K E B L E 25 and during his five years of college tutorship had won the j affection of his pupils, some of whom afterwards rose to emi nence. But it was to pastoral work, and not to academic duty, that he thenceforth devoted himself, associating with it, and scarcely placing on a lower level, the affectionate discharge of his duties as a son and brother. Filial piety influenced in a quite unusual degree his feelings and his action all life through. It was in 1827, a few years after he settled at Fairford, that he published the Christian Year. The poems which make up that book had been the silent gathering of years. Keble had purposed in his own mind to keep them beside him, correcting and improving them, as long as he liv^d, and to leave them to be published only " when he was fairly out of the way." This resolution was at length overcome by the importunities of his friends, and above all by the strong desire of his father to see his son s poems in print before he died. Accordingly they were printed in two small volumes in Oxford, and given to the world in June 1827, but with no name on the title page. The book continued to be published anonymously, [ but the name of the author soon transpired. Probably . no book of poetry in this century has had a wider circu- i Lxtion. Between 1827 and 1872 one hundred and fifty- eight editions had issued from the press, and since the latter date it has been largely reprinted both by the original publishers and by others. The author, so far from taking pride in this widespread reputation, seemed all his life long to wish to disconnect his name with the book, and " as if he would rather it had been the work of some one else than himself." This feeling arose from no false modesty. It was because he knew that in these poems lie had painted his own heart, the best part of it; and he doubted whether it was right thus to exhibit himself, and by the revelation of only his better self, to win the good opinion of the world, on which he knew that a woe had been pronounced.
Towards the close of 1831 Keble was elected to fill the chair of the poetry professorship in Oxford, as successor to his friend and admirer, Dean Milman. This chair he oc cupied for ten years, probably the most eventful ten years which Oxford has seen since the Information. The pro fessor is required by statute to deliver at least one lecture during each of ths three terms that make up the academic year; and during Keble s tenure these lectures were still required to be in Latin. In the course of his professorship he delivered a series of lectures, clothed in excellent idiomatic Latin, in which he expounded a theory of poetry which was original and suggestive, and which grew naturally out of his own character and habits of mind. He looked on poetry as a vent for overcharged feeling, or u full imagination, or some imaginative regret, which had not found their natural outlet in life and action. It was a relief provided for those feelings which are apt to fill the mind too full, and to overburden the heart. This suggested to him a distinction between what he called primary and .secondary poets, the first employing poetry to relieve their own hearts, the second, poetic artists, composing poetry from .some other and less impulsive motive. Of the former kind were Homer, Lucretius, Burns, Scott ; of the latter were Euripides, Dryden, Milton. This view is set forth in an article contributed to the British Critic in 1838 on the life of Scott, and was more fully developed in two volumes of Prxlectiones AcaJemi<:a His regular visits to Oxford kept him in intercourse with his old friends in Oriel common room, and made him familiar with the currents of feeling which swayed the university. Catholic emancipation and the Reform Bill had deeply stirred, not only the political spirit of Oxford, but also the church feeling which had long been stagnant. Cardinal Newman writes, "On Sunday July 14, 1833, Mr Keble preached the assize sermon in the University pulpit. It was published under the title of National Apostasy. I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." The occasion of this sermon was the suppression, by Earl Grey s Reform ministry, of ten Irish bishoprics. Against the spirit which would treat the church as the mere creature of the state Keble had long chafed inwardly, and now he made his outward protest, asserting the claim of the church to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative. About the same time, and partly stimulated by Keble s sermon, some leading spirits in Oxford and elsewhere began a concerted and systematic course of action to revive High Church principles and the ancient patristic theology, and by these means both to defend the church against the assaults of its enemies, and also to raise to a higher tone the standard of Christian life in England. This design embodied itself in what is known as the Tractarian movement, a name it received from the once famous Tracts for the Times, which were the vehicle for promulgating the new doctrines. If Keble is to be reckoned, as Dr Newman would have it, as the primary author of the movement, it was from Dr Pusey that it received one of its best known names, and in Dr Newman that it soon found its genuine leader. To the tracts, which did so much to spread High Church views, Keble made only four contributions : No. 4, containing an argument, in the manner of Bishop Butler, to show that adherence to apostolical succession is the safest course ; No. 13, which explains the principle on which the Sunday lessons in the church service are selected ; No. 40, on marriage with one who is nnbaptized ; No. 89, on the mysticism attributed to the early fathers of the church. Besides these contributions from his own pen, he did much for the series by suggesting subjects, by reviewing tracts written by others, and by lending to their circulation the weight of his personal influence. In 1835 Keble s father died at the age of ninety, and soon after this his son married Miss Clarke, left Fairford, and settled at Hursley vicarage in Hampshire, a living to which he had been presented by his friend and attached pupil, Sir William Heathcote, and which continued to be Keble s home and cure for the remainder of his life. In 1841 the tracts were brought to an abrupt termina tion by the publication of Newman s tract No. 90. All the Protestantism of England was in arms against the author of the obnoxious tract. Keble came forward at the time, desirous to share the responsibility and the blame, if there was any ; for he had seen the tract before it was published, and approved of it. The same year | in which burst this ecclesiastical storm saw the close of Keble s tenure of the professorship of poetry, and thence forward he was seen but rarely in Oxford. No other public event ever effected Keble so deeply as the secession of his friend Mr Newman to the Church of Piome in 1845. It was to him both a public and a private sorrow, which nothing could repair. But lie did not lose heart ; at once he threw himself into the double duty, which now devolved on himself and Dr Pusey, of counselling the many who had hitherto followed the movement, and who, now in their per plexity, might be tempted to follow their leader s example, and at the same time of maintaining the rights of the church against what he held to be the encroachments of the state, as seen in such public acts as the Gorham judgment, and the decision on Essays and lievieivs. In all the ecclesiastical contests of the twenty years which followed 1845, Keble took a part, not loud or obtrusive, but firm and resolute, in maintaining those High Anglican principles with which his life had been identified. These ab sorbing duties, added to his parochial work, left little time for literature. But in 1846 he published the Lyra Inno- centium ; and in 18G3 he completed a life of Bishop Wilson. XIV. 4
