IT is a difficult matter to criticise a religious poet from a purely
literary standpoint. There was a curious instance of this last year.
When the Keats Memorial was unveiled at Hampstead, Mr. Gosse spoke some
disrespectful words of Kirke White. There followed a short sharp
controversy in the _Standard_ on the subject. The defenders of Kirke
White's position as a poet, based their arguments, as far as I can
remember, on the grounds (1) that he was a good Christian, (2) that he
might have been Senior Wrangler, (3) that he was the victim of an early
death. The facts themselves, or rather the facts in combination, may
certainly be said to invest Kirke White with a romantic interest.
Southey, indeed, felt this so strongly that he wrote a memoir of the
young man, and edited his Remains. But any one who will now study Kirke
White's poems in themselves, as literature, without prejudice, must
inevitably come to the conclusion that they are worthless, and
disfigured by every fault that can be laid to the charge of poetry.
They are not even promising. They are tedious, grotesque, inharmonious,
dull. And yet they have a place in the Aldine edition of British poets.
No one would, of course, dream of classing Keble with Kirke White. Keble
was a wise, able, devoted man, narrow-minded, no doubt, and timid in
thought, if not in action. Not imaginative nor vivid, but intensely
affectionate, dutiful, and reserved; a lover of Nature, scenery,
friends, children, reflection; somewhat melancholy, no doubt, and not
growing in hopefulness as years went by--with little independence of
thought or character; but reverent, a lover of precedent, and authority,
and things established. Altogether a wholesome, valuable man, like
Telemachus in Tennyson's "Ulysses," of a type of which Englishmen may be
proud; but not a man who can be called interesting or romantic in any
degree; even Mr. Lock, who has written his life in a lucid style, and
with pious discretion, would admit that.
There is something eminently depressing about Keble's want of personal
ambition; no doubt, it was a triumph of grace over nature; but one would
have liked the triumph to have been a little more impressive. In the
celebrated canvass for the Provostship of Oriel, where the decision of
Newman and Pusey turned the scale, and gave it to Hawkins rather than
Keble, it is evident that Keble was not greatly disappointed; he
acquiesced too easily. In some men, this could almost be called
indolence, but in Keble we may call it modesty. It argues, however, a
certain want of fire, of intensity--and the same is the case with his
writings.
Keble never _lets himself go_; he is always checking and controlling the
impulse of song. And thus he spoke of his own poetry as a relief from
graver thoughts: "Poeticae vis medica," the healing power of poetry, he
called it; as something to which he could turn to distract and soothe
him, but a [Greek: _parergon_] nevertheless, not the business of his
life, not an overmastering impulse, an imperious need of
self-expression. This did not lead to the careful chastening and
correcting of his verse that one might expect. There have been poets, in
whom the sense of perfection was very strong, like Gray, who worked
rarely, slowly, painfully, producing a marvellous, jewelled masterpiece,
wrought out touch by touch. But there was nothing of this about Keble;
he was copious, fluent, uncritical; he was never fastidious, and allowed
much to go out under his name which was quite unworthy of an able man;
puerile, inelegant stuff; no one, we may say, was ever capable of more
extreme flatness than Keble reached in some of the poems in the _Lyra
Innocentium_; such as the compositions entitled "Irreverence in
Church," and "Disrespect to Elders," where it is asked that some good
angel may wait, "With unseen scourge in hand, On the Church path, and by
the low school door," in order to "write in young hearts Thy reverend
lore,"--very advisable, no doubt, but how suggestive of Bumble, and the
charity children, and the rod of office! A sense of propriety, we will
not say of humour, would have prevented such a bathos as this.
It is not, of course, contended that a sense of humour is, in the least,
part of the outfit of a poet. Shelley had none, yet was rescued from
bathos by enthusiasm. Wordsworth had none, and he wallowed in bathos.
The sense of humour is merely negative in a poet; it does not give a
poet sublimity, but it rescues him from puerility and absurdity. And so
into both of these faults Keble not unfrequently fell. In the _Lyra
Innocentium_ and the miscellaneous poems are many very lamentable
verses. In the Lyra indeed, there are few that are not lamentable. The
fatal blight of the book is that it is occupied throughout, not with
what one can learn from children, but with what one can teach them. It
upholds an impossible and undesirable ideal for childhood--the ideal of
the sainted infant, cheerful, high-principled, devout, obedient, but
neither natural nor child-like. Keble was very fond of children, but
only a childless man could have constructed so false a picture. This
false note vitiates the whole book; we are conscious of an under-current
of rebellion as we read it. We realise that, after all, we do not want
children to be such as Keble describes them. We do not wish them to be
"prostrate in their sin and shame," as in the poem of "Absolution" in
"Early Encouragements." And it is not poetry, whatever it may be, to
tell a child that
The Sunday garment, glittering gay,
The Sunday heart will steal away.
Even from the religious point of view, the book is pharisaical; it tends
to multiply offences, to create a fantastic and elaborate morbidity of
conscience fatal to the natural simplicity of childhood, that should be
so jealously guarded.
The following incident casts a curious light on Keble's taste. On a
stray piece of paper still preserved in his writing are the following
"principles in choosing and correcting hymns"!
(1) Always use "we" instead of "I," or nearly always.
(2) Insert as many touches of doctrine as may be.
(3) Under every head have at least one ancient or archaic hymn.
This is an interesting and characteristic fragment, because it
illustrates so well Keble's intense dislike to the personal, the
autobiographical element in poetry, that "self-revelation" which is so
much in demand at present. Secondly, it shows that he laboured under a
deep-seated error as to what was and what was not suitable material for
poetical treatment. The second principle would be bad enough if it
referred to composition, but when it deals with the correction of the
hymns of other authors it is unpardonable. The third principle
illustrates his reverence for antiquity and tradition.
We will now take the _Christian Year_ and we will say at the outset that
we do not propose to consider it, except incidentally, from the
doctrinal and hortatory point of view. We must first remember that
whatever be its merits and demerits, it is a book that has achieved a
popularity of an absolutely phenomenal kind. It is a book that has been
bought and read in England as Shakespeare, Bunyan's _Pilgrim's
Progress_, and _Robinson Crusoe_, and in America as the works of E. P.
Roe. In 1853 it was in its forty-second edition, twenty-five years after
its publication. In 1873, when the copyright expired, it had reached the
158th edition, and it is still in demand. For many years it took its
place, with High Church people, by the side of the Bible and Prayer
Book. It would be incredible, were it not true, that a book of
religious poetry, not suitable for public worship, the outcome of a very
definite school of thought, should have achieved such a success. It was
undoubtedly what the world wanted.
Now, let us first take some of its obvious demerits before we proceed to
discuss its merits. In the first place, it is often careless in form and
obscure in expression. It was consciously so, and Keble, probably
wisely, refused to alter and amend it, imagining that such afterwork
often sacrificed some of the freshness of inspiration. It was this
carelessness that made Wordsworth, who read it with great admiration,
say of it, "It is very good--so good that, if it were mine, I should
write it all over again."
The metrical schemes are often complicated and unsatisfactory. Many of
the poems are far too long, so as to be hardly lyrical. Such poems as
that for Advent Sunday, or the Second Sunday after Trinity, contain
between seventy and eighty heroic lines. Then, again, the cyclical
instinct which beset Keble, made him provide poems for every event,
every service of the Christian year. Thus we have Gunpowder Treason and
the Churching of Women celebrated, though it must be owned that, in
these cases, the poem has but the slightest connection with the subject.
Next--and this is a more serious point--the poems have been praised for
their frequent references to nature and the fidelity of their imagery;
after careful study of the Christian Year one is compelled to say that
this praise is not deserved: the imagery is of a purely conventional
character, and the observation employed of the most general kind. Dean
Stanley said, in praise of Keble's descriptive passages, that his local
and topographical details, whenever he spoke of the Holy Land, were
marvellously clear and accurate. But this is not really a compliment. It
shows that Keble was content to describe without his eye on the object,
and relying on the observation of others; and if the pictures of
landscapes that he had not seen are among his most felicitous passages,
we may well be excused for mistrusting his powers of observation when
dealing with the features of his own native country. The fact is that he
did not seize upon salient features; Matthew Arnold, in such a poem as
the "Scholar Gypsy," brings the Oxford atmosphere, the high gravelly
hills, the deep water-meadows, before the eye; but Keble's landscape is
the conventional English landscape, and has no precise definition, no
native air. For instance, in the poem for "Trinity Sunday" he says:
As travellers on some woodland height,
When wintry suns are gleaming bright,
Lose in arch'd glades their tangled sight;
By glimpses such as dreamers love,
Through her grey veil the leafless grove
Shows where the distant shadows rove.
Will any one say that there is the least precision about this picture?
What kind of a place is he describing? How different it is from such
verses as are found on every page of Tennyson, as
A full-fed river winding slow
By herds upon an endless plain,
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain.
Again, when Keble is describing the source of the moorland spring, some
of which is beautifully delineated, he says ("Monday in Easter Week"):
Perchance that little brook shall flow
The bulwark of some mighty realm,
Bear navies to and fro
With monarchs at their helm.
Or canst thou guess how far away
Some sister nymph, beside her urn
Reclining night and day,
'Mid reeds and mountain fern,
Nurses her store, with thine to blend?
This is pure conventionalism: the mixture of the reclining nymph and the
mountain fern is not felicitous. Constitutional monarchs do not steer
their own ironclads, and it is not picturesque even to pretend that they
do.
The following may stand as instances of his failure in precise
delineation. In the very first stanza of the book we have:
Hues of the rich unfolding morn,
That ere the glorious sun be born,
* * *
Around his path are taught to swell.
"Swell" is a property of bulk or sound, surely not of light? Again,
addressing the breeze, he says:
Wakenest each little leaf to _sing_.
This is purely conventional; how different from the "laurel's pattering
talk" of Tennyson. Again:
The torrent rill
That winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell,
Touched by the blue mist _well_.
How weak a word to end a stanza! Again:
The birds of heaven before us fleet,
_They cannot brook our shame to meet_.
How falsetto, how prejudiced a tone! And these are not isolated
instances: similar infelicities occur on every page.
Keble's whole view of Nature, it must be said, was onesided and wanting
in insight. Nature was to him nothing but a type of mild fervour and
uncomplaining patience. "All true, all faultless, all in tune," he says.
To the cruelty, the waste, the ugliness, that seem so inextricably
intertwined with natural processes, he diligently closed his eyes. Thus,
in No. 9 of the _Lyra Innocentium_ he propagates a host of innocent
superstitions as to the power of childhood over wild beasts. It surely
is not poetical to say of a baby:
The tiger's whelp encaged with thee
Would sheathe his claws to sport and play;
Bees have for thee no sting.
because it is not true.
Again, in the beautiful stanzas on the Second Sunday after Trinity, he
sees "the many-twinkling smile of ocean" up the glade. His only thought
is:
Such signs of love old Ocean gives
We cannot choose but think he lives.
An agreeable view, but hardly consistent with the vast and barren
cruelties which are as natural to the ocean as his genial presence.
We do not mean that a poet is bound to insist on the harsher aspects of
the case, but in a poet like Keble, who made so much of close communion
with Nature, of intimate musings, it is mere blindness not to take these
things into account. The fault, with Keble, was entirely in man's
corrupt heart; further than that he did not care to follow it; he
deliberately ignored the bewildering anomaly, the law of failure and
suffering that runs through Nature, as surely as through the history of
nations. How different a view it was from the view that Tennyson found
grow more and more intense with advancing years--that the world was, as
it were, the creation of some vast poetic heart, with its necessary
concomitant of failure and incompleteness.
Keble himself, in his "Praelectiones Academicae," or lectures delivered as
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in his review of the "Life of Sir
Walter Scott" (_British Critic_, 1838), enunciated a theory of poetry
which it will be well to examine. Dean Church said of the former work,
that it was "the most original and memorable course ever delivered from
the Chair of Poetry in Oxford"; but the statement does not imply any
very extravagant claims. Again, Bishop Moberly said that the book
exhibited "a power and delicacy at once so original and so just, as to
make these lectures one of the most charming and valuable volumes of
classical criticism that have ever issued from the press." Allowing for
all possible partiality, this is strong praise; but it is difficult to
see how it is justified. As to its critical value we may say at once
that no one was ever less fitted to be a critic than Keble. "What Keble
hated instinctively," says Newman, "was heresy, insubordination,
resistance to things established, claims of independence, disloyalty,
innovation, a critical and censorious spirit." That is an indifferent
outfit for a poet, and an impossible one for a critic. And even granting
to Keble a certain submissive acumen, a certain relish for masterpieces,
criticism which deals only with the panegyric of great masters, or the
classification of established reputations is surely the most valueless
of all criticism. If it is presented in attractive literary form it
merely diverts to itself the attention it professes to direct elsewhere!
If it is elucidatory, it is excusable: but Keble is not elucidatory.
The only true function of criticism is the judicial and tentative
selection of contemporary excellence. Artistic impulse, literary
progress, poetical production, have orbits of their own. Depreciative
criticism is nothing more than a kind of attendant _umbra_, and has
never done more than retard, if it has done even that, the popular
verdict. Dr. Johnson was perfectly right when he said, "Depend upon it,
sir, no man was ever written down but by himself." The criticism of the
_Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_, brilliant in form, retrograde in
spirit, made a few writers uncomfortable and gave a malicious pleasure
to a great number of readers: but poetical creation continued its calm
advance quite independently. Nay, they even overshot their mark and
called attention to the very writers they professed to crush. Had the
reviewers had their way, we should have heard no more of Keats,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Tennyson. The only valuable criticism is the
unprejudiced republican criticism, that dares to see what is good and
give instant encouragement to it. And Keble's is just the opposite, as
might be expected from the whole tone and habit of his mind. A cautious
appeal to authority, predetermined canons of taste and propriety--these
are his characteristics.
He enunciates the theory which would divide all poets into primary and
secondary poets. "Primary poets, according to Keble," says Principal
Shairp, "are they who are driven by overmastering enthusiasm, by
passionate devotion to some range of objects, or line of thought, or
aspect of life or Nature, to utter their feelings in song. They sing
because they cannot help it.... This is the true poetic [Greek: _mania_]
of which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged to poetry by any
such overflowing sentiment: but learning, admiration, choice and a
certain literary turn have made them poetic artists." Of the former kind
are Homer, AEschylus, Lucretius, Virgil, Pindar, Shakespeare, Burns,
Scott: of the latter, Sophocles, Milton, Dryden, Horace, and Theocritus.
This, in itself, is a somewhat singular selection of names. But what
absence of insight is there in Keble's judgment that the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ are the work of one hand, the former in youth, the latter in
later life. "The overmastering feeling of Homer," he says, "is _a sad
regret for the decay of the heroic age_, with its common national
feeling, its reverence for its leaders." What a fantastic judgment!
Homer the poet of a sad regret! Surely it is the very absence of all
critical or introspective or even _latent_ thought which gives the poems
their overwhelming charm.
The truth is that Keble's theory of poetry is practically an expansion
of Aristotle's Poetics, and is a narrow generalisation on wholly
insufficient grounds. Poets cannot be swept off the board entire, like
chessmen. There are many writers of verse, whose impulse to sing was
certainly original, and, according to Keble's definition, primary; yet
their work was essentially second-rate. Take such a poet as Southey: he
composed in a mood which he mistook for solemn inspiration; his poetry
was written in obedience to a high and sacred sense of vocation; he--in
a letter which cannot be called conceited, for it is written with a
serene and stately consciousness of greatness--placed his own poem of
_Madoc_ second only to Milton's _Paradise Lost_. Wordsworth
again--writing sometimes from a large and grave inspiration, sometimes
from a sense of duty--was he always a primary poet? The fact is that it
is almost entirely a matter of expression and style. Many men are poets
at heart, and have a vivid and eager consciousness of beauty, but only a
small percentage of these have the gift of transmuting it into language.
The truth is that secondary poets are mere literary men, _dilettanti_
verse-writers; and all poets who establish a real hold on the minds of
others, if it be, as Lovelace, by two lyrics only, or Shirley by one,
are primary poets. The thing cannot be done at all without a genuine
inspiration; but granted the inspiration, even the mood, the expression
is not always there.
Keble, says Principal Shairp, was, when tested by his own theory, a
primary poet--that is, his impulse and treatment were alike original.
The former of these statements may be granted with certain reservations:
_The Christian Year_ is an original book. The idea was an original one
and a happy one, though Heber had made a similar attempt. To assign to
each of the seasons of the Church a devotional commentary; to enrich the
austere and narrow melody of the ecclesiastical tone--running, like its
own plain-song, with a severe and plaintive monotony--with chord upon
chord of rich and suggestive philosophy, was no ignoble thought. Indeed,
the most apt comparison that can be found for Keble is to consider him
as a skilful musician, embroidering and enlarging with intricate
harmonies, a series of strict and uniform subjects. It is not, indeed,
the highest form of art, but it gives scope for the exercise of a wide
and tender skill. But Keble had no really original impulse; he required
to have his ground-bass found for him, and he could construct a descant
of admirable softness and delicacy, while underneath moved the solemn
and measured music of the ancient tradition.
As to the originality of the form which he employed, it is impossible to
agree with Principal Shairp; indeed, he vitiates his whole case by
comparing Keble to George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Was ever a more
inapt comparison made? To begin with, Keble was neither a mystic nor
even a symbolist. With George Herbert, and even more with Henry Vaughan,
the outward sign, the ordinance, the ornaments of religion were weak and
faint foreshadowings of some distant glory, some vast truth dimly
understood. But to Keble the form, the ceremony, the material detail of
service and sacrament were far too real and desirable. An instance of
this is to be found in the poem on Holy Baptism.
Where is it mothers learn their love?
In every church a fountain springs,
O'er which the Eternal Dove
Hovers on softest wings.
What a failure of human perception! It is said that Wordsworth, once
reading with admiration the above-mentioned poem, stumbled at the lines
I have quoted--the statement that mothers learn their love at the font.
"No, no," said the old poet, "it is from their own maternal hearts."
Henry Vaughan could never have been betrayed into so intimately unreal a
statement as this.
Again, as to technical treatment and form, it would be difficult to
select two poets so utterly and radically unlike as George Herbert and
Keble. The only point of resemblance is that they are both sometimes
unnecessarily obscure; but in George Herbert's case this arises from a
curious elaboration of expression, an intensity of compression, an
omission of logical steps, a tendency to cram a sentence into a word;
while in Keble's case, his obscurity arises from a kind of indefinite
garrulity, a tendency to divergence on side issues, a vapid displacement
of language.
The eye in smiles may wander round,
Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet,
But for the soul no help is found
Save Him who made it, meet.
What could be more inartistic than the disarrangement of the last two
lines? No, the strength of Keble lies in the gentle lucidity of many of
his finest poems, never in the arresting force of his epithets, never in
intricate and ingenious conceits of language.
The real prototypes of Keble in English literature are Gray and
Wordsworth. Keble on more than one occasion echoes the stately and
majestic cadence of Gray. Could such a stanza as the following have been
written without the example of the "Elegy"?
Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?
Not even the tenderest heart and next our own
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.
And again, from the "Second Sunday after Easter":
In outline dim and vast
Their fearful shadows cast
The giant forms of empires, on their way
To ruin: one by one,
They tower and they are gone--
Yet in the Prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.
.........
He watched till morning's ray
On lake and meadow lay,
And willow-shaded streams, that silent sweep
Around the banner'd lines,
Where, by their several signs,
The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep.
These sober, grave stanzas have something of the cadence of _The Bard_.
The resemblance to Wordsworth is more general, but it may be said that
the tone, the structure, the language of many of Keble's lyrics, the
background of Nature in which his thoughts enact their part, the
presence of skies and woods and waters, of which he is for ever
conscious, for which he is ever grateful, however inaccurately observed
and sketched, his innate love of old, traditional, wholesome things,
"our peace, our fearful innocence, and pure religion breathing household
laws"--all these make Keble a true Wordsworthian.
The qualities of style to which I propose to call attention in Keble
are--(1) simplicity; (2) propriety; (3) gravity--all three unpopular
qualities enough nowadays, and, therefore, perhaps all the more worthy
of study. (1) Simplicity, artistic simplicity, is a noble thing, and as
rare as it is noble; it must be beyond and above ornateness; anciently,
indeed, before literature had begun to knit her infinite combinations,
it was more attainable; but now to be unstudied is to be thin. Art must
now be "careless with artful care, affecting to be unaffected." Modern
simplicity must show the spareness of asceticism, not the leanness of
anaemia. It must arise from the repression of luxuriance, not poverty of
spirit; strict simplicity implies the rejection of all startling and
glittering tricks of style, and consequently it implies a lordly
patience in pursuit, with an indefatigable zeal for the selection of the
precise, the majestic, the supreme.
I do not say that Keble was always successful in the pursuit of
simplicity. But it was his object all through. Outside the _Christian
Year_, indeed, in the _Lyra Innocentium_ the studied avoidance of the
ornamental and the attractive, degenerated into vapid debility. But in
the "Morning" and "Evening" poems:
Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love,
Fit us for perfect rest above,
And help us, this and every day,
To live more nearly as we pray.
and--
If some poor wandering child of Thine
Have spurned to-day the Voice Divine,
Now Lord, the gracious work begin:
Let him no more lie down in sin.
have the true note of pure directness; how, in the middle of so sweet
and low a strain, such a stanza as--
The Rulers of this Christian land,
'Twixt Thee and us ordained to stand--
Guide Thou their course, O Lord, aright,
Let all do all as in Thy sight.
could be intruded, shows us how uncritical, how helpless Keble could be.
Again, consider such a poem as that for the "Second Sunday after
Easter," quoted above,
O for a sculptor's hand, &c.
and some of the stanzas on "St. Matthew's Day":
There are in this loud stunning tide
Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide
Of the everlasting chime,
Who carry music in their heart
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat;
and again for "Septuagesima":
There is a book who runs may read, &c.
and what is perhaps the finest of all his lyrics, that for "Whitsunday":
When God of old came down from Heaven,
In power and wrath He came:
Before His feet the clouds were riven,
Half darkness and half flame.
Around the trembling mountain's base
The prostrate people lay,
A day of wrath and not of grace,
A dim and dreadful day.
These have the authentic note of grandeur. They are lines that take the
heart and imagination captive, and linger in the memory unbidden. It may
be, of course, that some of them are consecrated by familiar use, by
being connected with moments of emotion and resolution. What an
immense, what a sacred power, these writers of liturgical poems wield!
but, on the other hand, such familiarity is apt to blind us also to
excellence of style. No, the claim of genuine, severe simplicity may be
sustained for Keble.
(2) Propriety.--I am using the word, of course, in the extended sense of
delicate appositeness, not as the reverse of impropriety.--Keble has a
wonderful power, without tricks of rhetoric, of touching in some natural
homely feeling with exquisite grace. How could the instinctive dislike
of change in familiar surroundings be more pathetically described than
in the poem for Whit Monday?
Since all that is not Heaven must fade,
Light be the hand of Ruin laid
Upon the home I love.
With lulling spell let soft decay
Steal on, and spare the giant sway,
The crash of tower and grove.
In such a mood it is so easy to be jealous, to be vindictive, to lose
the central thought in invective or unconvincing particularisation.
Again, in a frame of mind that easily drifts into morbidity and
despondency, with what pure patience he delineates the vague languors,
the unutterable discontents of the soft days of early spring, in the
poem for the third Sunday after Easter:
Well may I guess and feel
Why autumn should be sad,
But vernal airs should sorrow heal,
Spring should be gay and glad.
Yet as along this violet bank I rove,
The languid sweetness seems to choke my breath,
I sit me down beside the hazel grove,
And sigh, and half could wish my weariness were death.
And what could be more supremely delicate, more touched with a loving
humiliation, than the exquisite line (in the poem on Gunpowder Treason,
of all places!),
Speak gently of our sister's fall.
(3) Gravity.--This may be held perhaps to be almost a defect of quality;
but in Keble it has a positive value. He, a clerical Wordsworth, so to
speak, moved through the world, not indeed without some simple
merriment, but without a suspicion of the existence of that deeper and
larger mood that we name humour. He never cared to note the odd,
bewildering contradictions of humanity, its reckless absurdities, its
profound and intimate mirth. Keble's smile, and he is said to have had
one, was the grave, bright smile of the contented and joyful spirit, not
the secret and refreshing twinkle of the humourist. Indeed, the spirit
sickens to recall the pieces resolutely labelled humorous, which have
been shamefully made public among his miscellaneous poems. If these were
specimens of the wit in which his talk is said to have abounded, it is
a matter for deep thankfulness that so few reminiscences of his
conversation have survived.
Life was far too serious and momentous to Keble for him to have enjoyed
its pitiful contrasts. The only consolations indeed that can prevent a
spirit, bounded by so petty a horizon, from becoming sullen or bitter,
are perennial humour or intense seriousness. And Keble was as serious as
Shelley or Wordsworth. It is not a quality that needs defining by
quotation, for every single poem in the _Christian Year_ is penetrated
with it from the first line to the last. But in these days, when the
issues of life and death, the intricacies of character, the logical
truth of fatalism, are matters of after-dinner conversation, it is well
to live a little with a mind to whom they were absorbing and fearful
realities, too deep for laughter or tears. Keble's inmost instinct was
not love, or the sense of beauty, but a resolute and puritanical
sternness. He made the mistake, so common to religious spirits, of
supposing that the religious instinct is universally implanted, and that
whatever the varying quantities of intellect and capacity in an
individual, the spiritual faculties are evenly distributed.
Well, such an attitude, if unsympathetic and statuesque, is noble and
admirable. It is the temper in which great deeds are done and heroic
resolutions formed. It seals Keble one of that honourable minority who
clearly see the force of a moral ideal, maintain it in themselves, and
demand it from others; and if it is difficult to sympathise with it, it
is impossible not to admire it.
It may be urged, then, that on these three grounds Keble may be reckoned
among English poets. It will not be on these grounds that he will be
most read, but for his pure and sober religious spirit, about which
indeed much might be said that would be foreign to the purpose of this
essay. But it may be granted that he had a strong perception of beauty,
moral and physical, in spite of a certain rigidity of tone; and that he
had style, the gift of expression, an artistic ideal, without which no
purity of outlook, no exultant sense of beauty, can make a poet. But
even if his claim cannot be sustained, even if his writings were not
poetry, we may be thankful that for more than half a century there have
been spirits so high, so refined, so devoted, as to have been misled by
his spiritual ardour, the lofty sublimity of his ideal, as to mistake
his refined and enthusiastic utterance for the voice of the genuine
bard.