21 JULY 1894, Page 10

KEATS.

DROFESSOR PALGRAVE in his address on Keats, hat Monday, when the bust given to us by the American admirers of Keats was unveiled at Hampstead, ventured to call the figure of Keats one of the most loveable in English literature. Perhaps he may be right, though we should hardly think the greater poets, at least as presented in their poetry, the most loveable fissures in our literature, for they are apt to be more or leas hidden behind the rich and luxuriant flowers of their own fancy, and to look out upon us through a screen which conceals the play of their features, For our own parts we should have chosen those quite minor poets, Goldsmith and Hood and Hartley Coleridge, for the most loveable figures in English literature as judged by their poetry alone, for it is not the greatest and most separate powers which most excite the readers' personal affection. For loveable- ness we need the touching simplicity, the quaint vivacity, the humour, the sense of dependence, the childlikeness, which the greater poets do not often display. Keats, especially, died too early to admit of our fully disentangling his personality from that wealth of fancy, that radiant, joyous, and even florid beauty in. which he is concealed from us as some tropical trees are concealed by the glory of the creepers which hang from every bough. But we can quite under- stand the sort of rapture of admiration with which the New England literary class must regard this most tropical form of English poetical genius, for the New England literature has an air of simplicity and severity very remarkable in a people with so vigorous and buoyant a life,—the simplicity and severity which has grown no doubt from. their Puritan origin, and the severe conditions of their soil and climate. Keats must seem to them a sort of miracle of luxuriant life, and in their rapture at this marvel of colour, this wilderness of beauty, they have felt as- tounded at our apparent apathy towards such a wonder of youth and loveliness. And apathy no doubt it has been, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, all these have been as heartily admired by Englishmen as any poets can be by a race who are not in their hearts poetical, though when they do produce a poet, he is apt to be a poet of no mean genius. But Keats died too early and had hardly shown sufficiently the lines of his manhood through the brilliance of his redundant gifts, to capture fully the solid, sober, and easily bewildered English imagination. Englishmen have been dazzled by Keats, but they have hardly loved him. He is, like Spenser, rather the poet of poets, than the poet of " the dim common populations," who need either. some visible grandeur of form, or some abundance of humour and pathos to overcome their difficulty in entering into so elaborate and complicated a world of teeming fancy. No doubt Keats, if he had lived, would have attained to this grandeur of form ; the character of the man would have matured and presented an outline vigorous enough to carry off all this dazzling wealth of flowers and foliage. We are fully disposed to think with Mr, Gosse that Keats might have become a poet not less great, and probably even more various and dramatic, than Milton, if not even of the Shakespearian type. But for this there was not time. He only lived to the age at which fancy reaches its maturity,—the age at which the full strength and texture of the imagination have hardly been tested. And therefore it is our poets chiefly who hang on Keats. No English poet more completely captures the fancy of poets. The wealth and mystery in hie brilliant and elaborate workmanship is to them a glory and a wonder. But

" the toiling millions of men, sunk in labour and pain," need more distinctness and character in any poet who is to conquer them. Keats has fascinated the literary class completely by the splendour of his plumage. But his redundant beauties have been too overwhelming for those who want to see the significance and attitude of the poet's mind, more than they want to see the brightness and the rapture of the poet's dreams. Keats had hardly passed the dreaming age when he died. The nightingale, the Grecian urn, Psyche, these were the kind of subjects which inspired Keats's greatest poems, and these are not the subjects which can dominate the hearts of "the toiling millions of men sunk in labour and pain." Of Keats, much more truly than of a sublimer poet, Wordsworth, might it have been said that " he was a priest to all time of the wonder and bloom of the world," for Keats did not get beyond its wonder and bloom, while Wordsworth did,—he got to its heart and mind. Poets will dream of nightingales, of Greek sculpture, of the soul into which love pours Ms rap- ture, as long as the world lasts, but ordinary men want more in the poet that transcends all these rare and sweet

emotions, and pierces through them to the sources of strength, and faith, and truth. Keats was almost a boy, at all events was an immortal youth, not yet mature, when he was snatched away ; he had hardly lifted "the painted veil which those who

live call life." He loved to dream of death as something intenser than life :—

" Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, But Death intenser, Death is life's high meed," he said, and doubtless he has found it so ; but he found it so too soon for the fame he would most have valued,—the fame which lives in the heart of the people, and which gives new spring and life to the multitudes who have lifted " the painted veil" of which Shelley spoke, before they passed

behind it. Keats lived through the age of fancy, but he did not live into that of faith. The best summary of what he did as a poet is contained in his own ode to the nightingale:—

" Thou west not born for death, immortal Bird,

No hungry generations tread thee down The voice I hear this passing night, was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes bath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery land forlorn."

These "magic easements " Keats has opened for us, and in time to come will open again to thousands of lovers of his poetry, and open far wider than the voice of the most musical of nightingales could open them. But it is not the opening of " magic casements "for which the " dim common populations"

hunger most. They need the vision of spiritual help which Keats died too early to obtain, and therefore be will never be the poet of the multitude, will never speak as much to the hungry heart of these multitudes as even Shelley spoke, much less Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Matthew Arnold. Yet no poet has ever possessed so powerful a talisman to unseal the secrets of beauty in form, tint, atmosphere, and rich associations, as Keats, and therefore to the end of time he will seem one of the greatest of those magicians who fill the eye with the rainbow colours of their fancy, and refresh the mind with the radiance of their dreams.