Keats and his Critics

MATTHEW ARNOLD spoke of " the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good, but harm, to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable." But Sir Sidney Colvin is not one of these. His truly exhaustive biography 1 seems to have been designed partly as ballast that will for ever prevent the poet's reputation from rising unsteadily into the skies of romance. But it is not

merely exhaustive. It is written in a lively and genial fashion; it is copiously illustrated with extracts from Keats's own poems and letters and from such writings of others as throw any light on him; and it presents a picture, neither diminished nor exaggerated, both of his life and of the progress of his fame. It is not particularly original. No new material has been found which can be used to contradict the generally accepted story; and Sir Sidney Colvin's critical judgments are sound but not revolutionary. But in one important particular he has followed the traditional reading, where a different interpretation of the evidence might have lead him to give a very different cast to his tale.

He repeats, that is to say, the old fallacy that Keats was somehow peculiarly unfortunate in the criticism and recognition of his work; and while he denies that Blackwood and the Quarterly were causes of the poet's death, he ascribes to their

1 John Keats, His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame. By Sidney Colvin. (Macmillan.)

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opinion consequences that embittered his last days and would have ruined his career. He implies that Keats might reasonably have expected treatment of a very different sort. This reveals a certain tendency to forget the real world in which we live, to construct an ideal dwelling-place for his hero, and to treat as outrageous events in that conventional universe things which are the commonplaces of ordinary life. There is no particular reason why Sir Sidney Colvin should set up for Keats's generation an ideal standard of conduct which he would not apply to his own; and his apparent expectation that all reviewers should be at all times singularly discerning and singularly conscientious is really rather absurd.

Keats had, as a matter of fact, a fate which some living poets might feel disposed to envy. It is more necessary than ever, in view of this volume, to emphasise the facts that he was not yet twenty-six when he died, and that his last line was written before he was twenty-five. Yet with his first two, very immature books, he became a battle-cry and the subject of contention between hostile parties. Had he lived to-day he would have received, like Flecker, "an insolent ten-line review with a batch of nincompoops "; and such praise as was given him would have been as cautious as Leigh Hunt's was bold. The virulence of the attacks made on him was the complement of the enthusiasm with which his friends encouraged him. We are less vivid to-day in our literary passions; and the equability of mind which forbids us to see in poetry anything very provocative, whether for praise or blame, is not necessarily an advance on the era of Lockhart and Jefferies.

There is no evidence that Keats was much more

disturbed by the venom of Blackwood's than he would have been to-day if some paper had warned him in small type, with complete accuracy, that he was taking dangerous liberties with the English language. Certainly Lockhart's invective was more than ordinarily scurrilous, but it was couched in the dialect of the time. Keats himself writes: "I have no cause to complain, because I am certain anything really fine will in these days be felt." He says again that "the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice "; and Reynolds fully expresses the true significance of the whole affair when he assures his friend that men do not set their muscles and strain their sinews to break a straw." Croker and Lockhart (setting aside for a moment their political prejudice) were vaguely and unconsciously disturbed by those virtues in Keats which presaged a development of poetry strange and unfriendly to them; and they fell upon his obvious faults with relief. This, of course, is not meant to excuse the person whom Mr. Buxton Forman delighted to describe as "the noteless blot." The fact that contemporary fashion partly explains the violence of Keats's enemies ought not to prevent us from stigmatising bad criticism when we see it, or from denouncing the intellectual fault, even less pardonable than their æsthetic blindness, which led them to attack his poetry because they disliked his politics. But there is no trace of jealousy, which is the only quite unpardonable motive for severe criticism; and they may be acquitted with fair certainty of having done any positive harm to his health or to

his career.

The most illuminating contribution made by Sir Sidney Colvin to this discussion is his memory

of Andrew Lang "wondering whether in like circumstances he might not have himself committed a like offence, and with no Hyperion or St. Agnes' Eve, or Odes yet written, and only the 1817 volume and Endymion before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and scoffingly.' It is not impossible that he should have done so; and those who dare affirm of themselves the contrary must have greater faith in their own powers of discernment than the practice of criticism commonly generates. Let us own that the adverse critics attacked Keats more for his faults than for his virtues; the charge against them is that they judged by too narrow a standard and did not allow his virtues to plead sufficiently in extenuation. But the faults in his early work are admitted to-day, even by his warmest admirers, to be of a very glaring and disagreeable sort. The publication of his first book was an act of folly; the publication of a first book often is. Endymion was in some respects not ripe for print; and even Arnold wished it away from Keats's works. Keats himself condemned it in his Preface; and though, as Sir Sidney remarks, this Preface should, by its tone, have saved him from savagery, yet it is hard to reproach severely the critics who reinforced the author's own charges of mawkishness and feverishness.

I do not think that enough consideration has been given to the question whether "the noteless blot " may not have had some hand in the supreme excellence of his victim's later work. There are some poets on whom unsympathetic criticism has only a crushing or a withering effect; but I do not find it easy to reckon Keats among this number. His great sensitiveness and the weakness produced by disease at the end of his life have rather obscured

for us his courage and the resilience of his temperament. But if we admit, as I think we must, that his enemies did no real injury either to his health or his prospects, we may be content to look for what benefits they may have conferred on him by their castigation of his style. He was-let me say again-very young and, with all his sturdiness of character, both volatile and impressionable. He was beginning to be a little repelled by Hunt's personality; and he may have been disposed to assent to the strictures drawn on him by the tricks of style he had learnt from Hunt. The faults for which he was chastised were mainly faults of indiscipline; and the note of his letters during this time is his determination to discipline himself and to compose with complete artistic self-consciousness. Only a few months afterwards he wrote the first of the odes, the Psyche, and said that it was "the first and only poem with which I have taken even moderate pains"; but nearly all that he did afterwards was done with pains, and showed him freeing himself by a conscious effort from his faults of mawkishness and affectation. His third volume produced as it might well have done a real chorus of praise; and only the sudden disaster which overtook him prevented him from beginning a career of prosperity and fame at the age of twentyfive.

He was really the wonderful youth of poetry, for Chatterton and Rimbaud may be better described as miraculous boys. There is nothing in the history of literature like the youth of Keats unless it be the youth of Goethe; and it is not altogether fanciful to imagine that Keats's career, had it been prolonged, might have surpassed that of the German poet. Both were eclipsed for a time by a school of