I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those who dislike Keats and all his works.  But if we accept Keats and The Eve of St. Agnes, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspired them.  Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist.  His poems belong to the literature of the higher sensualism.  They reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.  He seems to have admired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to be squeezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception to this being his sister-in-law, Georgiana.  His famous declaration of independence of them—­that he would rather give them a sugar-plum than his time—­was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood.  Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather than with what the Victorians called “soul.”  His destiny was not to be a happy lover, but the slave of a “minx.”  It was not a slavery without dignity, however.  It had the dignity of tragedy.  Sir Sidney Colvin regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published.  It would be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication of La Belle Dame sans Merci. La Belle Dame sans Merci says in literature merely what the love-letters say in autobiography.  The love-letters, indeed, like the poem, affect us as great literature does.  They unquestionably take us down into the depths of suffering—­those depths in which tortured souls cry out almost inarticulately in their anguish.  The torture of the dying lover, as he sails for Italy and leaves Fanny, never to see her again, has almost no counterpart in biographical literature.  “The thought of leaving Miss Brawne,” he writes to Brown from Yarmouth, “is beyond everything horrible—­the sense of darkness coming over me—­I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing.”  And when he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend:—­

I can bear to die—­I cannot bear to leave her.  O God!  God!  God!  Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.  The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head.  My imagination is horribly vivid about her—­I see her—­I hear her....  O that I could be buried near where she lives!  I am afraid to write to her—­to receive a letter from her.  To see her handwriting would break my heart—­even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear.

Sir Sidney Colvin does not attempt to hide Keats’s love-story away in a corner.  Where he goes wrong, it seems to me, is in his failure to realize that this love-story was the making of Keats as a man of genius.  Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I fancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced into the later version of La Belle Dame sans Merci.  Sir Sidney is all in favour—­and there is something to be said for his preference—­of the earlier version, which begins:—­