; the most enamoured victim.
From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love,
we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his
Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of
it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old
polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a
born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this
congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World,
there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothing
but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!

His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event
in life, was "pluralistic." He did not ask that things should come in
upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked
that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or
meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for
him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One
he followed.

Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less
_moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was
Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!

If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic";
but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical
nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too
passionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material
bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken
strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions
of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption
wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging
his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should
have been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all the
magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned,
enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious
girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated,
with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges that
insolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Man
and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral
Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the
Upper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences,
interrupting his desperate Pur