guage of formal
beauty. But it is in formal beauty--the formal beauty especially of the
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_, which has never been surpassed in
literature--that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans,
not among the prophets. Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praise
of him will not be appreciation. It will be but a sounding funeral
speech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, the
greatest boast of whose life was: "I have loved the principle of beauty
in all things."

2. THE MATTHEW ARNOLD VIEW

Matthew Arnold has often been attacked for his essay on Shelley. His
essay on Keats, as a matter of fact, is much less sympathetic and
penetrating. Here, more than anywhere else in his work, he seems to be a
professor with whiskers drinking afternoon tea and discoursing on
literature to a circle of schoolgirls. It is not that Matthew Arnold
under-estimated Keats. "He is with Shakespeare," he declared; and in
another sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks with
Shakespeare." One may disagree with this--for in natural magic Keats
does not rank even with Shelley--and, at the same time, feel that
Matthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation.
He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did not
sufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passion and
courage and railing and ecstasy of which the poems are the expression.
He was a little shocked; he would have liked to draw a veil; he did not
approve of a young man who could make love in language so unlike the
measured ardour of one of Miss Austen's heroes. The impression left by
the letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing." After
quoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment:--

One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter
of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment
something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up,
without the training which teaches us that we must put some
constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is
the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice, which one might
hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.

Applied to the letter which Arnold had just quoted there could not be a
more foolish criticism. Keats was dogged by a curious vulgarity (which
produced occasional comic effects in his work), but his s