But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in the version he published in Leigh Hunt's Indicator to:—
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
and so on. Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike "knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt. This does not mean that the "knight-at-arms" version is not also beautiful. But, in spite of this, I trust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen to Sir Sidney Colvin's appeal to banish the later version from their editions of Keats. Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versions just as it ought to contain both versions of Hyperion.
Nothing that I have written will be regarded, I trust, as depreciating the essential excellence, power, and (in its scholarly way) even the greatness of Sir Sidney Colvin's book. But a certain false emphasis here and there, an intelligible prejudice in favour of believing what is good of his subject, has left his book almost too ready to the hand of those who cannot love a man of genius without desiring to "respectabilize" him. Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats—his fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however. He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to his citizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love. Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting of Hyperion opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to live in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against the English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal beauty. But it is in formal beauty—the formal beauty especially of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, which has never been surpassed in literature—that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans, not among the prophets. Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praise of him will not be appreciation. It will be but a sounding funeral speech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, the greatest boast of whose life was: "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things."
2. The Matthew Arnold View
Matthew Arnold has often been attacked for his essay on Shelley. His essay on Keats, as a matter of fact, is much less sympathetic and penetrating. Here, more than anywhere else in his work, he seems to be a professor with whiskers drinking afternoon tea and discoursing on literature to a circle of schoolgirls. It is not that Matthew Arnold under-estimated Keats. "He is with Shakespeare," he declared; and in another sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare." One may disagree with this—for in natural magic Keats does not rank even with Shelley—and, at the same time, feel that Matthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation. He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did not sufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passion and courage and railing and ecstasy of which the poems are the expression. He was a little shocked; he would have liked to draw a veil; he did not approve of a young man who could make love in language so unlike the measured ardour of one of Miss Austen's heroes. The impression left by the letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing." After quoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment:—
One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice, which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.
Applied to the letter which Arnold had just quoted there could not be a more foolish criticism. Keats was dogged by a curious vulgarity (which produced occasional comic effects in his work), but his self-abandonment was not vulgar. It may have been in a sense immoral: he was an artist who practised the philosophy of exquisite moments long before Pater wrote about it. He abandoned himself to the sensations of love and the sensations of an artist like a voluptuary. The best of his work is day-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itself upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was the Ode on a Grecian Urn. His magic was largely artistic magic, not natural magic. He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feel that they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they were to Shelley; rather they seem like figures copied out of his friends' pictures. Consider, for example, the picture of a nymph who appeared to Endymion:—
It was a nymph uprising to the breast
In the fountain's pebbly margin, and she stood
'Mong lilies, like the youngest of her brood.
To him her dripping hand she softly kist,
And anxiously began to plait and twist
The gestures of the nymph are as ludicrous as could be found in an Academy or Salon picture. Keats's human or quasi-human beings are seldom more than decorations, but this is a commonplace decoration. The figures in The Eve of St. Agnes and the later narratives are a part of the general beauty of the poems; but even there they are made, as it were, to match the furniture. It is the same in all his best poems. Keats's imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men and women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arras and golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we see them, charming figures of love-sickness. Similarly, in Lamia, we may remember the name of the serpent-woman's lover with difficulty; but who can forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of her couch and of her palace in Corinth:—