for ever.

Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the human race.

V

KEATS

1. THE VARIOUS KEATSES

Mr.

Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man of the Stratford bust. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After reading The John Keats Memorial Volume, consisting of appreciations in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little, one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of the Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on Melancholy was "a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and whistle

a tune as he strode along," and he discovers in three verses of The Pot of Basil "the immense indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia. To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic principles "account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms of poetry." Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. "John Keats," he tells us, "at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented, practised the theory of art for art's sake.... Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves. . . which it is now the fashion to call decadent." To Sir Ian Hamilton (who contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness to "jump down Etna for any great public good"; and did he not write:

The Patriot shall feel

My stern alarum and unsheath his steel?

And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall find this

personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.

Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the social scale by associating him with "the upper rank of the middle class"-an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a matter of fact, Keats's father was an ostler who married his employer's daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly Keats is the true

answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death," and the Keats who was "snuffed out by an article" similarly answer one another; and the Keats of The Fall of Hyperion is the perfect critic of the Keats of the Ode on Indolence, and vice versa. Keats was a score of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent, ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry, sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers, a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights, and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such as that he thought for a moment of abandoning Hyperion as a result of the hostile reviews of Endymion. Keats's life was not that of a planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was a man torn by conflicting demons-a marytr to poetry and love and, ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness.

He bowed before altars that, even when he