SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S LIFE OF KEATS.*
SIR SIDNEY COLVIN has turned his release from official duties 1 admirable purpose in this volume. The Keats literature is already large, but he was right in saying that "there does not yet existany one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material." The gap has been filled by his own labours; the aim defined in the words quoted has now been achieved. Sir Sidney Colvin shows us Keats as related to his environment, his contemporaries, and his forerunners, with por- traits—often full-length portraits—of his circle, his friends, and his critics. A special feature of the book is the remark- ably full treatment of the sources of his inspiration in literature ,-classical, Elizabethan, French, Italian, and contemporary—.
• John Heals: AU Lift and Palo, Friend., Critic., add After-Pane. By Meal Cdrla London: Macmillan sad CO. MM. net.l and in art, the specific etimuli being identified, or conjectured, with a skill born of wide and precise expert knowledge. Another Along point Is the helpful interpretation of the obscurities of Keate's symbolism, with the result of enabling the reader to form a truer estimate of " Endymion " than was before possible. And if the book has been a labour of love, It is love which is " this side idolatry." There is plenty of severe criticism of Keats's lapses from good taste and clear thinking—his amorous mawkishness, his lax phrasing, and infelicitoua coinages. Sir Sidney Colvin is scrupulously fair in his handling of Keats's critics : if he lets him- self go about Byron, the provocation is irresistible. But if Heats fared ill at the hands of most of the critics, he was on the whole fortunate in his friends. The reservation is needed, for though he owed much to the encouragement and companionship of Leigh Hunt, this intimate association " carried with it in the sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Heath's career." Leigh Hunt had many admirable qualities and gifts ; Skimpole in Bleak House NMI a caricature of his worst weal messes; but Sir Sidney Colvin rightly condemns him for often carrying "a very second-rate parlour tone into literature." Of the greater lights in the literary world, Shelley was the most friendly ; but from pride and a radical dissimilarity of temperament, Keats was always on the defensive in his company, and it was not Shelley's fault that the chief service he rendered Keats was in "Adonis." Keats was bored by Cole- ridge; and though he was a fervent admirer of Wordsworth and influenced by his poetry, their intercourse was chilled by Words- worth's condescension and egotism. Nor was there a perfect sympathy between Keats and Lamb. But Lamb recognised his genius, while Hazlitt, though in the same camp, remained unappre- ciative. The friends who helped him most were not so eminent, though they were all men of ability—Cowden Clarke, son of his schoolmaster at Edmonton, who introduced him to Spenser and Chapman, and was thus the " only begetter " of the immortal sonnet ; Reynolds, his wise literary counsellor; the faithful Haslarn ; Brown, the somewhat coarse.fibred but genial Scot ; Taylor, his generous publisher ; and Severn, noblest and most devoted of them all. And it is worthy of note that Keats, though fiery and (as a boy) pugnacious, never seriously quarrelled with his friends, though they quarrelled freely among themselves. It was inevitable that he should become increasingly alive to the shallowness of Leigh Hunt and the exacting egotism of Hayden, but there was no open breach, and oven when Hayden became an incubus Keats treated him with generous forbearance. Haydon's ardour and high aapirationahad helped Keats at a critical moment; and if Keats overestimated his friend's talents, he erred in good company. He had a true genius for friendship and deserved the affection he inspired ; his friends are unanimous in acknow- ledging that ho was lovable, chivalrous, and loyal, apart from his remarkable personal charm. He was a good brother and son as well as a good friend.
Sir Sidney Colvin has been unable to solve the problem of Keats's descent, but he almost certainly earns of Devonshire or Cornish stock on both sides, and his biographer traces the sound core of manliness, in his character to his father, his instability and constitutional delicacy to his mother. Mercurial, passionate, quarrelsome, but lovable as a small boy, he did not develop literary tastes until his last years at school. As for his sojourn among the gallipota, though he was not exactly an idle apprentice, the severance wee predestined and inevitable. He " found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and half-awestricken, passion for the poetic life." The poems of 1817 fell fiat outside his circle ; nor was this altogether to be wondered at. The influence of Leigh Hunt was more perceptible than that of Wordsworth. Apart from theChapman sonnet, and the two poems "I stood tip-toe" and " Sleep and Beauty," there was little offiratrate quality in the volume, and criticism was then more prone to castigate Irregularity than to detect promise. Sir Sidney Colvin, however, dwells justly on Keats's bold revolt against the tyranny of the Queen Anne model of the heroic couplet, and his reversion to the free handling of the Elizabethans. Above all, he shows how in the few "vital " poems Keats's conceptions of the function of the art to which he had dedicated himself are revealed, and his groat sehievementa foreshadowed, The chapters that deal with the period in which Keats was engaged on " Endymion " are perhaps the moat interesting in the book. The conditions were on the whole favourable. Keats's health was still unimpaired, the migration to Hamp- stead was a great improvement on London lodgings, his new friendships were all helpful, and he probably never wrote in more congenial surroundings than during his visit to his friend Bailey all Oxford. He had his ups and downs, but against the charges which he brings against himself of abstraction and heartlessness we may fairly sethis charming and affectionate correspondence with his young lister. Sir Sidney Colvin discusses the genesis of "Endy- mion," its sources, metre, merits, and defects, at very great length, and with a happy blending of good sense, acute criticism, and felicity of expression. He tells us how the legend of Endymion,
with which Keats had long been in love, and which had been made known to him through the earlier English poets, appealed to his peculiar sensibility to moon magic, and " turned under his hand into a parable of the adventures of the poetic soul striving after full communion with the spirit of essential Beauty." Amid all the obscurities and intricacies of the narrative, Sir Sidney Colvin traces the persistence of this inner and symbolic meaning. Keats himself described his purpose in the poem as a " striving to uproar Love's standard on the battlement of song,"
and though " the actual love scenes are the weakest, his ideal invocations to and celebrations of love are among the strongest things in the poem." The soundness of Keats's metrical instincts, though he was not yet a master of rhyme, is, effectively maintained ; his lavish turning of verbs into nouns and vice-versd is freely condemned, and the influence of Elizabethan and Jacobean authors as well as of Wordsworth and Shelley clearly established. We meat pees over the vivid account of Heath's incursion into journalism as a dramatic critic, of the famous dinner at Hayden's, of the visit to Devonshire, and the marriage and emigra- tion of Keats's brother George. The Scottish tour with Brown was full of stimulus. Keats said little about scenery--indeed he went as far as to say that " scenery is fine, but human nature is finer "—but the impression sank in and reappeared in his verse. The tour reveals Keats's high qualities as a letter-writer and an observer—witness his remarks on the Kirk-men of Scotland and his description of " the Duchess of Dunghill"—but the fatigues and exposure entailed had disastrous results in bringing to light "the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health " in the shape of throat trouble, from which he was never afterwards free. On the much-discussed question how far Keats's life was shortened and his spirit broken by the attache in Blackwood and the Quarterly, Sir Sidney Colvin makes it clear that, while Keats took his treatment at the hands of his critics more coolly than older and more experienced men had taken the like, yet " when he began to realise a year or so later the harm which the reviews had done and were doing to his material prospects, these consequences in his darker hours preyed on him severely and conspired with the forces of disease and passion to his undoing." The close of 1818 was sad- dened by the death of his brother Tom, at whose sick-bed he watched for three months. But the literary achievements of 1818-1819 mark the grand climacteric of his genius. Of the narrative poems, Sir Sidney Colvin sets "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil " first, " The Eve of St. Agnes " second, and " Lauds " third. Then there wore the great Odes, and the colossal epic fragment of " Hyperion," while into " La Belle Dame sans Mord " be threw " all the famine and fever of his private passion," for early in 1819 he had fallen under the spell of Fanny Brawne.
On the publication of his love-letters Sir Sidney Colvin writes with wisdom and good feeling. " More than any man, more certainly than any other unripe youth fretting in the high fever of an unhopeful love, Keats has had to pay the penalty of genius in the loss of posthumous privacy for the most sacred and secret of his emotions." But " once preserved and printed, those love-letters of his cannot be ignored." While his letters to his friends and relations are still often marked by calmness and sound judgment, the letters to Fanny Brawne show him as " passion's slave." Fanny Brawne remains something of an enigma ; she undoubtedly gave Keats cause for jealousy, and was incapable of appreciating his genius. But Sir Sidney Colvin recognizes that she was kind and in essentials constant to her lover, though disquieted by the terrifying vehemence of his passion, and unable to " realize fully what manner of man he was or how high and privileged was the charge committed to her." Before the break-down in February, 1829, " deepening despondency and recklessness had caused Keats to drop writing altogether." His last work, the revised version of "Hyperion," though inspired by a lofty aim, shows signs of failing powers and was soon laid aside ; and " praise and dispraiae were all one to him " when the " Lamia " volume appeared and met, on the whole, with generous recognition. Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne in this year aro " almost too agonising to read," and the story of the voyage to Italy, the teat days and death at Rome, is, an infinitely tragic recital, though the tragedy is illumined by the wonderful and more than fraternal devotion of Severn.
In an Epilogue Sir Sidney Colvin traces the slow growth of Keats's posthumous fame; the happy solution of the conflicting claims of his friends by their acceptance of Monekton-Milnes as biographer; the enthusiasm of the Pre-Raphaelites ; and the consensus of later critics as, to his genius. In expressing his confident belief that the poetry of Keats will never perish Sir Sidney Colvin rightly relies on the testimony of the greatest of his successors, and sums up by quoting Tennyson's eulogy : "Keats with his high spiritual vision would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us. There is some- thing magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost every- thing which he wrote." That, as his latest and beat biographer says," looking only at what he did, is enough for any man.a glory"
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