the ugly facts by which he found himself beset with dogged courage and unflagging energy; he wrestled with all the most vital issues of his age; poured out the vials of his wrath upon the new science, the new industrialism, the new democracy; and raised his voice-the voice of one crying in the wilderness—against the shams and simulacra, the faithlessness and godliness of modern life. Keats, on the contrary, simply left these things alone. He turned his back upon a world which was thus for Carlyle the arena of a mighty spiritual conflict. The changing order of the nineteenth-century world absorbed all Carlyle's attention. By Keats it was simply ignored. The one pulled with a giant's strength against the stream of tendency. The other gathered flowers upon the bank, and carelessly let the turbid torrent roll by. And here it should be remembered that in Keats's own view of the matter, it was no part of the poet's duty or function to assume the prophetic rôle, and undertake the guidance and leadership of men. For Carlyle, the poet was a direct emissary of God, a vates, a seer. "Every great poet is a teacher," wrote Wordsworth; "I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing." Shelley, as might be expected, was consistent in his assertion of the poet's high responsibilities and far-reaching influence. "Poets," he declares, in the closing passage of his impassioned Defence," are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." With Arnold and Lowell and Browning poetry has this same vital quality, this direct bearing upon the immediate and actual things of life; while no reader is likely to forget the young Tennyson's large claim, in the poet's behalf, to divinely-given insight and power: "The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love. He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, The marvel of the everlasting will Before him lay." But Keats's interpretation of his art had nothing sacerdotal or apocalyptic about it. He did not pose as a seer, nor did he ever show the slightest tendency towards the didacticism upon which Wordsworth fixed his mind. "To justify the ways of God to men"; to throw light upon the entangled problems of human life; to sound the battle-cry of progress, firing the strong with fresh enthusiasm, and bringing the stragglers into line and step-all this was alien to his view of the gay science and its place and influence in our noisy, bustling world. Poetry for him meant relief from life's strain, sunshine lighting its darkness, music amid its harsh discord and confusion-" a thing of beauty," and, as such," a joy forever." His highest purpose was to keep unfurled 66 Love's standard on the battlements of song " 1 his accepted ideal, the love of "the principle of beauty in all things"; the noblest conceivable result of poetry the gentle moving away, from time to time, of the pall by which our spirits are so constantly darkened. Thus he could write in remonstrance to Shelley, poet and would-be reformer-" You will, I am sure, forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore." Life has "burrs and thorns" in plenty, but it is the business of poetry to set them aside, not to feed upon them. Its great end is 'that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man"; 1 Endymion, Book ii. 2 and that end accomplished, the poet's proper work is done. This inspiring principle of all his writing reaches something like definite formulation in Sleep and Poetry, and in the following passage is given perhaps its dis tinctest enunciation: "Yet I rejoice: a myrtle fairer than Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone, Recoiling thus from both the temper and the mood of modern life, Keats consciously left the obstinate questions that came up for considera tion, the ancient problems in their modern shapes, the party-cries, the distracting tumult of practical affairs, the fierce death-grapple of old and new in religion, morality, society, to take care of themselves; while, far from the rush and turmoil, he lingered in his fairyland of fancy, in the bower he had fashioned for himself, "Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing." III. Before passing on to inquire a little more closely into Keats's temperamental peculiarities as self-revealed in his work, we may here pause a moment to notice the ob Ivious fact that the characteristic trend of his genius is shown in the broadest possible way both by his habitual choice of material, and by his treatment of such material when chosen. The themes of by far the greater proportion of his poems belong, it need hardly be said, to the past-to the "beautiful tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece," or the literature and legend-lore of the romantic middle ages. The texture of his work is thus not woven out of the stuff furnished by his own time. All these themes are, 1 1 Letter to his sister, Fanny, Sept. 10, 1817 (Forman's edition, Vol. iii., p. 78). |