Church Courts which shall decide ordinary cases of discipline. But the nation would never consent to deny recourse to the Final Court of Appeal. Among the reasons which make it impossible to do away with appeals is a fact which has been noticed above (page 447). Questions of discipline at present almost always involve questions of property. Even if a radical change were made, and the endowments of the Church of England were as much controlled by the Church Council as the funds of a Free Church are by its governing body, there must still be large changes in the law of the land before discipline can be disentangled from property. It would be absurd to legislate for the Church of England on the assumption that a sweeping change is to be made in the law which regulates all corporations.

Individual members of the Committee claim for the Church Council power to control the appointments which are now made by the Crown. Whether the whole Committee agree with them, or not, we find it hard to discover. But the reasons already assigned for disputing that claim will probably be thought sufficient.

The proposals made in the Report for regulating procedure are by no means clear. But one of them, if it is to be understood literally, involves a grave danger. A class of measures, not specified, might (it is suggested on p. 59) be dealt with by a Canon,' and so pass into law without any reference to Parliament. Now, in another place (p. 49) we are told that such Canons, having been assented to by representatives of the laity, 'should be regarded as having authority over all churchmen'; in other words, a breach of them would render laymen liable to excommunication. Little imagination is required to see what serious conclusions might be drawn. Suppose, for example, such a Canon were to decree excommunication against every man who married his deceased wife's sister, we should at once have a direct conflict between the National Church and the national conscience. But perhaps this danger is remote. For in the Report no provision is made for giving the Church

In a sketch of a legal constitution the word 'authority' must mean legal authority, for otherwise it has no real sense.

Council the right to make Canons. That right at present rests in the safe hands of Convocation.

All the legislative powers' of the proposed Council are, of course, only powers to pass measures which can have no legal validity until they have been sanctioned by Parliament. The general principle laid down in the Report appears to be quite sound. The Church Council is to formulate measures, with the advice of an Ecclesiastical Committee of the Privy Council. When formulated, measures are to be submitted to Parliament, which will either accept or reject them, but will not attempt the task of amendment. The exact procedure must obviously be determined by Parliament itself, so that the object may be fully secured. The Committee, true to its bias, describes that object as 'parliamentary control.' Those who regard establishment with less suspicion prefer to call it national cooperation.'

Some active and influential Churchmen are so much in love with the scheme that they are willing to pay the price of disestablishment for the sake of obtaining Life and Liberty.' If the contention of this article be just, they make a grave mistake. The proposed constitution, if such counterpoises as Crown patronage, a Court of Appeal, parliamentary determination of the franchise, were removed, would strongly favour the sectarian impulse. For the indirect election of lay representatives would ensure the exclusion of members opposed to the majority; and the dominance of ex officio members of the Lower House of Clergy would tend to suppress independence. Now, a sect may be pure and good, but its life is comparatively narrow, its thought contracted, its outlook provincial. England has sects enough; what she needs is a Church which represents and unites the Christianity of the whole people, a Church which is what Burke said it ought to be-the consecration of the State. And what religion needs is not a new 'intensive' and therefore exclusive Church, but an inclusive brotherhood, whose first aim is to advance the Kingdom of God on earth.

M. G. GLAZEBROOK.

Art. 9.-KEATS AND SIR SIDNEY COLVIN.
John Keats. His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics

and After-Fame. By Sidney Colvin. Macmillan, 1917. It might seem strange, at first sight, that Sir Sidney Colvin should have chosen as 'the chief subjects of his work on English literature, two men so unlike as the greatest of our romantic and the most obstinate and exclusive of our classical writers. Keats was a far greater man than Landor; but 'La Belle Dame' itself might almost as easily have been written by Landor as Æsop and Rhodope' by Keats. The difference in kind between the two men is as obvious as the difference in rank. The one wrote in the classical manner, at once by instinct, by principle, and by the life-long habit of scholarship. The other, both by nature and by training, lacked the classical instinct for clarity and selection and possessed in abundance the prodigality of phrase and susceptibility of imagination which are the characteristics of the romantic. Yet it is these two poets, apparently as unlike in genius as they were in fate, who have divided between them the chief part of the leisure which Sir Sidney Colvin has been able to give to literature.

Perhaps, after all, there is a link between them which transcends all differences. Sir Sidney Colvin has given even more of his life's work to art than to letters. May not the key to his devotion at once to Landor and to Keats be looked for in this direction? Have we had any two writers who were more conscious than these two that literature is a fine art whose productions are their own end? Milton was, of course, an incomparably greater artist than either; but he thought of himself not as an artist but as a prophet. Pope and Tennyson certainly, in their different ways, were extremely well aware that poetry is an art; but each aimed at producing effects on their readers other than, or additional to, those sought by the pure artist. There is no harm in that; and Tennyson is, of course, an artist of the very first rank. But, though his faults of taste and execution are so few, and those of Keats so many, yet he has not the temperament of an artist as Keats had it. Still less had Keats's contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley. An artist's primary instinct is the love of beautiful things and the

desire himself to create them. That instinct was in Keats as it is in few men from the very first; and it was no mere love of an abstract idea of beauty. The arts which, outside their own, most interested both Keats and Landor were those of painting and sculpture, which deal with the visible forms of things, not that other ethereal art of music which seemed the greatest of all to Plato, and I have no doubt to Shelley, just because it does not deal directly with objects of sense at all. The real subjects of Shelley's poetry (as sometimes of Wordsworth's) were ideas, abstractions, the invisible things and persons into which he constantly escaped from the actual men and women, the actual England and Italy, of his unsatisfied experience. Keats, on the other hand, instead of escaping from objects to ideas, habitually turned ideas into objective visions. Shelley's art, in fact, was always in danger from his speculative tendencies. Keats saw thought always clothed in form. His poetry is as strongly allied to painting and sculpture-especially painting-as Shelley's is to music, though he never turned alliance into absorption or confusion as Shelley sometimes did. So with Landor. The best of his work is marked by the strength and beauty, and the restraint of pure form, which are the peculiar notes of great sculpture. Like Keats, he must have visible form; he has no Shelleyan desire to escape into the invisible and immaterial. Sir Sidney Colvin has himself well said of him: He had little interest in any ideas but those which could be perfectly grasped and exhibited in precise lineaments like the shapes of antique gods.'

There, then, is the probable link which unites Sir Sidney's double and at first sight dissimilar service. In his private work, as in his official, to say nothing of his happiest friendships, he has loved painting and sculpture and artistry, and served those who shared his love. That service he is continuing in the midst of the present world-cataclysm, in which, as he says in his Preface, age debars him from rendering any effectual war-service. He need have no regrets or scruples. The intellectual life of the country is of necessity sadly impoverished by the imperious demands of the war to which none responded with more instant ardour than those who most loved art and letters, Whether that response was

unconscious instinct, or the fruit of the high lessons learnt in the finest of human schools, or the result of a conviction that for art and letters the very breath of life is liberty, it was freely made, and a proud but heavy price has been paid for it. In a country so indifferent to the things of the mind that the first public buildings it diverts from their ordinary business are the museums of science and art, a veteran of letters can assuredly do no better service in time of war than in helping to keep those things alive. Certainly there will be many fighters at the front and many toilers at desks and in workshops at home who will be grateful to Sir Sidney Colvin for this masterly and authoritative Life of Keats.

Keats is an immortal; and, just for that reason, each new generation will be hungry to hear his voice. But it will not be quite the self-same voice that each hears, any more than Virgil's generation or Dante's could hear the mellowed and ripened sound, rich in a hundred associations, which we hear now. So Sir Sidney's critical study, admirable and delightful as it is, and conclusive for this generation at least, may need to be done again in time to come. But the biography which he has given us is in all likelihood the final one. It is not with Keats as it was with Shakespeare or Milton, the facts of whose lives were left, in large part, to be discovered centuries after their deaths. There is no probability in Keats's case that any new facts of importance remain to be discovered; and with the old it will probably turn out that Sir Sidney has dealt once and for all in this book. In industry and learning, in fine critical perception, sympathy and judgment, in lucidity and distinction of writing, there are in our language very few literary biographies comparable to it. It cannot, of course, pretend to any rivalry with books quickened by the force of personal intimacy. Sir Sidney has only known two persons who ever spoke to Keats. Nor can his book lay claim to the qualities of the best of those masterly studies which are called Johnson's 'Lives.' But among books of its own orderfull-dress biographies critical and personal, written in possession of all the material and long after the event-it would be difficult to find its rival.

There is not enough material for a real Life in the case of Shakespeare. Masson made his Life of Milton'