Note 531 — Chapter I · WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES. (continued 2)

It is with some misgiving, and after more than one change of mind, that I place Shelley’s great poetical twin (or rather tally) in a note only here. I have already more than once referred (ii. 280, 412) to Keats’s perhaps one-sided but very vigorous and remarkable verse-formulation of the protest against Neo-classicism; the two prefaces (especially the final one) to Endymion have been generally recognised by the competent as perhaps the most astonishingly just judgments which any poet has ever passed on himself: and the Letters are full of critical or quasi-critical passages of the highest interest. I myself have a sheaf of them duly noted; and some persons of distinction whom I know would admit them to the very Golden Book of Criticism. I hope, however, that my own judgment is not too much sicklied o’er with crotchet in holding that Keats’s criticism of himself and others is somewhat too spontaneous and automatic, somewhat too much of a mere other phase of his creation, to deserve the name of criticism properly so-called. He speaks of Shakespeare admirably, because he has the same quintessentially English cast of poetry that Shakespeare had. When he speaks of poetry in the abstract, as he does admirably and often, it is this poetry speaking of herself, and therefore speaking truly but not critically. Even in the wonderful remark (vol. v. p. 111., ed. Forman, Glasgow, 1901) on himself and Byron, “He describes what he sees: I describe what I imagine” (where he repeats Philostratus without in the least knowing it), the thing is not criticism: it is self-speaking. And beyond this he seldom goes, and is seldomer happy in his rare excursions. He might have become a critic, as he might have become almost anything good; but I do not think he was one.