He is not a feminine poet, as Mr. Coventry Patmore calls him, any more than Theocritus or Tennyson is feminine; for the quality of extreme sensitiveness to outward beauty is not a mark of femininity. It is found in men more often and more clearly than in women. But it is always most keen and joyous and overmastering in the morning of the soul.
Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or Shakespeare or Milton; that he would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. He is certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a café chantant for its temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal Venus rising from the sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking into the gutter.
He is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,” as Lowell says, but mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries and in the spirit of his own season of life. The very sadness of his lovely odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “To Psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream of first love. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English literature, because it is the embodiment of the spirit of immortal youth.
Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. For that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. The History of English Literature, with which Taine amused us some fifty years ago, nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its failure to take account of Gray, Collins, and Keats as fashioners of English poetry. It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; the name of Keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing imagination,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. The American critic, Stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding of the subject when he said that “Wordsworth begot the mind, and Keats the body, of the idyllic Victorian School.”
We can trace the influence of Keats not merely in the conscious or unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in the early poems of Tennyson and Procter, in Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and Lycus the Centaur, in Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets, and William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, but also in the youthful spirit of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry; in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of natural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing cadences transmuting ancient forms of verse into new and more flexible measures; in the large liberty of imaginative diction, making all nature sympathize with the joy and sorrow of man,—in brief, in many of the finest marks of a renascence, a renewed youth, which characterize the poetry of the early Victorian era.
I do not mean to say that Keats alone, or chiefly, was responsible for this renascence. He never set up to lead a movement or to found a school. His genius is not to be compared to that of a commanding artist like Giotto or Leonardo or Michelangelo, but rather to that of a painter like Botticelli, whose personal and expressive charm makes itself felt in the work of many painters, who learned secrets of grace and beauty from him, though they were not his professed disciples or followers.
Take for example Matthew Arnold. He called himself, and no doubt rightly, a Wordsworthian. But it was not from Wordsworth that he caught the strange and searching melody of “The Forsaken Merman,” or learned to embroider the laments for “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gypsy” with such opulence of varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. It was from John Keats. Or read the description of the tapestry on the castle walls in “Tristram and Iseult.” How perfectly that repeats the spirit of Keats’s descriptions in “The Eve of St. Agnes”! It is the poetry of the picturesque.
Indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the influence of Keats unless we recognize also that it has produced direct and distinct effects in the art of painting. The English pre-Raphaelites owed much to his inspiration. Holman Hunt found two of his earliest subjects for pictures in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Pot of Basil.” Millais painted “Lorenzo and Isabella,” and Rossetti “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” There is an evident sympathy between the art of these painters, which insisted that every detail in a picture is precious and should be painted with truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of Keats, which is filled, and even overfilled, with minute and loving touches of exquisite elaboration.
But it must be remembered that in poetry, as well as in painting, the spirit of picturesqueness has its dangers. The details may be multiplied until the original design is lost. The harmony and lucidity of a poem may be destroyed by innumerable digressions and descriptions. In some of his poems—in “Endymion” and in “Lamia”—Keats fell very deep into this fault, and no one knew it better than himself. But when he was at his best he had the power of adding a hundred delicate details to his central vision, and making every touch heighten and enhance the general effect. How wonderful in its unity is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”! How completely magical are the opening lines of “Hyperion”:
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale