BOOKS.
THE POEMS OF JOHN KEATS.*
EAGER and tomultuary lovers of poetry are apt to declare that they care only for the authentic words of the poet. Editing and a careful presentment of the poet's achieve- ment are nothing to them. Indeed, many of them will go so far as to say that they want no interfering editor to come between them and the poetic rapture that breathes from line and stanza. Yet in truth there is no poet's work, except perhaps that of Wordsworth, who edited, or rather greatly over-edited, his own poems, which is not the better for the interpretation of exact and sympathetic scholarship. We may love the " pure and unpolluted flow" of words as much as any novice, but there la an added pleasure in seeing and understanding the development and expansion of the poet's art and the converging influences which went to make up his harmonies. Again, how fascinating it is to explore and appraise the influences which the poet set going and which are with us to-day. Such looking before and after is a great intellectual delight and a great aid to • Tls Penns of John Resta. Edited by Sir Sidney Caine, 2 vol. London: Chatto and Windus. DA. wt.] understanding, and this we can only get by careful editing. All honour and all gratitude, then, to the scholar who is at pains to help us to trace upwards the river to the rill.
We have a specific example of such editing, and also an opportunity for such gratitude, in the delightful edition of the poems of Keats which has just been given to us by Sir Sidney Colvin. It may seem a small achievement to arrange a poet's work in exact chronological order, or as nearly in exact order as is now possible. Yet as a matter of fact this arrangement needs a great deal of patient work and of the higher qualities of scholarship. Often the exact year—or rather month, for in a poetic life so short as that of Keats it is apt to be a question of months—is unrecorded, and has to be determined by considerations of style or allusion, in the text which can be verified by a reference to Keata's letters or the letters of his friends. To re-read Keats in Sir Sidney Colvin'e edition, and so to follow the develop- ment of the poet's genius, is a new pleasure in literature. The bud, as so often happens, at first seemed faulty, even misshapen, bat by February, 1815, we see the beginnings of the most rapid poetic development that the world has ever known. Views may differ as to which is the filet poem that shows the authentic gold, not in mere specks, but in quantity sufficient to make men feel that "a new foot was on the earth and a new name come down from Heaven." For the present writer, at any rate, that poem is the sonnet which begins "Happy is England." To him it is all Keats in little—the romantic element, the rebirth of the English and Elizabethan renaissance, and, above all, the special metrical music which Keats made his own. The much more famous sonnet of the same month," On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," is of course a nobler poem, but it is less prophetic of the many-sided genius of Keats. From this point to the end the petals and leaves of that mystic flower of song open under our eyes with magical rapidity. Triumph follows triumph in style, in metre, and, what is above all price, we get more and more of the new touch, the individual touch, the Keats touch. "Still more labyrinthine buds the roes" The poet is" daily self 'surpassed."
Especially amazing is the metrical development. Here is Beata taking the heroic couplet, and in an instant throwing back to Marlowe, and yet to Marlowe with a difference. For the wonderful thing in Keats is that, though he was so great a borrower and so astonishingly sensitive to every passing breeze of poetry, he was always master of the material he converted to his use. He was never an imitator. He let other men's work inspire him. As the pythoness opens her soul to the inspiration of the god, so is he transported and informed. Equally wonderful was Keats'a achievement with the seven-sylls.bled and octosyllabio measures, and with those honeyed stanzas which he employed in his Odes. There neither Milton nor Gray helped him. He soared straight into the empyrean on no borrowed pinions. But to return to our main point All this miracle is made far plainer as we follow Keats year by year, month by month, in the five years which are all that Destiny allowed.
We wish that in a second edition of Keats's works Sir Sidney Colvin—for none could do it better—would annotate the poems by notes indicating what we may call the external influences, literary and aesthetic. It is interesting to note that Keats is the first of our poets who shows himself truly sensitive to the figurative arts. Milton must have seen plenty of great pictures and great statues on his Italian tour, but there is little trace of their influence on his mind, though there may be a few cryptic allusions thereto. We know that he meat have seen the Sistine Chapel and the Stance, but he lighted no torch at their fires. Pope, again, in spite of his studio work, his epistles to Kneller and to Jervas, and his constant technical allusions to painting, clearly did not feel, or at any rate could not express, the inspiration of that Art. It was the same with Wordsworth and Coleridge. They may have bad a certain intellectual admiration for great paintings and great sculpture, but that was all. With Keats it is quite different. A picture, a baa-relief, a Greek vase, or a painted missal set him ablaze almost as quickly as a great piece of literature. We make no pretensions to close scholar- ship in the case of Keats, and therefore can only supply some very crude suggestions as to the ground which we should like to see covered. It has, of course,long been known that the lyric movement in "Endymion" which begins "Over the light
blue hills" was directly inspired by Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne." Again, it is obvious that the lines,
"Magic casement opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,"
were derived either from a sight of Claude's "Enchanted Castle," now at Lockinge, or else from a view of the steel engraving. There are no doubt plenty of other examples to be found by a scholar like Sir Sidney Colvin, who is equally at home in the worlds of literature, of painting, and of sculp- ture. Probably the exact inspiration of the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is unascertainable, but we feel sure that Keats must have seen the Flaxman designs for the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedies, and that they must have left their traces on his work. It is clear, also, from "The Eve of St. Mark" how deep an impression painted missile made on Keats's mind. One would like to know whether it is possible' to find out where and when he first saw them.
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