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JOHN KEATS

(1795-1821)

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

EARLY all people who read poetry have a favoritism for Keats; he is in many respects the popular hero of English literature. He was young, and chivalrously devoted to his art; he has a mastery of expression almost unparalleled; he is neither obscure nor polemic; and he has had from the first a most fecundating influence on other minds: in Hood, in Tennyson, in Rossetti and Matthew Arnold, in Lanier and Lowell, in Yeats and Watson, one feels the breath and touch of Keats like an incantation. It is a test of the truly original genius that it shall stand in line with the past and the future of its race; that it shall be essentially filial and paternal. Newman says somewhere in his ever lucid manner: "Good is not only good, but reproductive of good; this is one of its attributes; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable, for its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself all around it. A great good will impart great good." And as he might have added, it will have derived it. Keats first woke and knew himself reading Spenser's world of faëry, where abstract harmonies wander,

"And the gloom divine is all around,

And underneath is the mossy ground."

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That was really his opening event. His outer story is soon told. Let it count as it can that Keats was of commonplace stock, born on the 31st of October, 1795, early orphaned, having a small competence wasted prematurely through the fault of others; that he had careful schooling in his boyhood, and kind friends then and famous friends after to spur him on to achieve his best, never having set foot in a university save as a passing guest; that he was apprenticed to a country surgeon, and got absorbed, little by little and with exclusive passion, in literature; that he was small in person, but muscularly made, with a head and face of alert and serious beauty; and that his behavior in all the relations of life was cheerful, disinterested, modest, honorable, kind; that his health broke,- but not because of his anxieties, of which a fevered love-affair was chief,and that he died in exile at Rome on the 23d of February, 1821, aged five-and-twenty, uncertain of the fate of his third and last book, in

which lay his whole gathered force, his brave bid for human remembrance.

Keats's early attempts were certainly over-colored. 'Endymion,' despite its soft graces and two enchanting lyric interludes, is a disquieting performance. Yet it turned out to be, as he knew, a rock under his feet whence he could make a progress, and not a quicksand which he had to abandon in order to be saved. Like Mozart's or Raphael's, his work is singularly of a piece. His ambition in his novice days was great and conscious: "I that am ever all athirst for glory!" he cries in a sonnet composed in 1817. Everything he wrote was for a while embroidered and interrupted with manifold invocations to his Muse, or melodiously irrelevant remarks concerning his own unworthiness and pious intentions. And there is nothing finer in the history of English letters than his growth, by self-criticism, from these molluscous moods into the perception and interpretation of objective beauty. His dominant qualities, bad and good, exist from the first, and all along: they seem never to have moved from their own ground. But they undergo the most lovely transformations;\ in his own Hebraic phrase, they "die into life," into the perfected splendor of the Keats we know. He embraced discipline. Knowing no Greek (it was part of Shelley's generous plan, when both were unwittingly so near the grave, to "keep Keats's body warm, and teach him Greek and Spanish "), the little London poet turned loyally to Greek ideals: the most unlikely loadstones, one would think, for his opulent and inebriate imagination. Towards these ideals, and not only towards the entrancing mythologies extern to them, he toiled. Recognizing the richness and redundance of his rebellious fancy, he therefore set before himself truth, and the calm report of it; height and largeness; severity, and poise, and restraint. The processes are perceptible alike in lyric, narrative, and sonnet, taken in the lump and chronologically; the amazing result is plain at last in the recast and unfinished Hyperion,' and in the incomparable volume of 1820, containing Lamia,' 'Isabella,' 'The Eve of Saint Agnes,' and the Odes. It is as if a dweller in the fen country should elect to build upon Jura. This may be the award of a vocation and a concentrated mind, or even the happy instinct of genius. It betokens, no less, sovereignty of another sort. "Keats had flint and iron in him," says Mr. Matthew Arnold; "he had character." Even as the gods gave him his natural life of the intellect, he matched them at their own game; for he earned his immortality.

Now, what is the outstanding extraneous feature of Keats's poetry? It is perhaps the musical and sculptural effect which he can make with words: a necromancy which he exercises with hardly a rival, even among the greatest"; and among these he justly hoped to