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 self-abandonment was not vulgar.  It may have been in a sense immoral:  he was an artist who practised the philosophy of exquisite moments long before Pater wrote about it.  He abandoned himself to the sensations of love and the sensations of an artist like a voluptuary.  The best of his work is day-dreams of love and art.  The degree to which his genius fed itself upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was the Ode on a Grecian Urn.  His magic was largely artistic magic, not natural magic.  He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feel that they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they were to Shelley; rather they seem like figures copied out of his friends’ pictures.  Consider, for example, the picture of a nymph who appeared to Endymion:—­

    It was a nymph uprising to the breast
    In the fountain’s pebbly margin, and she stood
    ’Mong lilies, like the youngest of her brood. 
    To him her dripping hand she softly kist,
    And anxiously began to plait and twist