History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable” foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage? When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the real reason of the “kisses four”? was it not perhaps four because of the painful doubleness of the tragic vision--was it extravagant to suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the eyes of death? The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the “kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:-- ... there she gazed and sighèd deep, And here I shut her wild sad eyes-- So kissed asleep. Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning “wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would have the same effect. In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully, with no dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth. XVIII THE GENERAL ELLIOTT It is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, “The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries. This is the poem:-- THE GENERAL ELLIOTT