_The Problem of Keats_


It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an
older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of
at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger
race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.
Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate
Keats, Sir Sidney writes:--

'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of
his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one
great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less
tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history
to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race,
he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and
acutely sensitive.'