as a test of his
inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his
inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best
part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous,
sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a
loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his
emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human
mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of
incidents--partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet's own--which
should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take
possession of the reader's mind, for their own sake at the moment, and
for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we
find little in Keats's poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman,
passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at
times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of
mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an
adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first
leap in the dark, follows where Fortune leads him--and assuredly she
leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human
organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist.
Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far
as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner
does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love
with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana,
already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled
glimpse of moonlight. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but
of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately--or rather
with fatuous precipitancy--gives up the glorious goddess for the
sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her
proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may
possibly be true to the nature of a goddess--it is certainly not so to
that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself
different from womanhood--shall we say superior to it?

In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic
Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology
furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion's descending into the
bowels of the earth, p