Art. 9.-KEATS AND SIR SIDNEY COLVIN.
John Keats. His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics

and After-Fame. By Sidney Colvin. Macmillan, 1917. It might seem strange, at first sight, that Sir Sidney Colvin should have chosen as the chief subjects of his work on English literature, two men so unlike as the greatest of our romantic and the most obstinate and exclusive of our classical writers. Keats was a far greater man than Landor; but 'La Belle Dame' itself might almost as easily have been written by Landor as Æsop and Rhodope' by Keats. The difference in kind between the two men is as obvious as the difference in rank. The one wrote in the classical manner, at once by instinct, by principle, and by the life-long habit of scholarship. The other, both by nature and by training, lacked the classical instinct for clarity and selection and possessed in abundance the prodigality of phrase and susceptibility of imagination which are the characteristics of the romantic. Yet it is these two poets, apparently as unlike in genius as they were in fate, who have divided between them the chief part of the leisure which Sir Sidney Colvin has been able to give to literature.

Perhaps, after all, there is a link between them which transcends all differences. Sir Sidney Colvin has given even more of his life's work to art than to letters. May not the key to his devotion at once to Landor and to Keats be looked for in this direction? Have we had any two writers who were more conscious than these two that literature is a fine art whose productions are their own end? Milton was, of course, an incomparably greater artist than either; but he thought of himself not as an artist but as a prophet. Pope and Tennyson certainly, in their different ways, were extremely well aware that poetry is an art; but each aimed at producing effects on their readers other than, or additional to, those sought by the pure artist. There is no harm in that; and Tennyson is, of course, an artist of the very first rank. But, though his faults of taste and execution are so few, and those of Keats so many, yet he has not the temperament of an artist as Keats had it. Still less had Keats's contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley. An artist's primary instinct is the love of beautiful things and the

desire himself to create them. That instinct was in Keats as it is in few men from the very first; and it was no mere love of an abstract idea of beauty. The arts which, outside their own, most interested both Keats and Landor were those of painting and sculpture, which deal with the visible forms of things, not that other ethereal art of music which seemed the greatest of all to Plato, and I have no doubt to Shelley, just because it does not deal directly with objects of sense at all. The real subjects of Shelley's poetry (as sometimes of Wordsworth's) were ideas, abstractions, the invisible things and persons into which he constantly escaped from the actual men and women, the actual England and Italy, of his unsatisfied experience. Keats, on the other hand, instead of escaping from objects to ideas, habitually turned ideas into objective visions. Shelley's art, in fact, was always in danger from his speculative tendencies. Keats saw thought always clothed in form. His poetry is as strongly allied to painting and sculpture-especially painting-as Shelley's is to music, though he never turned alliance into absorption or confusion as Shelley sometimes did. So with Landor. The best of his work is marked by the strength and beauty, and the restraint of pure form, which are the peculiar notes of great sculpture. Like Keats, he must have visible form; he has no Shelleyan desire to escape into the invisible and immaterial. Sir Sidney Colvin has himself well said of him: He had little interest in any ideas but those which could be perfectly grasped and exhibited in precise lineaments like the shapes of antique gods.'

There, then, is the probable link which unites Sir Sidney's double and at first sight dissimilar service. In his private work, as in his official, to say nothing of his happiest friendships, he has loved painting and sculpture and artistry, and served those who shared his love. That service he is continuing in the midst of the present world-cataclysm, in which, as he says in his Preface, age debars him from rendering any effectual war-service. He need have no regrets or scruples. The intellectual life of the country is of necessity sadly impoverished by the imperious demands of the war to which none responded with more instant ardour than those who most loved art and letters. Whether that response was

unconscious instinct, or the fruit of the high lessons learnt in the finest of human schools, or the result of a conviction that for art and letters the very breath of life is liberty, it was freely made, and a proud but heavy price has been paid for it. In a country so indifferent to the things of the mind that the first public buildings it diverts from their ordinary business are the museums of science and art, a veteran of letters can assuredly do no better service in time of war than in helping to keep those things alive. Certainly there will be many fighters at the front and many toilers at desks and in workshops at home who will be grateful to Sir Sidney Colvin for this masterly and authoritative Life of Keats.

Keats is an immortal; and, just for that reason, each new generation will be hungry to hear his voice. But it will not be quite the self-same voice that each hears, any more than Virgil's generation or Dante's could hear the mellowed and ripened sound, rich in a hundred associations, which we hear now. So Sir Sidney's critical study, admirable and delightful as it is, and conclusive for this generation at least, may need to be done again in time to come. But the biography which he has given us is in all likelihood the final one. It is not with Keats as it was with Shakespeare or Milton, the facts of whose lives were left, in large part, to be discovered centuries after their deaths. There is no probability in Keats's case that any new facts of importance remain to be discovered; and with the old it will probably turn out that Sir Sidney has dealt once and for all in this book. In industry and learning, in fine critical perception, sympathy and judgment, in lucidity and distinction of writing, there are in our language very few literary biographies comparable to it. It cannot, of course, pretend to any rivalry with books quickened by the force of personal intimacy. Sir Sidney has only known two persons who ever spoke to Keats. Nor can his book lay claim to the qualities of the best of those masterly studies which are called Johnson's 'Lives.' But among books of its own orderfull-dress biographies critical and personal, written in possession of all the material and long after the eventit would be difficult to find its rival.

There is not enough material for a real Life in the case of Shakespeare. Masson made his Life of Milton'

an encyclopædia rather than a biography. Pope, amazing as his gifts were, was a very inferior subject to Keats; and, while Sir Sidney Colvin worships Keats (though on this side idolatry), Elwin's feeling for Pope became, as he proceeded in his task, more and more one of dislike and contempt. The latest and best Life of Wordsworth is seriously injured by bad writing and political pamphleteering. Dowden's Shelley suffers from moral special pleading. There is no good Life of Arnold or Browning; and the Life of Tennyson, admirable and invaluable as it is as a source of information, is the work of a son and makes no claim to critical independence. Mr Gosse's Swinburne has also the immense advantage of being written out of personal knowledge; but, after all, Swinburne cannot, any more than Arnold or Browning, claim to rival Keats in interest either as a poet or as a man. On the whole, it is difficult to see which of our greater poets has been so fortunate as Keats in this kind of posthumous friendship.

·

་

Sir Sidney states in his Preface that he has had two aims before him, that of holding the interest of the general reader,' and that of satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special student.' He has achieved both. The reader of general intelligence, so much more important than any kind of specialist, will find it hard to put the book down, and, when he does, will have learnt a good deal that is worth learning and felt a good deal that is worth feeling. Keats in one way and Shelley in another have perhaps been the most loved, as distinct from enjoyed or admired, of our poets; and Keats even more than Shelley, as being so much more human and so much better known. Shelley was a spirit, and never could be on a perfectly natural footing of truth and daylight with men and women who generally appeared to him either as angels or devils. He was almost as remote from those about him as a saint from his worshippers. Only, happily for us, there was among them one sincere but very profane disciple to whom we owe the amusing and lying legend of the saint known as Hogg's Life. But Keats's friends give us just the truth; and, what is more, he was able, in his abundant and delightfully confessional letters, to give it to us himself.

Sir Sidney Colvin draws freely on these letters to the great advantage of his book. And both with them and with the poems he has the courage and good sense never to shrink from reprinting in his pages the most familiar things. Not every one has a memory, and not every one will at all times leave his chair and interrupt his reading to get a volume from the shelves.

That is the first thing Sir Sidney Colvin has done for the ordinary reader of that not too ordinary sort which really cares for our great poets and their poetry; he has retold the Life of Keats with added facts on a larger scale and in a more interesting fashion than it had ever been told before. And the second is that he takes us through the poetry from the earliest to the latest, tells us what is known of the circumstances in which every important poem was written, and gives us abundant help towards its understanding and enjoyment. It is safe to say that Endymion' will be read by a good many people this year, who, but for Sir Sidney, would not have read it and would not have understood it if they had. And here we cross the thin boundary line which separates the right kind of general reader from the right kind of special student. The two chapters on Endymion,' the first on the source and symbolism of the story and the second on the qualities, affinities, and ancestry of the verse, are admirably addressed to both; that is to say, they are as full of life as of learning and of learning as of life. Sir Sidney does not, of course, go into such details as fill, for instance, the very useful compilation of M. Lucien Wolff on Keats's treatment of blank verse and the rhymed couplet. That would be out of place in a biography; but he gives us enough to stimulate the interest of the general reader and to tell all but those who have made a special study of metre something more than they knew before.

The newest thing in the book is perhaps the study of what Keats's poetry owes to works of art, which Sir Sidney has still further developed in a lecture recently delivered to the English Association. On this subject

also his is not the first word to be said and will probably not be the last. But he has obviously special qualifications for dealing with it; and his account of the way in which Keats used suggestions which he caught