He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron in The Fall of Hyperion:
Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase in The Maid’s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.
The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s Keats—Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne—he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood—were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered in Endymion. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope: