expected: "I have ... had the
resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear
all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass
two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a
dead man." I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury
common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able,
like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It
drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and
not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury;
meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt
recalls, "being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt
inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy."

IV

Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out
of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, "a
hollow image of fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me that hollow
image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the
exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats
but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long
escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of
his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that
it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in
Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he
celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not
merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but
because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his
lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the
world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. "Always," says
Boccaccio, "both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for
lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, "his
conduct was exceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates
him, finds "too much baseness" in his friend:

"And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,
Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;
But now I dare not, for thy abject life,
Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes."

And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because,
when she had taken her presence away, he