128 CONTRASTS OF METHOD mind's eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life. Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke. Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realised personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in Tintern Abbey and many passages of The Prelude and Excursion, with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of association and suggestion, to stand for and symbolise the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal identity was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realises and ponders over; what he does is with ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for nor attains, EVOCATION VERSUS EXPOSITION 129 as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation. CHAPTER V APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON ENDYMION 'Poems' fall flat-Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of publishers— New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse-Begins Endymion at Carisbrooke-Moves to Margate-Hazlitt and Southey-Hunt and Haydon -Ambition and self-doubt-Stays at Canterbury-Joins brothers at Hampstead-Dilke and Brown-Visits Bailey at Oxford-Work on Endymion-Bailey's testimony-Talk on Wordsworth-Letters from Oxford-To his sister Fanny-To Jane and J. H. ReynoldsReturn to Hampstead-Friends at loggerheads-Stays at Burford Bridge Correspondence Confessions-Speculations-Imagination and truth-Composes various lyrics-'O love me truly'-'In drear-nighted December' - Dryden and Swinburne - Endymion finished - An Autumnal close-Return to Hampstead. KEATS's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Every one of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these expectations after his manner:-'I have read your Sleep and Poetry-it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that will follow.' Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the Floure and the Lefe. Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in 'POEMS' FALL FLAT 131 Richard which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land: Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire? Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire. Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it.' Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve him. At length it appeared, in three successive numbers of the Examiner for July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick 132 REVIEWS BY HUNT AND OTHERS of the struggle. In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap of Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream.' Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at length, Constable's Scots and Edinburgh Magazine, and the Eclectic Review, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognises in the new poet a not wholly unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' The preachment of the Eclectic is still more pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. Sleep and Poetry, declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that he is indeed far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure, in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the remembrance.' Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him, had begun to |