate an introduction if it set us once more turning to the poems themselves. Mr. Walter Raleigh has already achieved a reputation for critical acumen, and much that he says here about Keats we should heartily endorse; moreover, he says what he has to say brightly and with humour. But we have one thing against him,—that he has not been nearly guarded enough in his insistence upon Keats's "sense of the luxurious." In the introduction to what is meant to be, and probably will be, a popular edition of the poems, there was an excellent opportunity to do for the general public what Mr. Colvin and others have done for a more literary class, and call attention to the virile strain that runs through the poet's work as through his life. For undoubtedly the general idea of Keats is still that he was a somewhat sensuous weakling, a pet of literary circles at Hampstead, the archetype and progenitor of a long line of Maudles and Postlettiwaites, whose self-consciousness and arrogance all sensible and well-bred people are glad to see held up to ridicule in their comic paper. A sensible father of a family, who goes to his bookseller's in search of a present for his poetical daughter, and takes up Keats—if he begins reading, as a sensible person should, at the beginning of the book— soon finds himself satiated by the cloying sweetness of " Endymion," with which nearly all editions piously open, just as editions of Shelley open with "Queen Mab." More- over, the one story that everybody knows about Keats, in addition to the legend of his being killed by the Quarterly, is Haydon's story of his covering his tongue and throat with cayenne pepper in order to enjoy the cool flow of claret. So that both by tradition and by experiment Keats is apt to be set down as a sensualist. And yet those who have read Mr. Colvin's delightful volume of Keats's letters know that the fact was far otherwise. They will recollect, perhaps, a humorous avowal that he was fond of claret, but they will not forget that he added, "This is the only palate-pleasure I care for." Without going into this question of personal character, it will be enough to remind ourselves that if Keats had been, either in his life or in his poetry, a sensualist, nothing would be so remarkable as the quarter from which, in these last days, his chief praises have sounded. The well-known poem com- paring him to the diver for the Tyrian murex, the shell-fish which gave the world-famed purple dye, was written by Browning, a poet rather of abstract ideas than anything sensual; the solemn judgment, "He is with Shakespeare," was pronounced by the calm and magisterial voice of Matthew Arnold ; and the most painstaking of commentaries has come from the austere pen of Mr. Robert Bridges.

• Poems by John Keats. Illustrations by Robert Mining Bell, and Introduction by Walter Raleigh. London : G. Bell and Sons. [is. 6d ]

We wish, therefore, that Mr. Raleigh had not given the weight of his professorial authority to bolster up a little longer the popular prejudice, for his theory that Keats's poetical achievement was due to preternaturally acute senses

and abnormally intense susceptibility, is nothing but a refinement upon that prejudice. A poet without fine senses and without emotional susceptibility would be a poet manqug,

if he could be a poet at all; but many people have acute senses and poignant sensibilities without being poets. Mr. Raleigh will need no reminding that the root of the matter does not lie here. It lies rather in the faculty of expressing what has been felt or perceived, so that the impression on the poet's mind may be conveyed to others. The poet's "divine faculty" is, as the name denotes, a "shaping spirit," and no one is a poet, however luxuriously emotional be his temperament, who cannot build verses that shall hand on his emotion to others. There is no doubt that" Endymion" as a whole is un-

readable; the reader is wearied by the luxuriance of page after page ; it is, as Leigh Hunt called it, "a wilderness of sweets." But this over-luxuriant result springs, not from any sensualism

in the poet—indeed, we know that " Endymion " was written not only with serious pains, but with a serious purpose—but partly from defects of style, such as a habit of over-emphatic

rhyming, and chiefly from too great abundance of beauties, each in itself justifiable. The poet's imagination is so fertile that the images throng and crowd into a jangle, and he has not yet learned to prune and select. Mr. Raleigh, however, will have it that Keats was a "lotus-eater," an idle dreamer, sitting at the receipt of sensations. In support of his position he quotes several passages from the letters, and it must be allowed that an occasional passage lends some colour to his

theory, for example the exclamation, "0 for a life of sensa- tions rather than thoughts ; " but we may remember that it is natural for a poet himself to emphasise what is given him, the inspiration beyond the will, rather than his own conscious workmanship, and we must not forget that " sensations ' when contrasted with "thoughts" do not exclude intellectual

appreciation of the objects presented to sense. Indeed, one of the passages which Mr. Raleigh quotes seems to us decisive against his theory of the merely luxurious dreamer. "A poet," writes Keats, "is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity ; he is continually in and filling some other body." On this Mr. Raleigh com- ments: "His remarks on the nature of poetic genius show the same stress laid on the receptive power." But as the context shows, the contrast Keats is making is between poetry like Wordsworth's—the poetry of thoughts—which sets forth a body of prophetical ideas ; and poetry as he himself understood it—the poetry of sensations—poetry which "lives in gusto," that is to say, appreciates and interprets the universe that lies before the senses, and, as he goes on, "has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen." Now to the conception of an Iago there goes more than "receptive power," more than "lotus-eating," or luxuriousness of sensibility. Mr. Raleigh clinches his view by the statement that Keats was indebted to sleep for his trains of images. But surely it is your old men who dream dreams, and your young men who see visions. At any rate, Keats had no need

to fall back on the suggestions of sleep. It may be well to give an extract from a letter written by Keats on his twenty-

third birthday to his brother George, because it supplies the utmost justification for Professor Raleigh's theory, and at the same time, as it seems to us, its sufficient refutation. It, is on matrimony from the point of view of a poet just turned twenty-three :— "Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation, I hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at tho end of a Journey or a Walk, though the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofa stuffed with Cygnets' down, the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should not feel—or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window-pane are my Children. The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness— an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard—then

'Tragedy with sceptred pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost Soul upon the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delioate that I am content to be alone. These things, combined with the opinion I have of the generality of women—who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar Plum than my time, form a barrier against Matrimony which I rejoice in."

When we ask ourselves what it is that we value most in the poetry of Keats, we discover that it is the power he has of conjuring up before us, sometimes by no more than a single epithet, beautiful and lifelike pictures of the world we live in, or that still more beautiful world of his own imagination.

Even in the first poem of his first volume we find traces of

this "natural magic" as in the description of- " The moon lifting her silver rim

Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim Coming into the blue with all her light."

We have all seen the sight many times with more or less

sensibility, but will passive sensibility paint a picture which, like this, shall have life and motion ? The critic knows that there is more in it. In this case he notices how skilfully the

word "coming" gives the final suddenness of the moon's appearance,—an appearance which is always sudden, however gradual has been the approach ; and he will point out that Keats uses the same combination of words in a more famous passage, with almost equal success, speaking of the summer woods, which-

" Dream all night without a stir Save for one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off As if the ebbing air had but one wave."

As examples of the potency of Keats's single epithets it will be enough to remember his "daisies on the aguish hills," which gives the very shiver of a chilly evening in April, or

the phrase, "to let fair things pass by unheeded as a threshold brook," which summons up a complete picture. The early poem already quoted from will further supply instances of the metaphorical use of Nature, such as the comparison of human life to-

" A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care Riding the springy branches of an elm,"

and so introduce the other side of the poet's faculty, the power of painting, not what he sees or has seen, but what he imagines. These imaginative pictures are as vivid as the others, and Keats seems to have regarded the power of paint- ing them as hie distinguishing mark as a poet. There will occur to every one the splendid instance in the "Ode to a Nightingale," where the picture of Ruth "in tears amid the alien corn" is succeeded by that of-

" Magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."