security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware methinks of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief I have composed the following poem." And by that belief, it may be added, a large part of Shelley's finest work was inspired, from The Revolt of Islam itself to the closing chorus of Hellas

1

"The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return

and the magnificent Ode to the West Wind, with its final significant question,

"O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Yet almost alone among the English poets of the time, Shelley retained the warm and enduring faith in those large principles of progress of which for him the revolution itself was only a single expression. A truer utterance of the general feeling of the time may therefore be found in almost any one of his contemporaries than in this inspired prophet of Humanity, the singer of Prometheus Unbound.

1 Preface to The Revolt of Islam.

II.

We have undertaken this necessarily superficial analysis of the larger conditions of life and thought in the years immediately following the revolution, and of the connection of the literature of the epoch with such conditions, in order that we may be the better able to appreciate the purely negative relations borne to contemporary movements by the poet with whom our present study is concerned. For us, the most significant thing about John Keats is, that living at such a time of travail, uncertainty, social dissatisfaction, and spiritual craving, his writings should nevertheless show scarcely a trace of the manifold influences at work in the world around him. The struggle and confusion, the discord, doubt, and despair of his age cast no deep shadow across the glowing pages of his verse. We go to him for no expression of the inner life of the time-for no revelation of its larger tendencies and currents. Such expression, such revelation, we seek in different ways in Byron and Shelley, in Coleridge and Wordsworth. Keats dwells apart, in the world, but scarcely of it.' He is pre-eminently a poet of evasion, out of touch and harmony with the things among

1 It should be noticed in establishing the position of Keats that only one other important poet of the period remained untouched by the ideas of the revolution and the reaction which followed it. This was Samuel Rogers.

which it was his misfortune to be thrown, and seeking an escape through the imagination from the hard and sharp realities of modern life.

One of the broadest and ablest of our living critics has accentuated the important fact that in the early years of the present century "the movement party in England, and England's party of progress, remained separated by a great gulf." This was, indeed, as the writer terms it, an “unfortunate circumstance"; but it was all the same an inevitable consequence of the conditions of the time. The movement party, represented by such hard-hearted, clear-sighted, unsentimental men as Bentham, Austin, and the elder Mill, had carried forward in direct line the dominant utilitarian traditions of the eighteenth century, taking, as the younger Mill himself stated, the French philosophes of that century as examples for their imitation. The poetry of the period, on the other hand, was, as we well know, a set protest against the entire body of those traditions, and an immediate appeal to that emotional side of life which they had systematically set at nought. Hence, for the time being, the complete alienation of philosopher and poet, and hence, moreover, the prophetic significance of the influence exercised upon the later thought of John Stuart Mill-a man nourished in younger life upon the dry Benthamite dictum that all poetry is misrepre

1 Edward Dowden, Studies in Literature, p. 33.

sentation-by the study of Wordsworth and Shelley.

Now in Keats we have the extreme reaction against the whole spirit of the eighteenth century. He was in the more general sense the most romantic among the great romanticists, because he detached himself most completely from all those elements in the life of the modern world which were the partial results of the outworkings of the forces of common sense and enlightenment. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth, and certainly neither Byron nor Shelley, was able to separate himself so absolutely and at every point, as did Keats, from all the widely ramifying developments of those influences which were actually at work in their midst; and therefore their romanticism, so far as its spirit and essence were concerned, was not really so thorough-going or consistent. This fact must not be lost sight of in the consideration of Keats's relation to his time.'

1 Attention may here be directed to the well-known lines in Sleep and Poetry in which, after unfolding his ideas of the true poetic spirit, Keats attacks the formal verse of the DrydenPope school. Himself requiring space for the full play of his exuberant and unchecked imagination, he broke down the model of couplet-structure perfected by Pope, and accepted by all Pope's successors (even so far as they employed the couplet at all, by those of the early romantic reaction). In this, as it would seem, he took the lead indicated by Leigh Hunt in his Story of Rimini, though he carried freedom to an excess of license which Hunt himself found it impossible to endorse (see Hunt's review of the 1817 volume, reprinted in Forman's edi

It should be borne in mind, however, that when we undertake to describe Keats's mental attitude towards modern tendencies, practical or speculative, as an attitude of evasion, the merely negative elements in this statement are those which point towards the most significant results. This fact has indeed been anticipated in what we have already said, but it is important enough to justify a word of reemphasis. Keats's unsympathetic contact with the modern world involved little of active protest or antagonism. If he could not enter into the spirit of his age, he did not, on the other hand, habitually set himself against it; if he was not inspired by the revolutionary fervor of Shelley, neither was he driven to expostulate with Wordsworth, or to jeer with Byron. Place Keats alongside of his characteristic antithesis among our great modern writers, Thomas Carlyle, and his position at once by contrast becomes clear. A spirit of intense revulsion from the enlightenment of the century and all its works certainly characterized poet and prophet alike; but this spirit of revulsion revealed itself in totally different ways. Carlyle faced

tion of Keats's Works, Vol. i., appendix). Keats studied Dryden's versification carefully, and with considerable advantage, before he wrote Lamia; and the marked contrast on the formal side between this later poem, and the "slip-shod" Endymion is exceedingly instructive. The reader will remember Byron's unmeasured denunciation of Keats on the score of the latter's antagonism to Pope.