I want the one rapture of an inspiration. 
  O then if in my lagging lines you miss
  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
  My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
  Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.’

[JUNE, 1919.

The Problem of Keats

It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney Colvin’s life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public:  first, because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness.  The impassioned and intimate sympathy which is felt—­as we may at least conclude—­by a portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the consciousness which stands in a right and natural order.  Keats is with us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin’s mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.  Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate Keats, Sir Sidney writes:—­

’He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics.  But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,—­that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical.  To that which lies behind and above politics and history to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and acutely sensitive.’

   [Footnote 6:  John Keats:  His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
   and After-fame.  By Sidney Colvin.  Second edition. (Macmillan.)]

We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring.  It may be that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.  We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.