of fame, that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaëton." But his genius was strong within him, and would not let him abandon the career to which he was born; and there came moments, moreover, in which he had assurance that his power was genuine and his work enduring; and in one of these he said with simple and modest assurance: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death." IV Among the English poets he is, and of his genius and of his rank it is not easy to write briefly. Rightly viewed, every man of genius belongs to the succession in the priesthood of beauty; and it is not possible to study one without some consideration of all who, preceding him, prepared the way for him, and who, coming after, entered into the fruits of his endeavors. Short as was the life of John Keats, and small as was the actual bulk of his production, there is no one of his contemporaries who holds more distinctly or securely his place as the legitimate successor of the greatest among the English poets before him and as the necessary precursor of those who have followed. When one is called upon to sum up the characteristics of the work of Keats, it is inevitable that first should come to mind his thrilling sensitiveness to sensuous beauty. His poetic philosophy is summed up in the oft-quoted lines: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all Interpreted in the light of almost all of Keats's earlier expressions, beauty is here to be taken as meaning that aspect of the beautiful which is apparent to the sense of man, but to this beauty as perceived and assimilated by the imagination. No personal trait of the poet was more strikingly marked than his exquisite susceptibility to appeals to' eye and ear; yet to these appeals it was his imagination which responded. That had he lived he would have developed a high appreciation of that beauty which is purely intellectual and spiritual seems evident from the great advance which he made in the three immortal years which practically comprised his art life; but taking his poetry as it stands, it is largely the wonderful music of an imagination A vibrating in quick and delicate response to the delights of t sensation. The joy of seeing, of hearing, of feeling, the intoxication of emotions awakened by pleasurable appeals to senses responsive as the strings of a wind-harp,- this is the motive of the greater part of Keats's poetry. Even love was with him a delight of the sense. It seems to me rather idle to go about in attempts to disguise or evade this fact. It was part of his nature, and it was undoubtedly one of those youthful limitations which he would have outgrown had time been given him. To the exuberant spirit of his highly organized youth that beauty which thrilled him through his delicately excitable senses was the one thing most vital, the one thing most true. In this connection it is worth while to consider a moment the familiar comment that Keats was essentially a Greek. It is not difficult to see how the phrase came into use, but it is in reality not only empty but misleading. The abundant use of Hellenic myths which distinguished his poetry furnished an easy epithet to those who must ticket the poets, and who are the more eager to tag with an epithet the singer because they are unable to comprehend the song ; while those characteristics which were common alike to the Greeks and to the greatest Elizabethans were sufficiently marked in our poet to excuse the adoption of the convenient phrase even by those who look deeper than the superficial form. Yet it is not Greek but Elizabethan that we must call Keats, if he is to be classified by the aid of a retrospective epithet. There was much in common between the Greeks and the Elizabethans, as indeed there must be between all artists representative of great art periods. In each there were characteristic qualities peculiar to the one age and time or to the other, and of these Keats shared those of his predecessors upon English soil rather than those of the Greeks whose gods he sang and whose myths he endeavored to revivify. It is only as a means of coming to a better understanding of what Keats was in himself that it is worth while to discuss the question whether he might the more aptly be compared to a belated Elizabethan or to a Greek born out of time. In common with both Elizabethans and Hellenes he possessed an imagination joyous, spontaneous, vibrant; with both he shared that devotion to art which is essential to the production of great work; to him as to them the world of the imagination was the one thing, most vitally real amid the illusions and evasions of life; to them and to him alike beauty was an enkindling inspiration and its embodiment the highest joy. He had in common with the poets of Greece and of England at its greatest time a certain enchanting directness and simplicity of expression: while from both he differed in his comparative indifference to humanity. Keats shared with the Greeks that pagan sensuousness which revels in the delights of the senses untroubled by moral meaning or responsibility; like the Elizabethans he possessed the perception and appreciation of natural beauty entirely apart from its ministry to man; while from both he differed — and in so far fell below both by the capability to rest upon a passionate satisfaction in sensuous beauty for its own sake and as an end sufficient in itself. This last-named characteristic was evidently due in part to the keenness of the young poet's senses and to his ignorance of life. The very acuteness of his perception of beauty made it the more difficult to pierce through the surface to the heart of things. It was inevitable that his vivid temperament, quivering and thrilling from the overwhelming perception of outward beauty, should at first be dazzled and absorbed by this alone. The wonder of it is the rapidity with which Keats was advancing to a higher perception and to a deeper insight when the foreshadow of death chilled him. After Endymion there is constantly evident a steadily increasing perception of the relation of beauty to human emotion and to human life. Endymion himself is human hardly further than as an embodiment of passion, and with the exception of a single passage in book fourth there is little indication that upon the poet's attention had ever forced themselves the perplexities of thought, of aspiration, of despair, which baffle and agonize the life of man. In the later poems, and especially in the great odes, sympathy with humanity is seen welling up from beneath the too luxurious, blossom-jeweled herbage which had at first choked its spring; and whatever else the poetry of Keats might or might not have been had he lived, it seems certain that it at least must have been more and more deeply human. 1 V They What has been said indicates and pretty nearly completes the catalogue of the faults and limitations of Keats. were the faults of youth and a lavishly gifted genius. It 1 Lines 515-545: -"There lies a den, Beyond the seeming confines of the space Its own existence," etc. was in involuntary excusing of the generous faults of his own immaturity that he wrote to a friend: "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess." In writing Endymion he seemed to be carrying out the principle laid down by William Blake: "Exuberance is beauty"; and to be hindered by the multiplicity and richness of his own images from seeing beyond them. It may be added that in his portrayal of passion he perhaps never reached the age of discreet reserve; and that while there is naïveté as well as sensuality in it, there is more boyish lack of judgment than either. A graver fault than all others, however, is the unmorality of what he wrote. However convinced we may be that Keats would have developed the moral sense had he lived, and that he would have gone more deeply into the problems of human existence, the fact remains that his work must be judged for what it is. What it might have been may affect our estimate of the poet, but it cannot alter our judgment of the poetry. As it stands the work of Keats is lacking in ethical fibre. Talk of the 'message' of poetry has become so intolerably hackneyed that one hesitates to use the word, yet the truth is that this poet does not bring to his readers that message which mankind claims as its right from the seer gifted by nature with the divine insight of genius. Yet it is easy to lay too much stress upon this point, and it is still easier to fall into the profound error of confounding ethical quality with mere moralizing. It is no small thing to have taught the vital worth of beauty, and behind all that Keats wrote lies the insistence that beauty is truth because only through beauty can man reach to any theory of harmony between emotion and earthly existence. Whether he specifically and explicitly stated this, even to himself, is of less moment than whether he realized and embodied its deeper and wider significance. He certainly felt the relations of material loveliness to human life; he perceived also |