mr. sidney colvin’s book upon keats is, in the main, a welcome exception to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. it is remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. the bulk of keats’s poetry, including “endymion,” is estimated at its true worth, which, as keats—the severest judge of his own work—knew and confessed, was not much; and the little volume (justly styled by mr. colvin “immortal”) which was published in 1820, and which does not consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the whole of the poet’s effective writing. and even in this little volume—which includes “lamia,” “isabella,” “the eve of st. agnes,” the five “odes,” and “hyperion”—mr. colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many{81} serious defects. from the comparatively worthless waste of the rest of keats’s writing, mr. colvin picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of the fragment called “the eve of st. mark,” and of that which is probably the very finest lyric in the english language, “la belle dame sans merci.”
as long as mr. colvin limits himself to the positive beauties and defects of keats’s poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. “i think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most shakespearian spirit that has lived since shakespeare.” is not the truth rather that, among real poets, keats was the most un-shakespearian poet that ever lived? true poets may be divided into two distinct classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become confused. in the first class, which contains all the greatest poets, with shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as accidents—though inevitable accidents—of its operation. the vision of such{82} poets may almost be described in the words of st. thomas aquinas, in speaking of the beatific vision. “the vision,” he writes, “is a virtue, the beatitude an accident.” such poets are truly spoken of as masculine. in the other class—in which keats stands as high as any other, if not higher—the “beatitude,” the beauty and sweetness, is the essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident. these poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as feminine (not necessarily effeminate); and they are separated from the first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly man from a truly womanly woman. the trite saying that the spirit of the great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. “the man is not without the woman;” though “the man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man.” the difference lies in that which has the lead and mastery. in keats the man had not the mastery. for him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and nothing else. but it is a fact of primary significance, both in morals and in art (a fact which is sadly lost sight of just now), that the highest{83} beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth. there is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art, which women and womanly artists never attain—an inner radiance of original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as accidental.
in his individual criticisms of keats’s poems mr. colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine character. in speaking of “isabella” he says: “its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the medi?val colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all; its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and without these no great literature can exist.” again: “in keats’s conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion{84} he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature.” and again: “in matters of poetic feeling and fancy keats and hunt had not a little in common. both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in art, books, and nature.” in these and other equally just and unquestionable criticisms of keats’s character and works, surely mr. colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was “by temperament” “the most shakespearian” of poets since shakespeare. and whether he was also such (as mr. colvin further asserts him to have been) “by power,” let the poet’s work declare. in his own lovely line—which he faithfully kept to in “lamia,” “isabella,” “the eve of st. agnes,” and the “odes”—he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. when he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better, though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a general gordon or a sir thomas more. but let keats try to assume the man—as he does in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition {85}or at satirical humour, in the “cap and bells”—and all his life and power seem to shrivel and die, like the beauty of lamia in the presence of apollonius. some of his readers may object the semblance of miltonic strength in certain passages of the fragment “hyperion”; but keats himself knew and admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the world that there was no object of merely external nature, from “roses amorous of the moon” to
the solid roar
of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,
which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.
in making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of keats and shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. the femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. it has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as{86} some of us may feel by her having headed the tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. it is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.
