The lack of proportion, which was the distinctive characteristic of Keats's early artistic method, had almost disappeared before the close of the four years that covered his active literary career. Perhaps his genius would ever have hovered over such an exquisite sense of the luxurious in animated imagery as would have made the chaste shapeliness of a balanced creation a difficult thing to him. But the tissues of his sensuous fantasy were being rapidly separated by keen experience. His earliest works sparkled with the many-coloured brightness of a prism; his latest works began to glow with the steady presence of a purer light. Scheme, in his first efforts, was often subordinated to incident, incident to image, image to phrase. It is significant that, in the days when Keats was yet within what he has named the 'Infant Chamber Of Sensation' in the mansion of life, he was more intoxicated with the delight of Spenser's allusion to the ‘sea-shouldering whale’ than with the Titanic sublimities of Macbeth. Shakespeare's own youth ran riot with a like wantonness. Before Marlowe's strong influence had shaped to artistic forms his abundant fancy, or yet the revelation of life's misery, pain, and oppression had come on him with a sad suddenness in the atmosphere of the Chamber of Thought, Shakespeare, like Keats, had revelled in mere love of poetic luxury. But signs are not wanting that even before the completion of ‘Endymion’ judgment was doing its work with Keats. The fulness of fantasy became greater, and yet the disposition unduly to yield to it became less. Then each after each of the few poems that followed— ‘Hyperion,' 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' the ‘Eve of St. Agnes'―revealed Keats's strengthening power over the fixed laws of proportion, and his increasing command over the universal sensuousness that ran wild in the days that had gone by.
We cannot see more clearly to what perfectness the artistic method of Keats had attained than by glancing at a poem which, though little known and less talked of, was one of the last and the loveliest he gave us. The ballad, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' is wholly simple and direct, and informed throughout by reposeful strength. In all the qualities that rule and shape poetry into unity of form, this little work strides, perhaps, leagues in advance of ‘Endymion.' That more ambitious work was in full sense poetic—soft and rich and sweetly linked. This harmonious gem is higher than poetic―it is a poem. As a tale of midday witchery, it is, though slight, as flawless as the first part of ‘Christabel,’ and immeasurably in advance of its own author's ‘Lamia.' As a work of complete beauty, there are few poems to match it:
‘O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering ?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
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