hat 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 lan