Aovcmbcr 15, 1917 
LAiNU & WATER 
17 
Etfc anti itelters 
By J. C. Squire 
Keats's Faiiie 
AHL'XDKKD \Cdis ago Kt-ats's first voluiuo of 
poetry was published ; and Sir Sidney Colviu's 
new I.ije (MacmiUan, i8s. net), which, Immanly 
speaking, nuist be tlie definitive biography of the 
jii)c-t, is H " centenary tribute," which renders any other 
unnecessary. That first volume, which appeared when Keats 
was twenty-one. contained, as every critic has observej, 
much immature and much bad work. Lhics like 
of liiin wliose, nan«4 tn cv'iy heart's a solace 
High-minded and unbending William Wallace, 
which Sir Sidney Colvin does not ([uote, beat on their uwu 
t'round J.eigh Hunts 
■Jhe two di\inesL tilings tlie world has got 
A lovely woman ni., a rural spot, 
which he does quote But when evirythiny possible lias been 
extracted to illustrate the tremendous progress Keats made in 
two years, the fact remains that there were scattered every- 
wh(!re in the book, passages which might have shown any one 
but a dolt tliat this w^'^fi great poet in the making, and that 
it contained, moreover. To One who has been long in city pent: 
Sleep and Poetry, and, above all, the Sonnet on Chapman's 
Homer. 
***** 
The reception that it got is notorious. " The book." 
says Cowden Clarke. " might have emerged in Tiinbuctoo 
with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. The whole 
community a;* if by comjKict. seemed determined to know 
nothing ahout it " This is a slight exaggeration There was 
a little sale ; and this is how the publisher alludes to it : 
By far the greater number of jjersons who have purchased 
it from us have foinid fault with it in such plain terms, that 
we have in many cases offered to take it back rather than be 
annoyed with the ridicule which ha.s, time after time, l>een 
slioweretl upon it. In fact, it was only on Saturday last that 
we were under the mortification of having our own opinion ot 
Its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us 
he considered it " no better than a take-in." 
The critks, however, said little about it (except that Keats 
was unclean) ; their efforts were reserved for Endymion. 
which came out next year \Vith this the friends of " that 
imiiible but infatuated young bardling, !!ister'Jolm Keats,'.' 
<ould no longer complain tliat he was entirely ignored. 
Blackwood led the pack, the Quarterly and the British Critic 
following. Here is Blackwood s peroration : 
And now, good morrow to the "Muses' son of Promise " ; 
as Uff the feats he«Kt " may .^o," as we do not pretend to 
>;iy Iike-himself, "SSjusc of my native^ land am 1 inspired," 
wc .shall adhcp- .i«riiif safe old rul.e of pauca verba. \Vc 
venture to ma! lall prophe.sy, that his lxx>kseller will 
not a second t;: . lure ^50 upon anything he can write. 
It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary 
than a starved pcjet : so back to the shop Mr. John, back to 
" plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," etc. But, for Heaven's 
sake, young Sangrado, he a little more sparing of extenuatives 
and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your 
poetry. 
This passage is well known What is not so generally realised 
is the slowness with which the appreciation of him spread 
even after his death. He had died, and Shelley's great 
eleg}' on him was under review, when Blackwood resumed 
with a reference to him as 
a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy 
trade of Cockney-poetry- and has lately died of a consumption 
after having written two or three little books of verse much 
neglected by the publib. 
A comic analysis of Adonais, with jiaiodies on it followed. 
A few men knew what Keats was ; I.amb, Shelley, Leigh 
Hunt and Keats's young friends, Reynolds, in a later letter, 
said : " He had the greatest power of poetry in him, of •any- 
one since Shaktspeare" Kight years after his death a group 
of young Cambridge men. including Tennyson, Fitzgeraltl, 
Sterling, Arthur Hallam and Monckton.Jiilncs— Browning, 
as a boy, had already been inspired by nim~were the first 
group of enthusiasts who ]y.\d not known liim in the 
flesh. But the pmidits still remained secure in their crassncss. 
Jt was in 18,5.' t hat the (Jitartcrly, rcA-iewing Tennyson's poems, 
wrote of him as 
a now prodigy o( genius— another ami biiglilcr star cif a 
;jalax>-. or milfiv way of iXHitry, of which the latiiented Keats 
'.vas the harbinger. 
Jeers at Keats's failure w'lth tire public were still well-founded 
in f.ut. Koatb had been dead ninet»'.en vears when the first 
reprint of his collected poems appeared : and tli^is went into 
remainders with Browning's Bells and Pomegr donates. Four 
years after this Lord Jeffrey, still flourishing, obser\ed that 
Keats and Shelley were falling into oblivion, and that of tht 
])oets of their age, Campbell and Kogers were those destincc. 
for immortality. Lord Houghton's edition of 1848 marki 
the date of the general recognition of Keats as one of the 
greatest of our poets. The maintenance and increase' of his 
fame since then cannot be described in detail. " Keats." 
^aid Tennyson, " would have beconu' one of the \ery greatest 
of all ])oets had he lived. At the time of his death tliere wiJs 
apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself 
out ; his keen poetical inst\nct was in full process of de\elop- 
ment at the time. Each new cfiort was a steady advance ou 
that which had gone before. With all Shelley's splendid 
imagery and colour, I find a sort of lenuity in his ])oetry." 
.Again,"" Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would lia\e 
been, if he h^d lived, the greatest of us." And the noblest 
tribute of all is the Essay by the present Pcet Laureate, 
indisputably the finest thing, that has been written about him, 
and one of the most penetrating, direct and — there is no 
other word — business-like critical studies in existence. 
" li." concludes that essay, 
if I have read him rightly, he would be pleased, could he sc^ 
it, at the universal recognition of his genius, and the utter 
rout of its traducers ; but much more moved, stirred he would 
be to the depth of his great nature to know that he was under- 
- stood, and that for the nobility of his character his name was 
loved and esteemed. 
And the words are all the more impre.ssive as they end a study 
which is utterly unsparing in its detection and analysis of 
Keats's faults. 
***** 
" High spiritual vision," " the nobility of his character"^; 
the phrases will still sound strange to those who take their 
conception of Keats from erroneous but hard-dying legend. 
He died of consumption ; he wrote, when dying, love-letters 
which in places are morbid, though they are not, as a whole, 
so' ■' deplorable "as is usually made out; and Byron gave 
universal currency to the delusion that he was killed by hostile 
criticism. This combination of facts has perpetuated the 
notion that he was a neurotic weakling with a hectic genius. 
It is all hopelessly w rong. Those who knew him thought him 
the manliest of "men. Anecdotes like that of his hour's 
successful fight with a butcher twice his size whom lie had 
caught ill-treating a cat. are unnecessary as corroboration : 
for corroboration is present everywhere in his letters, and 
frequently in his pioems. A man who was killed by scurrilous 
••blockheads of reviewer* woiild^bv a.wcakliiig- j3ut- except 
for the fact that attacks on him made it impossible to eaiii 
money by his poetry — he was indifi'erent to what was sai^l 
about him. Every great poet knows his own capabilities'; 
and Keats's opinion of those who were vilifying him was 
briefiy expressed : " This is a mere matter of the moment ; 
I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." 
He was not over confident. He discriminated between his. 
good and his bad work : " Aly ideas with respect to it " 
ithut is, Kndymion) he said, " are very low " ; and, a little 
later. " I am three and twenty with little knowledge, and 
middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm 
1 have been cheated into some fine passages ; but that is not 
the thing" But the only thing he was uncertain about was 
whether he had done anything good enough to show what 
was in him : 
If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immoi^al work 
behind me — nothing to make . n.y friends proud of my 
memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all 
things." and if I had time I would have made myself 
remembered. 
Of that he was^never doubtful. And he knew accurately the 
conflicting but not irreconcilable tendencies witliin himself ; 
the tendency to luxuriate and the tendency to " ])hilosophise." 
At the beginning th.e former predominated. He wandered, 
often led by the rhyme, through mazes of soft and luscious 
imagery ; he held that the greatest poet was he who said the 
most " heart-easing " things ; and the list of his favourite 
adjectives. comi)iled by ?-^r. Bridges, illustrates very strikingly 
the languorous (lualitv of his dreams and desires. But hd 
was not made to be a slave to these : in the Odes and /lyf>criun. 
the richness and vividness and sweetness remained, but Ihe 
tropical lu.vuriance had been iiruned, and the native strength 
of his character and intellect, the clarity of his imagination, 
the absolute accuracy of jihraseology of which he was capable, 
aouear with a splendour that makes these poems incomparable 
