but, regarded as a whole, it is a weakling in comparison with the Chapman sonnet. The sonnets, “To Sleep” (“O soft embalmer of the still midnight”), “Why did I laugh to-night?” and “On a Dream” (“As Hermes once took to his feathers light”)—all of them dated in 1819—are remarkable; the third would indeed almost be excellent were it not for the inadmissible laxity of an alexandrine last line. This is the sonnet of which we have already spoken, the dream of Paolo and Francesca. The “Why did I laugh to-night?” is a strange personal utterance, in which the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely passage of the “Ode to a Nightingale”; but the sonnet, considered as an example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined.
There are several minor poems by Keats of which—though some of them are extremely dear to his devotees—I have made no mention. Such are “Teignmouth,” “Where be you going, you Devon maid?” “Meg Merrilies,” “Walking in Scotland,” “Staffa,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin Hood,” “To Fancy,” “To the Poets,” “In a drear-nighted December,” “Hush, hush, tread softly,” four “Faery Songs.” Most of these pieces seem to me over-rated. As a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the brightness or the tenderness which the subject bespeaks; but they are slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memorable work. One enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over; they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time.
The feeling with which Keats regarded women in real life has been already spoken of. As to the tone of his poems respecting them we have his own evidence. A letter of his to Armitage Brown, dated towards the first days of September 1820, says, in reference to the “Lamia” volume: “One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. On thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman I would care to please; but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats; they never see themselves dominant.” The long poems in the volume in question were “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Hyperion,” and “Lamia.” In “Hyperion” women are of course not dominant; but, as regards the other three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. In “Isabella” the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance—so also in “Lamia”; and in the “Eve of St. Agnes” she counts for much more than Porphyro, though the number of stanzas about her may be fewer. Nevertheless it might be that the women in the three poems, though “dominant,” are “classed with roses and sweetmeats.” I do not see, however, that this can fairly be said of Madeline in the “Eve of St. Agnes”; she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope. Again, Isabella, amenable as she may be to the censure of the severely virtuous, plays a part which takes her very considerably out of affinity to roses and sweetmeats. To Lamia the objection applies clearly enough; but then she is not exactly a woman, and Keats resents so fiercely the far from indefensible line of conduct which Apollonius adopts in relation to her that it seems hard if the ladies owed the poet a grudge. On the whole I incline to think that they must have been misreported; but the statement in Keats’s letter remains not the less significant as a symptom of his real underlying feeling about women.
It has often been pointed out that Keats’s lovers have a habit of “swooning,” and the fact has sometimes been remarked upon as evidencing a certain want of virility in himself. I cannot affect to be, so far, of a different opinion. The incident and the phrase do manifestly tend to the namby-pamby. This may have been more a matter of affected or self-willed diction on his part—and diction of that kind appears constantly in his earlier poems, and not seldom in his later ones—than of actual character chargeable against himself; yet I would not entirely disregard it in the latter relation either. Keats was a very young man, with a limited experience of life. He had to picture to himself how his lovers would be likely to behave under given conditions; and, if he thought they would be likely to swoon, the probability is that he also, under parallel conditions, would have been likely to swoon—or at least supposed he would be likely. Because he thrashed a butcher-boy, or was indignant at backbiting and meanness, we are not to credit him with an unmingled fund of that toughness which distinguishes the English middle class. The English middle-class man is not habitually addicted to writing an “Endymion,” an “Eve of St. Agnes,” or an “Ode on Melancholy.”
Sensuousness has been frequently defined as the paramount bias of Keats’s poetic genius. This is, in large measure, unassailably true. He was a man of perception rather than of contemplation or speculation. Perception has to do with perceptible things; perceptible things must be objects of sense, and the mind which dwells on objects of sense must ipso facto be a mind of the sensuous order. But the mind which is mainly sensuous by direct action may also work by reflex action, and pass from sensuousness into sentiment. It cannot fairly be denied that Keats’s mind continually did this; it had direct action potently, and reflex action amply. He saw so far and so keenly into the sensuous as to be penetrated with the sentiment which, to a healthy and large nature, is its inseparable outcome. We might say that, if the sensuous was his atmosphere, the breathing apparatus with which he respired it was sentiment. In his best work—for instance, in all the great odes—the two things are so intimately combined that the reader can only savour the sensuous nucleus through the sentiment, its medium or vehicle. One of the most compendious and elegant phrases in which the genius of Keats has been defined is that of Leigh Hunt: “He never beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad.” In immediate meaning Hunt glances here at the mythical sympathy or personifying imagination of the poet; but, if we accept the phrase as applying to the sensuous object-painting, along with its ideal aroma or suggestion in his finest work, we shall still find it full of right significance. We need not dwell upon other less mature performances in which the two things are less closely interfused. Certainly some of his work is merely, and some even crudely, sensuous: but this is work in which the poet was trying his materials and his powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty and ultimate function.
While discriminating between what was excellent in Keats, and what was not excellent, or was merely tentative in the direction of final excellence, we must not confuse endowments, or the homage which is due to endowments, of a radically different order. Many readers, and there have been among them several men highly qualified to pronounce, have set Keats beside his great contemporary Shelley, and indeed above him. I cannot do this. To me it seems that the primary gift of Shelley, the spirit in which he exercised it, the objects upon which he exercised it, the detail and the sum of his achievement, the actual produce in appraisable work done, the influence and energy of the work in the future, were all superior to those of Keats, and even superior beyond any reasonable terms of comparison. If Shelley’s poems had defects—which they indisputably had—Keats’s poems also had defects. After all that can be said in their praise—and this should be said in the most generous or rather grateful and thankful spirit—it seems to me true that not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable; that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance; that he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifference to the thought itself and its necessary means of development; that he is emotional without substance, and beautiful without control; and that personalism of a wilful and fitful kind pervades the mass of his handiwork. We have already seen, however, that there is a certain not inconsiderable proportion of his poems to which these exceptions do not apply, or apply only with greatly diminished force; and, as a last expression of our large and abiding debt to him and to his well-loved memory, we recur to his own words, and say that he has given us many a “thing of beauty,” which will remain “a joy for ever.” By his early death he was doomed to be the poet of youthfulness; by being the poet of youthfulness he was privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet of rapt expectation and passionate delight.