’Then saw I a wan face
  Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch’d
  By an immortal sickness which kills not;
  It works a constant change, which happy death
  Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
  To no death was that visage; it had past
  The lily and the snow; and beyond these
  I must not think now, though I saw that face. 
  But for her eyes I should have fled away;
  They held me back with a benignant light
  Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
  Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
  Of all external things; they saw me not,
  But in blank splendour beam’d like the mild moon
  Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
  What eyes are upward cast....’

This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats’s evolution.  It stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded as obedient to its own inward law.  Moneta was to him the discovered spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself.  In her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea if you will, not hypostatised but immanent.  Before this reality the poet is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings.  He, too, is the prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.

Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to express, came the end of Keats the poet.  None have passed beyond him; few have been so far.  Of the poetry that might have been constructed on the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture, each after his own image:  we do not know the method of the ‘other verse’ of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united contraries.

We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view.  The angles of observation are different.  The angle at which we have placed ourselves is not wholly advantageous—­from it Sir Sidney’s book could not have been written—­but it has this advantage, that from it we can read his book with a heightened interest.  As we look out from it, some things are increased and some diminished with the change of perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir Sidney.  In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is obscured.  We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are proud to share.

[JULY, 1919.

Thoughts on Tchehov