But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours. 3. FANNY BRAWNE “My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady--the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer. Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed.