The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius. Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy--though _mal à propos_. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it--but turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more--I could be martyr’d for my religion--love is my religion--I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks--your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love--and he had never been in love till he met Fanny--he would have been the great poet we know? I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.”