That he was overlanguaged at first there
can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back
to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly
plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is
attainable.
Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to discuss
until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us
that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to Keats, because his
poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time
he wrote them. But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness
of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features
of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. In the
parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the
past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he
learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of
externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an
action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man
behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself
to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to
listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his
intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning.
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