It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney Colvin\'s life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first, because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned and intimate sympathy which is felt—as we may at least conclude—by a portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin\'s mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets. Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate Keats, Sir Sidney writes:—

\'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,—that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely sensitive.\'

[Footnote 6: John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-fame. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]

We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so. We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.

It is rather by this than by Sir Sidney\'s particular contributions to our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we accept his patient exposition of the theme of \'Endymion\' with a friendly interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats\'s imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers who at the end of a long day\'s journey among an inhospitable peasantry are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant and unknown to them—the price of land, and the points of a pedigree bull—so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle argument in \'Endymion\' in which at no moment we really believe. On the contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author\'s friendly spell) that Keats wrote \'Endymion\' at all adventure. The words of the cancelled preface: \'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,\' were, we are sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable of or averse to \'fundamental brain-work\'—he had an understanding more robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not excepted—but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned with understanding. \'Endymion\' is not a record or sublimation of experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along which his imagination might \'paw up against the sky.\'

A refusal to admit that Keats built \'Endymion\' upon any structure of argument, however obscure—even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the argument he discovers is very obscure—is so far from being a derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this decline in the revised Induction to \'Hyperion.\' As far as an absolute poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats\'s poetry will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood. And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S. Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the one in \'The Eve of St Agnes,\' the other in \'La Belle Dame sans Merci.\' And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in modern poetry.

A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred years is only a cul de sac. Somewhere there has been a substitution. In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it is.

At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales—a heresy even for objective criticism—nor \'Hyperion\'; but precisely that revised Induction to \'Hyperion\' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the poet\'s powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary interest. Keats\'s natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style, the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitely greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote \'Hyperion.\' \'Hyperion,\' though far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same as \'Endymion\'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them. These necessities were not present in this form to Keats\'s mind when he began \'Hyperion\'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme. Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by the intellect, but by the being.

He dropped \'Hyperion\' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.

\'I have given up "Hyperion"—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist\'s, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of feeling….\'—(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)

That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications. \'English ought to be kept up\' meant, on Keats\'s lips, a very great deal. But there is other and more definite authority for the positive direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at the same time:—

\'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be............