MR. FORMAN'S EDITION OF K.EATS.* THE system adopted by Mr.

Forman in his edition of Shelley has been followed in this fine and exhaustive edition of Keats. That the editor has done his work with loving care and untiring labour will be questioned by no one who gives to these volumes the attention they deserve. And no one with a heart and ear for lovely verse can think any toil too great to be bestowed upon a poet whose rare genius has won for him a unique place in the literature of his country.

On the other hand, it is open to question whether we do honour to a poet's memory by sweeping up and carefully pre- serving all the rubbish that has accumulated round it, every trifle that he uttered, every word almost that has been said about him. An imaginative writer is almost certain to produce much that is worthless or much that is extravagant in the early stage of his career. He tries his hand at many things, and perhaps fails more frequently than he succeeds ; he is apt to rush eagerly into print, and to mistake ambition for achievement. This was pre-eminently the case with Shelley. No poet of our century has composed verses more exquisitely musical ; not one, perhaps, in his finest work has written with more consummate art. As a boy, however, Shelley had the misfortune to produce some tales scarcely more coherent than the ravings of a madman ; and because he wrote St. Irvyne and Zastrozzi before he was seventeen, these rhapsodical romances are destined, we suppose, to occupy a place in every complete edition of his works. Mr. Forman found it necessary to reprint them in his works of Shelley, and the publication may have been inevitable. What an author prints himself, and does not withdraw from publication, forms an integral portion of his writings. It may injure his reputa- tion, but as the evil that men do lives after them, so also is the folly of great writers cursed with a lasting life.

At the same time, the responsibility of an editor is great, and that ample scope remains for the exercise of a sound judgment is evident from the volumes before us. For the extent of his knowledge, and for his careful annotations on the text, the highest praise is due to Mr. Forman. The assiduity with which he has brought• together every fact calculated to illustrate the career of Keats, shows with how hearty a zest the labour has been undertaken. We do not know that any needful explanation is lacking, or any suggestive illustration omitted. The reader who looks carefully through the footnotes to " Endymion " will understand Mr. Forman's thoroughness in this respect. The preface, too, is a most inter- esting piece of work, and so is the curious addendum to the preface, in which the writer discusses Keats' awkward mode of spelling, which is adopted throughout,—to the detriment, as he allows, of the appearance of the pages. If Keats had a system, he did not always adhere to it, and considering the careless spelling to be found in the letters, we are inclined to doubt whether the peculiar orthography of his poems was not as often

• The Poetical Works and other Writings of John Keats. Edited, with Notes and Appendices, by Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols. London Reeves ead Turner.

the result of ignorance as of choice. Everywhere throughout the volumes Mr. Forman's own notes are as pertinent as they are brief, and the beautiful way in which this noble-looking edition of a great poet is brought out reflects the highest credit on editor and publishers. Having said this much in praise of the work—and it would be unjust to say less—we must add our conviction that Mr. Forman has overweighted his pages with superfluous matter. It might have seemed impossible to fill four thick volumes with the works of a poet who wrote little before he was twenty, and died at the age of twenty-six. His admirers and lovers know that all which he has written of lasting worth can be printed in a pocket volume, yet we have here upwards of 1,700 octavo pages filled or supposed to be filled with Keats's verse and prose. Let us open the volumes and examine their contents. The first volume contains little that can be fairly called superfluous. In addition to the preface and its supple- mentary notes, which are followed by an index of first lines, the poems published in 1817 are printed and annotated, the last poem of the series being" Endymion." Leigh Hunt wrote a re- view of the poems at the time, and it is here reprinted ; a review also appeared, it is scarcely necessary to say, some months later in the Quarterly, followed in 1820 by one in the Edinburgh, and these noteworthy papers are inserted in the appendix, which contains also some of Leigh Hunt's sonnets, and a remarkable letter, re- printed from the Athinueum, in which the publishers of Keats's volume, annoyed by the ridicule showered upon it, regret that they undertook the publication. Volume II. comprises all the work of the poet which bears the stamp of immortality, together with a vast number of posthumous and fugitive poems of great variety in their degrees of merit and demerit. Many of the pieces are sheer doggerel, others are marked by an unsuccessful attempt at humour, and among them may be read "La Belle Dame sans Merci," which Gabriel Rossetti wrote of as "wondrous." The reader, should it please him, may also read the poet's latest and least worthy effort, the "Cap and Bells." To avoid the publi- cation of many feeble and characterless verses is impossible in a complete edition of Keats, but we could readily have spared Leigh Hunt's running commentary on the Eve of St. Agnes, and we submit that the greater number of subjects that occupy forty- five pages of the appendix are not essential additions to our knowledge of the poet. In the third volume of Miscellaneous Letters, it seems scarcely necessary to insert Hazlitt's grossly indecent and lying attack on Southey, simply because Keats makes an allusion to it in his correspondence; or for a similar reason, a long poem written by the "matchless Orinda." In Volume IV., if we grant the necessity of reprinting the poet's painful love-letters, there is not muck superfluous matter to complain of. Much space is occupied in the volumes by the repetition of passages from the letters, so that-an anecdote or a biographical statement is inserted in a note, in some cases twice inserted, which appears again in the correspondence.

The reader who wishes for a clear estimate of Keats as a man and as a poet will find here ample materials upon which to base his judgment. In the first place, if the old belief still clings to him that the life of Keats was "snuffed out" by the notorious Quarterly article, he will be compelled, in the face of the evidence produced, to discard it utterly. That it was not, however, a groundless belief at the time is evident, since George Keats considered his brother's death due" partly" to Blackwood and the Quarterly. Then, it maybe asked whether Fanny Brawne's conduct was the cause of his decline. In reading the painful love-letters to Miss Brawne, which, in our judgment, expressed at the time of publication, ought never to have been printed, we must remember that Keats's morbid condition made him jealous, exacting, imperious, fall of suspicions, and perversely irritable. We know what his claims were, and what his fears were, but we do not know and can only guess how his wild, passionate utterances were responded to by Fanny. That she fully under- stood her lover is in the highest degree unlikely. Her nature, if we are able to read it rightly, was essentially common-place ; and it is evident that, like most young and beautiful girls, she was fond of admiration and society. Venial faults, truly, and scarcely calling for the strong words of reproof or anger written from Keats's sick-room. Moreover, it should be remembered,. when we feel inclined to blame Miss Brawne, that Keats was the most unmanageable of lovers. With him, the torment of love was greater than the rapture, and his extreme reticence as to what he was feeling, except to the girl herself, added to the weight of pain he carried with him to Italy. On receiving the thirty-seven letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne (two additions?

letters, by the way, are now added to the collection), Joseph Severn wrote to Mr. Buxton Forman that he understood then for the first time the sufferings and death of the poet :—

" lie did not confide to me," he writes, "this serious passion, and it now seems-to me but for this cause he might have lived many years. I can now understand his want of courage to speak, as it was

consuming him in body and mind Perhaps I view the work more painfully, as I was not aware of such torment existing in the poet's mind, and as I saw him struck down from health and vigour to sickness and death, you will not wonder at my emotion, now that I

find the fatal cause I think he must have been sensible this passion was destroying him, or he would have made it known to me. He referred at times to his being cat off from his world of poetry as his great misfortune, bat never to Fanny Browne. I left England with him with the confidence of his recovery, for so the Doctors assured me, but in less than a year this fatal passion destroyed him."

This seems to be an error. We do not think this wonderful poet died either of criticism or of love. On the contrary, we are common-place enough to hold that he died as his mother and brother died, of the family disease,—consumption. He said himself that he had fretted himself to death, and no doubt mental disquietude greatly enhanced his sufferings, but the discovery in the post-mortem examination that "the lungs were completely gone" sufficiently explains the origin of the illness and the cause of death. Severn thought that Keats got a kind of mawkishness from Leigh Hunt, but George Keats, one of the manliest of men, when expressing his hope that his brother's name would not be associated with Hunt's littlenesses, says that he was impatient of the association in his life-time. Hunt, who had the ignorance or the prejudice to call Southey" a weak man in all respects," was himself weak in many ; but he was one of the first to do justice to the genius of Keats, and if there were something a little like patronage in his friendship, it might readily be forgiven; but John, in his younger brother's judgment, was more magnanimous in conferring than in receiving a bene- fit, and felt "too impatient of obligations." Indeed, it was his earliest purpose in art rather than his moral character that may be said to have been injuriously affected by Hunt, whose in- fluence can be traced in his affectations of expression and of versification. These are the youthful faults of " Endymion," which in spite of them will be always dear to the reader who can find his pastime in a dreamy world of poetry. The little volume was published in 1818, when Keats was in his twenty- fourth year. Two years later appeared " Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems." The advance in that short period, not only in imaginative power, but in artistic construction, is marvellous. This small book contains some of the loveliest English poetry that even this wealthy century has produced. Of its kind, indeed, it is unparalleled for wealth of fancy and Magic of language. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the "Ode to a Nightingale," the "Ode to Autumn," the majestic fragment of "Hyperion," and that enchanting poem the "Eve of St. Agnes," rank with the masterpieces of English verse. These, and about a dozen pieces besides, including six or seven sonnets, form the enduring work—" infinite riches in a little room "—for the sake of which the memory of Keats is held in such high honour. In addition to these productions, which seem already stamped with immortality, there is a considerable body of post- humous and fugitive verse, which fills more than 300 pages of Mr. Forman's edition. "It is not unlikely," he writes, "that other pieces by Keats may yet be found, for he wrote much common-place verse when a boy, and I have reason to think that a good deal of it still exists ; but it is questionable whether anything of true and sterling value still remains to be discovered." We devoutly hope that no literary resur- rectionist will succeed in disinterring these "other pieces of common-place verse." Already the common-place element is far too conspicuous, and one turns over page after page of languid and conventional poetry to which it is painful to attach the name of Keats. Any boy of sixteen with a turn for rhyme could write better verses, one would think, than the silly stanzas to Miss Wylie, and verses as good as the sonnets to Chatterton and Byron. Some gems there are, however, such as the poem already mentioned, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," a few lyrics which have Keats's wealth of colour and daintiness of handling, and three or four sonnets worthy of a place in selections. Among these is the sonnet to Homer, which contains a line

regarded by the late Dante Rossetti as one of the finest "in all poetry":—

"There is a budding morrow in midnight."

A novel and interesting feature of the present edition is the aeries of letters from Keats to his sister Fanny. These are numerous, and show the character of the poet in a new and highly favourable light. Sympathy with the young girl's troubles, a wish in all possible ways to give her pleasure, and a brotherly regard for her welfare are evident throughout. We are struck by their gentleness and kindliness of tone, and like the writer all the better for these genuine utterances of his heart. And this, though in a lesser degree, forms the attrac- tion of the poet's letters to his friends generally. They reveal the man, and show at once warmth of feeling and strength of purpose. At twenty-three, the age at which Milton wrote in his regretful sonnet,—

" My basting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom sheveth,"

Keats, smitten with a like feeling, wrote as _follows to his pub- lisher, John Taylor :—

" I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but one thing to prevent me. I know nothing ; I have read nothing ; and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, Get wisdom— get understanding.' I find earlier days are gone by—I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of know- ledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society ; some with their wit ; some with their benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good-humour on all they meet, and in a thousand ways all dutiful to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it ; and for that end purpose retiring for some years."

Reading this, and kindred passages, 0120 feels what a noble career might have opened up before the modest and yet am- bitions poet, had not the threads of his thin-spun life broken so early. As it is, he has left enough for fame, and better still, for that love which all generous natures must feel for a spirit so rarely gifted.