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 the............