“‘O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth,
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the Evening listens.’”
Not that he was ever foolish enough to despise knowledge, or trust overmuch to impulses “from a vernal wood,” as if a poet could subsist on inspiration. A few weeks after the date of the letter just quoted, a letter which he himself qualified before he was done as “a mere sophistication,” we find him renouncing a proposed pleasure trip. There is but one thing to prevent his going, he tells his correspondent. “I know nothing,” he says, “I have read nothing, and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier days are gone by—I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.”
But as we counted it fortunate that he had already had the courage to forsake everything else for the pursuit of poetry, so we must be thankful that now, feeling his educational deficiencies, he did not do what nine professors out of ten, had he had the ill-fortune to consult them, would—very properly, no doubt—have advised him to do; that is to say, cease production for the time being and devote himself to study. That would have been a loss irreparable. His sun was so soon to go down! A mercy it was that he made hay while it shone.
For much of the hay that he made was as good as the sun ever shone on. That it was a short season’s crop may pass unsaid. It is not within the possibilities of human nature, however miraculously endowed, to be mature at twenty-five. Enough, surely, if at that age a man has done a good bit of work of the rarest, divinest quality, work that, within its range and scope, the greatest and ripest genius could never dream of bettering. That is Keats’s glory. So much as that one need not be either a poet or a critic to affirm; the critics and poets have agreed to affirm it for us. If Tennyson said, as reported, that “Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all; there is something magical and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote;” and if Arnold put him, in two words, “with Shakespeare,” why, then, for the present, at least, the case is judged, and we who are neither poets nor critics, but only tasters and relishers, can have no call to argue it.
So much being admitted, however, it is not to be assumed that here is an end of things. One may still like to talk a little. Hearing him praised, one may still say,—
“‘’Tis so, ’tis true,’
And to the most of praise add something more.”