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Art. IV.—Shelley.
1. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by
Mrs. Shelley. 1853.
2. Essays; Letters from Abroad; Translations and Frag
ments. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited bv Mrs. Shelley.
1854.
3. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Captain Thomas
Medwin. 1847.
4. The Shelley Papers. By Captain Thomas Medwin. 1833.
O write well on any theme requires not only a knowledge of
the subject, but a deep sympathy with it. The first requisite
is more commonly fulfilled than the second. Men can, after a
fashion, master a subject—know its bearings and its details—and
still have no real attachment for it: men, too, if they are at all
suspected of this indifference, will lash themselves into a
spurious love, which may be detected by its very absurdity. But
true love springs from the heart, can admire the virtues of its
friend without exaggeration, and yet not be hoodwinked to his
faults ; has the sincerity to praise where praise is deserved, and
the courage to reprove where reproof is wanted. Hence is it
that true love is the same as thorough knowledge, for it sees both
sides of the matter. Shelley’s critics, as well as his biographer,
have been of all kinds except the last. Captain Medwin should
remember that as it is the fault of a bad logician to prove too
much, so it is of an indiscreet friend to praise too much. He
has, however, in his “ Life of Shelley” contrived to fall into both
mistakes. But he is also wanting in the higher qualifications of
a biographer. It has now become, somehow or another, an esta
blished axiom that nothing is so easy to write as a biography.
Jot down a few facts, reckon them up like a schoolboy’s addition
sum, and you have a Life ready-made. Nay, perhaps save your
self even this trouble, and, in these days of mechanical aids, take
a “ Ready Reckoner,” and you will find it done for you. An
other popular receipt is, to sketch in a few lines here and there—
never mind if they are a little blurred—paint them in watercolours, and you have a portrait at once : the critics will clean
your picture for you gratis. Perhaps nothing is so difficult as a
biography; but of all biographies, a poet’s most so. You have
in his case not only to trace the mere liver of life, but all those
back currents and cross eddies in which his stream of poesy has
flowed. Every little action has to be examined to see what effect
T
[Vol. LXIX. No. CXXXV.J—New Series, Vol. XIII. No. I.
II
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Shelley.
it has had upon his life and his poetry, for the two are inter
woven as w7oof and warp : not only this, hut the biographer must
bring a congenial and a poetic spirit to the task—must show in
what new realms of poesy our poet has travelled, what new
beauties he has discovered, what new Castalian springs he has
drunk of; should show, too, what new views of life he has
opened up, how these views originated, and what their ultimate
aim is—for this is the important point—and what real value they
have in their practical bearing upon this earth ; and how far they
are likely to affect and improve it. But in Shelley’s case the dif
ficulty is tenfold increased. His character, in one sense one of
the most simple, is in reality one of the most complex. So shy
and reserved in many matters, yet speaking forth so boldly and
uncompromisingly; so inconsistent at times, yet ever the same in
the cause of truth ; so impulsive in most matters, yet so firm in
behalf of liberty; so feminine and so susceptible, yet so heroic
and resolute, he presents a medley of contradictions. All this
must be accounted for by his next biographer. Nevertheless, we
are thankful to Captain Medwin for what he has accomplished;
he has done it to the best of his endeavours, and with a certain
species of enthusiasm which will atone for many defects. But a
Life of Shelley is still wanted—so much remains that is still
obscure about him. Any little facts, as long as they are genuine
and upon undoubted authority, would be welcome; for it is these
little facts and traits—little they are wrongly called—which help
us to judge of a man’s character, and give us such an insight into
his life and poems.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” said Byron; yet, we suspect,
without knowing why. The one is Nature’s real infinite order of
things; the other, only man’s worldly finite arrangement. We
talk of sober truth and wild fiction; but it is truth in reality that
is wild, and fiction sober. “ As easy as lying,” says Hamlet, but
truth is hard to imitate. Hence to thinking men the romance of
history is more exciting than any novel; a biography more inte
resting than any fiction. Shelley’s life, with all its pathos, is an
example. The imagination of no novelist would ever have dared
to have drawn such a character. It would have been scouted at
once as impossible in the highest degree. Let us endeavour to
give some sort of a brief sketch of it, trying to fill in, with what
cunning we have, the lights and shades. Percy Bysshe Shelley
was born at Field Place, in Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792,
related through his family to Algernon and Sir Philip Sydney,
heir to a baronetcy and its rich acres. Novel readers would be
delighted in such a promising hero; young ladies would have
fallen in love with him at once, or with his ten thousand a year.
He was brought up, it appears, with his sisters until he was
�At Sion House, Brentford; and at Eton.
99
seven or eight years old, and then sent to an academy at Brent
ford, and subsequently, at thirteen, to Eton. At neither schools
did he mix with the other boys, but like Novalis and many other
boy-men, took no part in the sports. This shyness and reserve
he never threw off during life. It appears even in his poems;
they seem to shun the light of the common world, its din, its
noise ; they fly away to the realms of imagination for peace
and quietness. We can fancy Shelley walking by himself with
that delicate feminine face and quiet dreaming eye, glooming
moodily over his supposed wrongs, which, by-the-bye, he might
have easily cast away, had he but set to work and bowled round
hand, or played at fives with the rest; they would have dropped
off, as lightly as the bails, with the first wicket he took. But it
was not so, and he ever afterwards looked back with pain upon
those early days. Writing of them in the Dedication of the “Revolt
of Islam”—
“ I wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes—
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.”
At Sion House, Brentford, Shelley was a great reader of
blue-books,” so called, says Captain Medwin, from their covers,
and which, for the moderate sum of sixpence, contained an
immense amount of murders, haunted castles, and so forth.
When the “ blue-books” were all exhausted, Shelley had recourse
to a circulating library at Brentford, where, no doubt, as at all
circulating libraries, plenty more “ blue-books” were to be ob
tained, and where he became enchanted with “ Zofloya, or the
Moor,” whose hero appears to have been the Devil himself. No
doubt, to this source may we trace Shelley’s love for the morbid
and the horrible, which happily, under better influences, disap
peared from his writings. Here at Sion House, too, was exhi
bited Walker’s Orrery, which even surpassed “ Zofloya” in its
attractions, and which first turned Shelley’s thoughts in a better
direction than circulating libraries generally point to. At Eton,
an old schoolfellow of Shelley’s gives the following account of
him:—“ He was known as ‘ Mad Shelley,’ and many a cruel
torture was practised upon him. The‘Shelley! Shelley! Shelley!’
which was thundered in the cloisters, was but too often accom
panied by practical jokes—such as knocking his books from
under his arm, seizing him as he stooped to recover them, pulling
and tearing his clothes, or pointing with the finger, as one Nea
politan maddens another.” We often look upon a school as an
epitome of the world—a perfect microcosmos. And the above is
as true a picture of the world’s treatment of Shelley, as of Eton.
A few more years, and it was the world itself, with stronger lungs
h 2
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Shelley.
and with bitterer tones, crying out “ Mad Shelley;” it was the world,
a few years after, that seized his books with Chancery decrees; it
was the world, that is to say, these same boys, now “ children of
a larger growth,” that pointed at him with its finger. Shelley
felt all this in after-life as much as he did now at school; not
the mere insults, but that these boys, now men, should never have
outgrown their weaknesses. One more point in his Eton career.
He was there condemned to that most distasteful of all tasks to
true genius, to write Latin verses, that poetry of machinery.
Shelley, condemned to the Procrustean bed of longs and shorts,
wishing to enter the promised land of science—Shelley, who
hereafter should be the true poet, scanning with his fingers
dactyles and spondees, asking for a short and a long, that great
desideratum to finish a pentameter with, and all the time thirsting
to drink from springs that might refresh his mind, is a pitiful
spectacle, well worth pondering over. How many promising
minds this insane custom, still continued at our schools, has
blunted and sickened, cannot well be computed, we should say.
We wonder boys have not yet been practically taught the Pyrrhic
dance or the evolutions of a Greek chorus; they would be quite
as mechanical and far more amusing. In one person alone at
Eton did Shelley at all find a congenial spirit, a Dr. Lind, of
whom Mrs. Shelley writes, that he supported and befriended
*
Shelley, and Shelley never mentioned his name without love and
reverence, and in after years drew his character as that of the old
man who liberates Laon from his tower-prison, and tends on him
in sickness. This is touchingly like Shelley’s nobleness, which
never forgot a kindness. Most poets have ever looked back upon
boyhood with joy; it is the storehouse of many an old affection,
full of many dear memories. Shelley’s was blank enough of all
such things ; this one old man, a green spot in its sandy wild.
And now, since Eton would do nothing for Shelley, he betook
himself to reading Pliny’s “Natural History,” puzzling his tutor
with some questions on the chapters on astronomy. He next
commenced German. The fires of such an ardent spirit could
not easily be smothered out. Chemistry and Burgher’s “ Leonora”
were now his two engrossing themes; and about this time he wrote,
in conjunction with Captain Medwin, “ The Wandering Jew,” the
little of which that we have seen is poor enough; but Shelley’s
ideas are described by the gallant captain as “images wild, vast,
and Titanic in which remark we suspect that Captain Medwin
is like the Jew, rather “wandering.” And now we are approach
ing a great event in Shelley's life. A Miss Grove, a cousin of
his, of nearly the same age, who is described as very beautiful,
* See Mrs. Shelley’s note on the “Revolt of Islam.”
�At Oxford.
101
captivated him. We like to dwell upon these two child-lovers.
The frost of the world must have thawed away for the first time
to poor Shelley; a spring, full of fresh thoughts and hopes, were
springing up in his heart. He had found some one in this wide,
wild world to love him, and to love. Upon his dark night now
came forth the evening star of love, trembling with beautv and
light. Surely it was not the same old world, with its haggard
nightmares and its feverish dreams ? The dew of love fell soft
upon that wild brain of his. It was the first love—that first
iove which comes but once in a man’s life. You may have it
again ; but, like many another fever, it is slight and poor in
comparison. Of her and himself did he write in after years—
“ They were two cousins like to twins,
Ancl so they grew together like two flowers
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers
Lull or awaken in their purple prime.”
To her, too, did he dedicate his “ Queen Mab —
“ Thou wast my purer mind,
Thou wast the inspiration of my song ;
Thine are these early wilding flowers,
Though garlanded by me.”
And now, in conjunction, these two child-lovers wrote the
romance of ‘ Zastrozzi. We would fain linger here on these
happy days. But there is already a third party in the number—
it is a skeleton. Shelley, now not much more than sixteen, went
up to Oxford, engrossed with his chemistry. But Oxford did
not, any more than Eton, encourage his pursuits. Acids and
Alma Mater did not agree. Galvanic batteries and portly dons
were not likely to be on the best of terms. Why, a Head of a
College might mistake one for some infernal machine. So
Shelley betook himself to philosophy; Locke was his professed
guide, but in reality the French exponents of Locke, which is a
very different matter. Hume, too, became his text-book ; and
the poet, now a convert to Materialism, rushed on to Atheism;
and in a moment of enthusiasm conceived the project of con
verting Alma Mater herself. We don’t well see what other course
that venerable lady, with the means she possessed, could pursue
but the one she adopted. So Shelley was expelled. It is worth
considering, however, that there was no other weapon left against
Atheism but the poor and feeble one of expulsion. On Alma
Mater we need waste no reflections; but turn to Shelley in his
utter desolateness, for unto him it must have been an hour of
great darkness. The old traditional guide-posts were gone, and
he had to walk the road of life alone. New world-theories he
must construct; the old eternal problems he must now solve
�102
*
Shelley.
for himself. Other griefs from -without pressed upon him. His
cousin deserted him, or rather, we should suppose, was made to
desert him. His treatise on Atheism had deeply offended his
relations, though we are surprised at its preventing his marriage.
An expected baronetcy in this world, like charity, can hide a
multitude of sins. A baronet’s blood-red hand could easily, we
should have thought, have covered up even Atheism, since it gene
rally can conceal so many faults. So Shelley left Alma Mater, and
matriculated at the university of the world, where he should
some day take honours, though from thence some would have
expelled him too. He appears to have gone up to London, living
with Captain Medwin, speculating on metaphysics, and writing
letters under feigned names to various people, including Mrs.
Hernans. To show in what a state of mind he was at this time,
we may give the following anecdote in Captain Medwin’s own
words :—“Being in Leicester-square one morning at five o’clock,
I was attracted by a group of boys standing round a welldressed person lying near the rails. On coming up to them I
discovered Shelley, who had unconsciously spent a part of the
night sub dio.” We read of him, too, sailing paper boats on the
Serpentine, as he did years after on the Serchio, just as he
describes Helen’s son—
“ In all gentle sports took joy,
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float.”
(“Rosalind and Helen.”)
He returned home, where, however, he did not remain long, in
consequence of his falling in love with a Miss M estbrook, a
schoolfellow of his sister’s. This was productive of another
breach with his family, more serious than that caused by his
Atheism. Miss Westbrook, it appears, was the daughter of a
retired innkeeper; and Shelley’s father, the baronet, with proper
aristocratic notions on all points, had long been accustomed to
tell his son that he would provide for any quantity of natural
children, but a mesalliance he would never pardon. So when
Shelley married the daughter of the retired innkeeper, his father
very properly cut off his allowance. Anything in this world, we
believe, will be forgiven, except this one thing. You may take a
poor girl’s virtue, and it passes for a good joke with the world; but
if you make her the only reparation you can, you shall be an out
cast from society. Such doctrines are a premium upon vice, and do
more harm to a nation than Holywell-street: and we are more in
clined to place many of the griefs of Shelley’s first marriage, with
its sad results, at the front door of fashionable society, -than to any
other cause. The retired innkeeper and Shelley’s uncle, Captain
�His and Schillers Love for the Storm.
103
Pilford, however, found the requisite funds, and Shelley and his
young wife went off to live in the Lake District, where Mr. De
Quincey gives us the following picture of them :—“ The Shelleys
had been induced by some of their new friends (the Southeys) to
take part of a house standing about half a mile out of Keswick,
on the Penrith road. There was a pretty garden attached to it; and
whilst walking in this, one of the Southey party asked Mrs. Shelley
if the garden had been let with their part of the house. ‘ Oh, no,’
she replied; ‘the garden is not ours; but then, you know, the
people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I are tired of
sitting in the house.’ The naivete of this expression, ‘run about/
contrasting so picturesquely with the intermitting efforts of the
girlish wife at supporting a matron-like gravity, now that she was
doing the honours of her house to married ladies, caused all the
party to smile.”* Ah ! could it, indeed, have been always so; and
we think of another poet who says of himself and his wife, “I was
a child—she was a child;” and we sigh as we think over their
tragic fates. Shelley did not stay here long. We find him flitting,
spirit-like, about from place to place. We meet with him at one
time at Dublin, which he was obliged to leave on account of a
political pamphlet he had published. Soon afterwards we dis
cover him in North Wales, helping to assist the people to rebuild
the sea-wall which had been washed away. All this time, too,
was he suffering bitterly in spirit—the struggle was still going on
within. In addition to this, his wife was by no means a person
suited for him, and after a three years’ union they were separated.
In July, 1814, conceiving himself free, we find him travelling
abroad with Mary, the future Mrs. Shelley, daughter of Alary
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, well known for their antimatrimonial speculations. They crossed the Channel in an open
boat, and were very nearly lost in a gale. Shelley’s chief enjoy
ment seems to have been on the water; and in this expedition
his greatest delight seems to have been in sailing down the rapids
of the Rhine on a raft. He is in this particular very like Schiller;
in fact, a portion of Schiller’s biography might be applied, word
for word, to him :—“At times he might be seen floating on the
river in a gondola, feasting himself with the loveliness of earth
and sky. He delighted most to be there when tempests were
abroad; his unquiet spirit found a solace in the expression of its
own unrest on the face of nature; danger lent a charm to his
situation; he felt in harmony with the scene, when that rack was
sweeping stormfully across the heavens, and the forests were
sounding in the breeze, and the river was rolling its chafed waters
into wild eddying heaps.”t And we find this love for water and
* “Sketches, Critical and Biographic,” p. 18.
f "Life of Schiller.”
�104
Shelley.
the storm in Shelley’s poems. He now returned to London, where
he suffered from poverty and absolute want. Nothing daunted
him. He now betook himself to the study of medicine, and com
menced walking the hospitals. Gleams and visions of liberty
lighted him upon his path ; but they were all mere will-o’-the-wisps,
and went quickly out, leaving him in blacker darkness than
before. Doubts still surrounded him on all sides. It is a pic
ture worth studying—that delicate, womanly face, thoughtful and
sad, with its long curling hair, and its genius-lighted eyes, brood
ing painfully in poverty over its woes. We look on him, and he
seems as some flower that has bloomed by mistake in winter-time
—too frail to cope with the blasts and the falling sleet, but yet
blooms on, prophesying of sunshine and summer days. The year
1815, however, brought him relief. It was discovered that’the
fee-simple of the Shelley estates was vested in Shelley, and that
he could thus obtain money upon them. The old baronet was
furious at the discovery, but was ultimately persuaded to make
his son an allowance. Shelley, now freed from his pecuniary
difficulties, again went abroad in May, 181G, this time to Secheron,
near Geneva, where Byron was living; and here the two poets
kept a crank boat on the lake, in which Shelley used “ to brave
Bises, which none of the barques could face.” How much Byron
profited by his intercourse with Shelley let the third canto of
“ Childe Harold,” which was written at this period, testify; and
let us at the same time remember Byron’s own words—“You
were all mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the
best and least selfish man I ever knew.” After an absence of
more than a year, Shelley returned to England; and now per
haps the bitterest trial of all awaited him. His wife had drowned
herself. Woe seems to have shrouded him as with a garment.
How bitterly he feels it, these and many other verses tell—
“ That time is dead for ever, child,
Browned, frozen, dead for ever;
We look on the past
And stare aghast,
At the spectres, wailing, pale and ghast,
Of hopes that thou and 1 beguiled
To death on life’s dark river.”
Nay, the strain on his mind was too much, and he became for a
time insane, and so describes himself in “Julian and Maddalo.”
And now, as if his bitterness were not enough, the Court of
Chancery tore his children away from him. “ Misfortune, where
goest thou, into the house of the artist ?” saith the Greek pro
verb. And still the struggle was going on within, embittered by
woes from without. Life’s battle-field is never single. We
cannot stop to inquire whether trials and struggles may not be
�His Friendship with Keats.
105
in some way essential to the education of genius, and whether
there may not be some as yet unrecognised law to that end.
The old fable is certainly a true one of the swan singing only in
its death-agonies.
But there must be an end; and now the scorching day was
melting into a quiet eve : the stormy waves were subsiding. We
have dwelt at some length on the previous details, but must now
be more brief. We do not so much regret this. It is in the
storm only that we care to see the straining ship brave out the
danger—any day we can see plenty of painted toy-boats sailing
on the millpond. Shelley now married his second wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, and led a quiet life at Marlowe, writing
“ Alastor” and the “Revolt of Islam,” and endearing himself to
the villagers by his kindnesses. He here contracted severe
ophthalmia, from visiting the poor people in the depth of an un
usually cold winter. About this time, too, he became acquainted
with Keats, and nothing can be finer than the friendship between
the two poets—nothing nobler in literature than Shelley taking
up the gauntlet for his oppressed brother poet against the re
viewers, and writing afterwards to his memory the sweetest of all
dirges, the “ Adonais.” So dear did he hold his friend, that when
Shelley’s body was washed ashore, Keats’ poems were found in
his bosom. In 1818, Shelley left England, never to return.
Life now was becoming unto him as a summer afternoon with its
golden sunshine. He had found a wife whom he could love:
that passionate heart, ever seeking some haven, had at last found
one—little voices now again called him father. The mists of
youth wrere clearing away; gleams of light were breaking in upon
him. He had betaken himself to the study of Plato ; and perhaps
there was no book in the world that was likely to do him such
good. In one of his letters he writes, “ The destiny of man can
scarcely be so degraded, that he was born only to die.” But
even now he had his troubles, as we all shall have, be the world
made ever so perfect. He lost one of his children; was still
troubled with a most painful disease; was still the mark for
every reviewer’s shaft. And now, when everything promised so
fair and bright, on one July afternoon the waves of the Mediter
ranean closed over that fair form, still young, though his hair
was already grey, “ seared with the autumn of strange suffering.”
The battle of life was past and over.
We have thus given a hurried sketch of Shelley’s life. Impul
siveness was no doubt the prominent feature of his character.
Love for his fellow-men, hatred against all tyranny, whether of
government or mere creeds, combined with kis ardent and poetic
spirit, hurried at times his as yet undisciplined mind away. No
doubt he struck at many things without discretion. But it re
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Shelley.
quires older men than Shelley to discriminate what is to be
hit. Strike at the immorality of a clergyman, and he screens
himself behind the Church, and there is instantly a cry you are
assailing Religion itself. Many stalking-horses, some of them
with huge ears and broken knees, are there walking about on this
earth, which we must worship, even as the ^Egyptians did cats,
and the Hindoos cows. Animal worship is not yet extinct.
Shelley, too, was one of those whose nature is their own law;
who refuse to be cramped up by the arbitrary conventionalities
of life which suit ordinary mortals so well, which fact is such a
puzzle to commonplace minds that they solve it by setting down
the unlucky individual as a madman; an easy solution, in which
we cannot acquiesce. One of those few, too, was he
“ Whose spirit kindles for a newer virtue,
Which, proud and sure, and for itself sufficient,
To no faith, goes a begging.”
An isolation of spirit, too, he possessed, often peculiar to genius.
He found no one to sympathize with him; hence his mind was
turned in upon itself, seeking higher principles, newer resolutions
than are yet current. He found himself, even when amidst the
throng, quite alone; though jostled by the multitude, quite soli
tary. Society to such a one is pain; the very noise of human
voices, misery. Hence, in his despair, he is tempted to exclaim
to his wife, “ My greatest content would be utterly to desert all
human society. I would retire with you and our child to a soli
tary island in the sea, would build a boat, and shut upon my
retreat the floodgates of the world: I would read no reviews, and
talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination, it would
tell me that there are one or two chosen companions beside
myself whom I would desire. But to this I would not listen.”
That Shelley should have been misappreciated is only natural. To
a proverb, the world likes its own, and Shelley was not amongst
that number. High-minded, he despised the inanities of life;
sincere and earnest, he hated the hollowness of the day. Too
sensitive, he turned away to bye-paths. The flock of sheep herd
together; he was sick at heart and wandered by himself. Poetic
and ideal, he felt more than most of us the heart-aches and
brain-aches of life, and ever seeking, ever hoping, found no cure
for them. Speculative and philosophical, he felt the burden of
the world-mystery and the world-problem, which he was ever
trying to solve, and which every time lay heavier on his soul.
Weak and physically frail, he felt life’s pack more than others,
and knew not how to carry it without its galling him. A loving,
sympathizing soul, he found but little affection, little love in the
world ; for the most part a cold response and hard hearts, and so
he uttered his wail of misery and then died.
�His Critics.
107
He was slain accidentally in the battle of life—a mere stripling
fighting manfully in the van. Still the army of life, like a mighty
billow, rushes on; still the battle rages, still the desperate charge
of the forlorn hope—here it gains, there it wavers, then is swept
away—and still fresh ones follow on: the individual fighting in
the first place for himself and his own necessities; and then, if a
noble soul, doing battle for his fellow-creatures, helping the weak,
raising up the down-trodden. The years sweep on like immense
caravans, each of them laden with its own multitude, brawling,
striving, fighting. We look out from the windows, and see behind
us the earth covered with the monuments of mighty men, with
nameless mounds where sleep the dead. Let us linger round the
grave of him who lies beneath the walls of Rome, near the pyra
mid of Caius Cestius, “ in a place so sweet that it might make
one in love to be buried thereand see what epitaphs have been
written over him, and what, too, we have to say.
In plainer words, we will proceed to look at Shelley as exhibited
by others, glancing at his religion, his politics, and poetry, by all
of which we may be enabled to learn something more, and to
form a completer estimate of him; and we would here remark
that whatever censure or praise we may bestow on him, the one
should be laid on, the other doubled by, his youth.
We have now passed away from the old reviewing times of
Gifford, when difference of opinion was added to the sins usually
recognised by the Decalogue, when it actually could taint the
rhymes, and make the verses of too many or too few feet, accord
ing to the critic's orthodox ear. This old leaven has long since
died out of all respectable Reviews, and can only be seen in its
original bitterness in a few religious publications, where vitupe
ration so easily supplies the place of argument. The world
luckily sees with different eyes to those it did thirty years ago.
Most people can now give Shelley credit for his noble qualities
of generosity and pureness of moral character; and even those
who may differ widely from his opinions, are willing to admit the
beauty of his poems. Most people, we said; all certainly except
those connected with a few religious publications, and the author
of “ Modern Painters.” Mr. Ruskin seems to be seized with some
monomania when Shelley’s name is mentioned. In the Appendix
to his “ Elements of Drawing,” he calls Shelley “ shallow and
verbose.” In a note in the second volume of“ Modem Painters,”
part iii. sec. ii. chap. iv. § 6, he speaks of Shelley, “ sickly
dreaming over clouds and waves.” As these objections are mere
matters of opinion, we shall pass them by; it is hopeless to
try to make the wilfully blind see. But in the third volume,
part iv. chap. xvi. § 38, he talks of Shelley’s “ troublesome
selfishness.” Facts are said to be the best arguments, and we will
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Shelley.
give Mr. Ruskin, as an answer to his libel, the following pathetic
story in Leigh Hunt’s own words :—
“ Mr. Shelley, in coming to our house at night, had found a woman
lying near the top of the hill, in fits. It was a fierce winter’s night,
with snow upon the ground—and winter loses nothing of its severity
at Hampstead. My friend, always the promptest as well as the most
pitying on these occasions, knocked at the first houses he could reach,
in order to have the woman taken in. The invariable answer was,
they could not do it. He asked for an outhouse to put her in, while
he went for the doctor. Impossible. In vain he assured them she
was no impostor—an assurance he was able to give, having studied
something of medicine, and even walked the hospital, that he might
be Useful in this way. They would not dispute the point with him ;
but doors were closed, and windows were shut down. Time flies; the
poor woman is in convulsions; her son, a young man, lamenting over
her. At last my friend sees a carriage driving up to a house at a little
distance; the knock is given; the warm door opens; servants and
lights put forth. Now, thought he, is the time; he puts on his best
address—which anybody might recognise for that of the highest gentle
man—and plants himself in the way of an elderly person who is step
ping out of the carriage with his family. He tells him his story.
They only press on the faster. ‘ Will you go and see her ?’ ‘ No, sir,
there is no necessity for that sort of thing, depend on it—impostors
swarm everywhere—the thing cannot be done. Sir, your conduct is
extraordinary.’ ‘ Sir,’ cried Mr. Shelley, at last assuming a very diffe
rent appearance, and forcing the flourishing householder to stop, out
of astonishment, ‘ I am sorry to say that your conduct is not extra
ordinary ; and if my own may seem to amaze you, I will tell you
something that may amaze you a little more, and I hope will frighten
you. It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience
of the poor and wretched ; and if ever a convulsion comes in this coun
try, which is very probable, recollect what I tell you—you will have
your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt
over your head.’ 4 God bless me, sir! Dear me, sir!’ exclaimed the
frightened wretch, and fluttered into his mansion. The woman was
then brought to our house, which was at some distance, and down a
bleak path; and Mr. Shelley and her son were obliged to hold her till
the doctor could arrive. It appeared that she had been attending this
son in London, on a criminal charge made against him, the agitation
of which had thrown her into fits on their return. The doctor said
that she would have inevitably perished had she lain there only a short
time longer. The next day my friend sent mother and son comfort
ably home to Hendon, where they were well known, and whence they
returned him thanks full of gratitude.”
This was an action worthy of a descendant of Algernon and
Sir Philip Sydney, and may perhaps remind Mr. Ruskin of a
certain parable of the good Samaritan. Again, in the same
volume and part of “Modern Painters,” ch. xvii. § 26, Mr. Ruskin
calls Shelley “passionate and unprincipled;” and again, in §41,
�Mr. Ruskin on Shelley.
109
lie speaks of his “ morbid temperament.” It is only charitable
to suppose that Mr. Ruskin has never read Shelley’s Life ; and,
again, in the same volume and part, ch. xvi. § 34, he writes,
“ Shelley is sad because he is impious.” This sort of reasoning
reminds us of a story told in Rogers’s “ Table Talk,” which, as it
affords us some further insight into Shelley’s character, may be
given:—“One day, during dinner, at Pisa, where Shelley and
Trelawney were with us, Byron chose to run down Shakspeare,
for whom he, like Sheridan, either had, or pretended to have, little
admiration. I said nothing; but Shelley immediately took up
the defence of the great poet, and conducted it with his usual meek
yet resolute manner, unmoved with the rude things with which
Byron interrupted him—‘ Oh, that’s very zvell for an Atheist,’ ”
&c. Byron, however, did not approach Mr. Ruskin’s absurdity.
Atheism here did not altogether spoil Shelley’s defence; it only
made it pretty good. Orthodoxy, we must suppose, would have
rendered it perfect. But Mr. Ruskin boldly asserts, “Shelley is
sad because he is impious;” or, in other words, because Shelley
happens to differ from Mr. Ruskin’s notions on religion. It is
true that Shelley is sad—not, though, because he is “ impious,” but
from mourning over the wrongs that he sees hourly committed
—the day full of toil, the air thick with groans. A solemn tone
of sorrow pervades his poetry, like the dirge of the autumn wind
sighing through the woods for the leaves as they keep falling off.
We are ashamed and mortified to find Mr. Ruskin using such a
coarse and vulgar argument—he who is ever complaining of the
unfairness of his critics. But perhaps Mr. Ruskin may find this
out, that when he has learnt to respect others, his critics will be in
clined to treat him more leniently; and, furthermore, whilst he
deals so harshly and so uncharitably with Shelley, we would in
all kindness remind him of the line, “ who is so blessed fair that
fears no blot?”
And now for our orthodox reviewers, and their treatment of
Shelley. “Queen Mab” is generally selected by them as the
piece de resistance. We are far from defending the poem as re
gards its tone and spirit, nor do we uphold Shelley in any of his
attacks upon the personal character of the Founder of Chris
tianity ; he finds no sympathy with us when he calls Christ “ the
Galilean Serpent.” Much more do we agree with the old dra
matist, Decker, when he writes—
“ The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil Spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.”
Shelley himself afterwards thoroughly disclaimed the opinions
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Shelley.
of this early and crude production. Upon an attempt being made
to republish it, he thus wrote to the editor of the Examiner:
—“ A poem, entitled ‘ Queen Mab,’ was written by me at the age
of eighteen, I dare say in a sufficiently intemperate spirit—but
even then was not intended for publication; and a few copies only
were struck off, to be distributed among my personal friends. I
have not seen this production for several years; I doubt not
but that it is perfectly worthless in point of literary composition;
and that in all that concerns moral and political speculation, as
well as in the subtler discriminations of metaphysical and reli
gious doctrine, it is still more crude and immature.” And he
goes on to say that he has applied for an injunction to stop its
*
sale. Shelley, in after life, was the last man to speak slightingly
of religion or religious matters—no true poet can ever do that;
he, above all men, venerates religion. By him, as Shelley says
in the Preface to the “ Revolt of Islam,” “ the erroneous and de
grading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being is
spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself.” But why
“ Queen Mab” should ever be picked out as so peculiarly blas
phemous by its assailants, we have ever been surprised. We are,
we repeat, far from sympathizing in the least with Shelley’s ex
pressions; but we equally abhor the tenets of his orthodox
reviewers. They are far more open to the charge of blasphemy
than Shelley. It is they who degrade God, and God’s creatures,
by representing him as the God of vengeance, and all His works
vile and filthy; this glorious world as the devil’s world, and all
the men and women in it chosen vessels of wrath, unable to do
one good deed of themselves. They call Shelley an Atheist, in
deed ! Rather call all those Atheists who deny liberty and all
rights to their poorer brethren; who would trample them still
deeper in the mire of ignorance, who would desecrate God’s Sab
baths with idleness, and who make God in their own images piti
fully sowing damnation broadcast on his creatures. Call them,
too, Atheists, yes, the worst of Atheists, who lead a life of idleness
and aimless inactivity; for the denial of God (a personal God, in
the common sense of the term) does not constitute Atheism; but
spending a life as if there were no God, and no such things as
those minor gods—Justice, or Love, or Gratitude.
Shelley was, at all events, sincere in his creed, which is more
than can be said for most of his opponents. He suffered for it,
and suffered bitterly; not, indeed, the tortures of the rack, but
those more painful ordeals which we in this nineteenth century
are so skilful to inflict. All ages have very properly allotted
special punishments to their greatest spirits. The Greeks gave
* See also a letter to Mr. John Gisborne—“ Shelley’s Letters and Essays,”
vol. ii. p. 239.
�Religion at the Present Day.
Ill
hemlock to Socrates; the Jews rewarded Jesus with a cross.
Galileo received a rack for his portion. But we English have
found out the greater refinement of cruelty, which may be in
flicted by hounding a poet down by Reviews and Chancery-suits.
Contrast Shelley, and his fervid eloquence, and poetry, and zeal,
with his opponents. Go into an English church, and there you
shall too often see but an automaton, now in white now in black,
grinding old church tunes of which our ears are weary. It—for
we cannot call that machine a living human being—finds no re
sponse in the hearts of its hearers. Notone pulse there is quickened,
not one eye grows brighter. If it would but say something to
all those men and women, they should be as dancers ready to
dance at the sound of music. But no voice comes, unless you
call a monotonous drawl a voice. The farce is all the more
hitter, because that figure to our knowledge leads a life quite
contrary to the words upon his lips. How few of these Automata
in white or in black would, in days of darkness and of trouble,
stand up for their Bible and their Gospel, and dare to pull off
the surplice and gown, and wear the martyr’s fiery shirt! One
of them comes into the Church for the family living, and makes
God’s house a place for money-changers and traders in simony;
the other, because he has not capacity enough for any other pro
fession. And these are the men that are to lead us in days when
science and knowledge are fast advancing in every direction!
these the men to sing of God’s wondrous works ! Do they not
rather dishonour God, and prostitute religion to the worst form
of Atheism ?
That Shelley, or any one else, should become wearied with our
present religious condition, we are not surprised. Our wonder
is, that there are not far more of the same class. We have for
years been lying under a tree which is long past bearing—waiting,
alas ! for fruits, and not finding even a green branch, or a shady
place. The once pure water of baptism is now turbid, the very
sacramental bread mouldy. We must sorrowfully say with Jean
Paul—“The soul which by nature looks Heavenward, is without
a temple in this age.” So the old religious roads of thought are
being torn up; the old via sacra being levelled. As it has been
said a thousand times, no one need fear that religion will ever
die. While there is the blue unfathomable sky above us, in which
swim golden sun and moon and stars, and the comets trail along
like fiery ships, there will ever arise a sense of mystery and awe
in the breast of man; and while the sweet seasons come round,
there will spring from his heart, like a fresh gushing fountain, a
psalm of thankfulness to the Author of them. The deep spiritual
nature of man can never die. And it is no sign of the decay of
religion, but quite the reverse, when men refuse to be fed on the
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Shelley.
dry husks and chaff of doctrines. Yes, we will hope that a new
and a brighter Reformation is dawning; that fresh Luthers and
Melancthons shall arise, and that we shall have a Church wherein
Science shall not fear to unfold her New Testament—wherein
poets and philosophers, and painters and sculptors, may be its
priests, each preaching from his own pulpit—when every day
shall be equally holy—when every cottage shall be a temple,
and all the earth consecrated ground—consecrated with^ the
prayers of love and labour.
And now let us turn to Shelley’s politics. Most poets have ever
been the supporters of Liberty. And the reason is, as Words
worth says, “ A poet is a man endowed with more lively sensi
bility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, and a more comprehen
sive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind.”
They feel “ the sweet sense of kindred” more than others, and
cannot bear to see some of their brethren chained like galleyslaves to the oar of labour—earning their bread with tears of
blood, without time for leisure, or meditation, or self-improve
ment ; working like the beasts of the field, with this difference,
that they are less cared for by their masters. As Milton says—
“ True poets are the objects of my reverence and love, and the
constant sources of my delight. I know that most of them, from
the earliest times to those of Buchanan, have been the strenuous
enemies of despotism.” The remark is true. Tyrtaeus singing
war-strains, and the old Hebrew prophets rousing Israel from its
sleep of bondage, are instances of what is meant. All poets
have felt this love for Liberty. Even Mr. Tennyson can turn at
times from his descriptive paintings, and give us such a lyric as
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,” so full of noble hopes and
sympathies. A little time ago we had a novel with a Chartist poet
for its hero ; and by-and-bv a living poet, the son of a canal
bargeman, risesup among us—no fiction this time—uttering strains
of woe to that same often invoked Liberty. But the feeling is
most vivid in early youth ; the cares of the world soon grow
round us, and many of us find out it is to our apparent advantage
to remain silent; and we become to our shame dumb, ignomi
niously content to accept things as they are. Some even turn
renegades, as Southey. But in Shelley the flame every day burnt
brighter. Liberty with him was no mere toy to be broken and
laid aside, but the end and aim of his life. He kept true to the
dream of youth, and the inspiration of early days, when injustice
has not yet clouded our vision. But, on the face of it, is there
not something supremely ridiculous in the son of a wealthy
baronet coming forward to delineate the woes of men about
which he could really know nothing ? Why not have written
�The Times in which Shelley lived.
113
odes of the Minerva-press stamp, which could have been read to
aristocratic drawing-rooms ? The answer is, that this thing
genius is strong and earnest, and, luckily, will not bend like a reed
before any fashionable breeze from Belgravia or St. James’s.
Society is a costly porcelain vase, wherein the poor plant genius
is cramped and stunted, and artificially watered and heated, in
stead of living in the free open air, enjoying the breeze and the
showers of heaven; it must either break its prison or wither.
Shelley adopted the former course. Let us rejoice it was so—
that there was one man who, though brought up in luxury, had
the heart and the courage to pity the misfortunes of the poor.
Let us remember, too, the days Shelley had fallen upon, when the
nation was suffering all the distresses a long war could entail;
when a Parliament of landlords enacted the Corn-laws for the
benefit of their own rents; when prosecutions were rife for the
most trifling offences ; when Government actually employed spies
to excite starving men to violence; when “ blood was on the
grass like dew.” It was the dark night that preceded the dawn
of a better day. Since then, schools have sprung up ; free-libraries
and museums have grown here and there; parks have been
opened; baths and wash-houses built; crowded districts drained
and ventilated; cheap and good books diffused. Within the last
few months “The National Association for the Advancement of
Social Science” has held its first meeting, and there is a general
wish, except perhaps amongst a few, to improve the condition of
the working classes. A man who, in Shelley’s position, should
now write as Shelley did, could simply be regarded as a misguided
enthusiast; and we can only pardon Gerald Massey in some of
his wild strains, by knowing how galling is the yoke, and how
bitter the bread, of poverty. Still much, almost everything, yet
remains to be done. The life of the labourer still, as Shelley
would sing,
“ Is to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day.”
Not even that, as the poorhouse in the winter’s night can testify.
But, after all, what is this image of Liberty which Shelley has set
up for us ? We can answer best in his own words :—
“ For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread,
From his daily labour come,
In a neat and happy home—
Thou art clothes, and fire and food
For the trampled multitude:
No—in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be,
As in England now we see.”
[Vol. LXIX. No. CXXXV.J—New Series, Vol. XIII. No. I.
I
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Shelley.
This surely is rather a material view; no one can well see
treason in the loaf, or impiety in the well-filled cupboard; and yet
an important one. The soul of man can never be fed, while his
body is racked with hunger; his mind can never be warmed with
any spark of the higher life, while his limbs shiver with the cold;
his spiritual faculties can never be raised, while be is sunk in
physical uncleanness. But rising to a higher strain, Shelley
proceeds:—
“ To the rich thou art a check;
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.
Thou art Justice—ne’er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold,
As laws are in England:—thou
Shieldest alike the high and low.
Thou art Wisdom—freemen never
Dream that God will doom for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which priests make such ado.
Thou art Peace—never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.
*****
Science, and Poetry, and Thought,
Are thy lamps ; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
Such, they curse their Maker not.
Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless,
Art thou; let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.”
(“ The Masque of Anarchy.”)
This, we must confess, is superior to most of his delineations of
Liberty. In a great many places he doubtless runs very wild in
the cause of Freedom. He had not yet attained that true calm
ness which is requisite for any great movement. Youth has it
not. The green sapling cracks and explodes in the fire, yet gives
no heat; the seasoned log burns bright and quiet. It is not by
fiery declamations, by mere impulse, that anything in this world is
ever surely gained, but by calmness, clearness of vision, and deep
insight. The still small voice makes more impression on us
than the loudest shouts, for the latter are, through their very noise,
quite inarticulate. Still the question remains to be answered,
�Happiness, how obtained.
115
how is this and other visions of Liberty to be realized ? Was
Shelley himself in the right way to bring about the desired
reform ? Certainly, as far as his hand could reach, he did his
utmost. He poured what oil he could on the raging waters
round him. But these attempts, and all others like them, are, it
is very obvious, only palliatives, not real remedies. Shelley’s
views as to Reform and Liberty are very vague. He seems to have
had some idea that with a hey presto, everything could be
changed. Pantaloon had only to strike the floor three times, and
the whole scene vanished; the old witches, who caused all the
trouble, were to be changed at once into beautiful sprites;
Columbine should come dancing on, and a general return to
Fairyland, everybody paying for every one, and nobody taking
anything. He himself was willing to make any sacrifice. In
this respect he seems to have been like some innocent child,
wandering into a garden, singing as he went, plucking with its
tiny hands the flowers and fruits, willing to share them with any
one—wishing, perhaps, that men could live upon them altogether,
and not a. little vexed and surprised when told that they would
not bloom in the winter time—wishing, too, that the beds might be
kept trim, and the grass might be cut without human labour—and
then sitting down, musing, melancholy, and sad, on the first falling
leaf.
To us it appears that liberty and happiness—if it be liberty
and happiness we want—depend upon no legerdemain, no
shuffling of cards. Once let us learn that our well-being depends
not upon external circumstances, but upon the riches of moral
goodness, and that our mind, like a prism, can colour all events,
and we shall then be on the true road to a higher reform than
our politicians have yet dreamt of. To teach men their duty,
and what love and what justice mean, seems to us just now the
one thing needful. Gold, perhaps, is the medicine least wanted to
cure human ills—the worst salve for human bruises. The mere
kind look and the kind action will be treasured up with its own
interest, not to be counted at any poor per cent., whilst the money
will have been foolishly squandered—how much more the word
which shall kindle a new idea, a fresh truth, another life. The
mechanic earning his few shillings a week, enough to support
himself, may find pleasure, if he has but learnt to take an
interest in the few green grass blades beneath his feet, and the
few opening flowers in his garden, which no lord in his castle can
surpass. Nothing is so cheap as true happiness: and Providence
has well arranged that we may be surrounded by ever-flowing
springs of it, if we will but choose, in all humility, to drink of
them. Shelley, unfortunately, fancied that there was some one
specific to be externally applied to the gangrene of wretchedness,
i2
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Shelley.
and cure it at once and for ever; but we must go far beyond the
surface, and the application must be made, not to the diseased
part only, but to the whole body of society. And as to the
sorrows and contradictions of life, we take and accept them,
believing that there is a spirit at work for good, which will bring
them out to a successful issue. And we are proud to be instru
ments in working out so grand a principle, believing that the
pain and the loss to us will be gain to the human race; that
these days of sorrow will be a gain to coming years; that this
sadness of a part will be a gain to the whole. In this is our un
faltering trust; and secure in it we can go joyfully along, enduring
patiently whatever sorrow or whatever conflict we may encounter,
striving to help our weaker brethren, giving them what aid we
can.
Painful as it may be to think of a number of fellow-creatures
toiling early and late, yet labour has its own claims on our grati
tude. Labour seems to be man’s appointed lot here, and it is
foolish to quarrel with it; still more foolish to call it a curse; the
thistles and the thorns have been, perhaps, of more benefit to the
human race than all the flowers in the Garden of Eden. They
have called forth man’s energies, and developed his resources.
All those chimneys in our factory-towns—are they not as steeples,
veritable church steeples and towers of the great temple of Labour,
pointing, with no dumb stone fingers, up to heaven, saying, by
us, by labour, is the road up there ? Does not the flame and the
smoke-wreath look as if it came from some vast altar, the incense
of sacrifices—yes, of noble human sacrifices, daily offered up;
and do not the clank and clash of a thousand hammers and anvils
sound sweet upon our ears, as the music of bells calling us to our
duty—trumpets sounding us to the battle of life, that battle
against evil and wrong ? So it must be: out of darkness cometh
light, and from the cold frosts and bitter snows of winter, bloom
all the beauteous flowers of spring; and from all this grime, and
dirt, and sweat of labour, who shall prophesy the result ? Even
now are there giants in the land; even now may we see cranks,
and wheels, and iron arms, tethered to their work instead of men;
even now do wre hear the music of the electric wires across the
fields, telling us other things than the mere message they convey;
even now may the hum of the engine, and the breath of its iron
lungs, be heard in our old farm-yards, and the reaping-machine
seen cutting down the golden wheat, and the steam-plough
furrowing up the fields, taking away the heaviest burdens from
the backs of men. Shelley would have hailed such a time with
delight—when there should be some margin of the day given to
the ploughman and the mechanic for rest and recreation—for re
�The Power of Love and Justice.
117
member, a man is ever worthier than his hire. Had Shelley ever
seen a railroad, he would, perhaps, have exclaimed with Dr. Arnott,
“Good-night to Feudality.” It is curious to notice what an in
terest he took in endeavouring to establish a steamer on the Gulf
of Genoa. But all the leisure in the world, all the instruction
that can be had, will avail us nothing, if we do not build on
higher principles than we are at present accustomed to—if we do
not rest our foundations upon Love and Justice. “Ah !” sighed
Shelley to Leigh Hunt, as the organ was playing in the cathedral
at Pisa, “ what a divine religion might be found out, if charity
were really made the principle of it instead of faith.” This, then,
is a part of Shelley’s creed—a creed which is beginning at length
to be felt; the creed of Jesus and of Socrates ; of poets of to-day
and of yesterday; the law of laws; the doctrine of charity—that
charity which Paul preached as greater than faith. Let our poli
tics and our religion be built upon love and justice for their
foundations, and once more will man live in harmony with the
rest of the creation—will smell sweet with “ his fellow-creatures
the plants,” and his voice will be attuned with the love-songs of
the birds. He will then understand how he was made in God’s
image, for God is love; the world will then once more bloom a
Garden of Eden, and Selfishness, that evil spirit—call it the
devil if you will, for it is this world’s devil—be ousted from our
planet.
But it requires something more than a poet’s strains to break
the spells that bind us—to exhume the people from their present
sepulchre of ignorance. A Tyrtaeus is of no use, unless we will
fight; his strains of no avail, unless we will work, man to man,
shoulder to shoulder. The walls of prejudice and selfishness will
not fall down by any mere trumpet-blast. If any one thinks us
too ideal, let him know we are purposely so. The ideal
is better than the real, and it is something to be ideal in
these practical days of ours. “ Equality ” and “ love ” may per
haps never be known, as they should be, amongst men. Riches
have been well compared to snow, which if it fall level to-day,
to-morrow will be heaped in drifts. But surely there is an equality
apart from money, and a love which knows not bank-notes; we
will hope for, and aid forward, too, the day when there may not
be the present gulf betwixt the peer and the peasant, and when
that simple commandment shall be better observed, “ Do unto
others as you would be done by.”
In a note to “ The Prometheus Unbound,” Mrs. Shelley thus
writes:—
“ The prominent feature of Shelley’s theory of the destiny of the
human species was, that evil is not inherent in the system of the crea
�118
Shelley.
tion, but an accident that might he expelled. This also forms a
portion of Christianity. God made earth and man perfect, till he, by
his fall—
‘Brought death into the world, and all our woe.’
Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be
no evil, and there would be none. That man could become so perfect
as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater
part of the creation, vras the cardinal point of his system.”
There is much truth in this. Our misery arises from the in
fringement of natural laws; and as long as those laws remain
broken, our misery will still continue. But Hope is by our side,
and she tells us, with the unmistakeable voice of truth, that men
will some day grow wiser and less selfish than at present—when
most of the present suffering shall pass away—when none need
be long unhappy, except through their own fault—for the earth
was created for a good and a happy purpose, though it take
myriads of years to accomplish it.
And now let us not be one-sided, but view Shelley as a whole
—the unripe as well as the sunny side of the fruit—the dark
shadow on his orb as well as the sunlight. His impulsive
character prevented him from laying enough stress on the grand
principle of duty. Its infinite worth we cannot over-estimate.
Duty is a pillar firmly fixed in rock of adamant, round which we
climb heavenward; round everything else we only twine horizon
tally, crawling along the ground. How far a stronger sense of
duty in Shelley would have saved him from the wretchedness
which he suffered, and his first wife from the terrible catastrophe
consequent on his leaving her, we shall not attempt to estimate;
but certainly it would have impelled him, as it did Milton, to
return from Italy when his country was in danger, and like him
also, if need were, to support himself even by keeping a school.
We have already noticed his want of a due appreciation of the im
portance of Labour. He forgot also that the energies of man are
tempered to an iron hardness by adversity; that our strength
springs up fresher and stronger under the clouds of trials and
sufferings; that our souls are braced by the keen, cold winds of
poverty; our faculties purified by the fire of affliction. Hence
was he ever planning Utopias, where the idle should batten upon
the earnings of the industrious — cloud-cuckoo-towns, where
idleness and the take-no-thought-for-to-morrow principles should
become the laws of our being, which are all of them impossibili
ties on this toiling planet. Again, too, Shelley erred in being
too ready to pull down instead of to build up. Greater harm has
"been done, both in religion and politics, by men whose capabili
ties have been of the destructive order, without the constructive
�Shelley, and the Arrangements of Society.
119
faculty, than by all tlie bigots that ever breathed. It is worse
than cruelty to take away the bread of life and the waters of life,
however adulterated they may be, from a man, and offer his
hungry and thirsting soul nothing in their place. But the grand
mistake of Shelley’s was the idea of revolutionizing the course of
things by a simple change of institutions. The best form of
government can do but little, unless the reform begins with the
individuals themselves. Govern ourselves well, and we need not
then talk so much about governing others. It is not the form of
government, so much as the men and women, we must care for—
not this or that institution, but the first principles of honesty and
justice amongst ourselves, which we must regard.
That men should be severe upon Shelley we can well under
stand—good, easy people, whose skins are luckily so tough and
insensible that the harness of life can make no raw on them—
whose heads are but moulds for so many cast-iron opinions and
creeds. That an over-sensitive poet should break away from all
the rules of life, and betake himself to the wilderness of his own
doubts and speculations, is to them a most incredible, not to say
a most wicked thing. To leave a home fireside, with its six
o’clock dinner and port wine, in exchange for a doubtful supper
on bread and cheese, and a certain one on metaphysics—to form
your own world-theory—to found a fresh morality—is to them
the height of madness. They forget that the arrangements of
society are made, and rightly too, for the mass—that is, for such
people as themselves—and that a poet is something very different
from themselves, and that these laws which operate so well for
them, will in all likelihood work fatally on the poet. So the
poor poet must be hooted and brayed at by all the chorus of
human owls and quadrupeds. He plunges away madly into the
darkness beyond, solitary and sad, endeavouring to steer by the
compass of his own thoughts. The world looks on him in his
struggles and his toils with the same quiet indifference, not to say
pleasure, that a boy does at a cockchafer spinning in agony on a
pin’s point. That Shelley’s views were often wild and crude, no
one for a moment will deny. Enthusiastic and impulsive, he
jumped to all sorts of conclusions on the most important points.
The value of a young man’s experience—and Shelley died at
nine-and-twenty—is not worth much, and it is only by expe
rience we can test anything in this practical world. He himself
found this out at last. Circumstances also had a great effect in
his case, as they have upon all of us. We perhaps can never
rightly weigh the balance of any man’s actions, because we never
allow enough for the circumstances which should be placed in
the other scale. Here was Shelley, the son of a man who was
,
�120
Shelley.
entirely different in his whole nature, sent to school where he
*
was brutally treated and discouraged in his studies, marrying a
peison who was in no respects fitted for him. On the other
hand, suppose that he had had a father who could have judi
ciously sympathized with him, been sent to a school where
masters would have encouraged his studies, and have married a
suitable wife, who shall say what Shelley might have been ?
But we are dealing with things not as they might be, but as they
were and are. One small pebble in the way of a stream shall
make the river flow in another direction, and water quite other
lands and countries to what it does now. Yet man, perhaps,
should not be a stream, as weak as water. Be this as it may, it
is certain that before Shelley s death the mists that had long
obscured the rising of his dawui were already melting, and his
day was just breaking, all calm and pure; the bitter juices were
all being drawn up, and converted into sweetness and bloom; the
fruit of his genius was fast becoming ripe and mellow.
We have gone thus far into Shelley’s life and opinions, without
touching upon his poetry; for we think that if a person cared
nothing at all about poetry in the abstract, he must be struck
with that still higher poetry of kindness and generosity which so
inspired Shelley. His written poetry, in our mind, is quite a
secondary affair to that. There is a poetry of real life which is
grander than any yet sung by minstrel. The man is greater
than his poems.
The critics have plenty of stock objections to find with Shelley’s
poetry. The most common complaint is, that he is too metaphy
sical ; that the air is so rarified in his higher regions of Philoso
phy, that ordinary beings can’t breathe it; that his verse is like
hard granite peaks, brilliant with the lights and the shadows of
the changeful clouds, robed with white wreaths of mists, and
touched with the splendours of the setting and the rising sun,
but not one flower blooms upon it, not one living creature is to
be seen there, only ethereal forms flitting fitfully hither and
thither; and we must, to a certain extent, admit the truth of the
charge. Shelley exhibited to a remarkable degree the union of
the metaphysical and the imaginative mind. Philosophy and
poetry prevailed over him alternately. For a long time he was
doubtful to which he should devote himself, f It is from an
overbalance of philosophy that there is such a want of concrete
ness in his poems. He was for ever looking at things in a meta
* “As like his father, as I’m unlike mine.”—Letter to Mrs. Gisborne,
f See Mrs. Shelley’s note on the “ Revolt of Islam.”
�The Cause of Shelley s Poetry.
121
physical point of view, projecting himself into Time and Space;
regarding this earth as a ball, with its blue robe of air,
“ As she dances about the sun,”
instead of parcelled out into rich farms and sprinkled with towns,
and solid three and four-storied bouses, and walls fourteen inches
thick, tenanted by Kit Slys, Shylocks, Iagos, Falstaffs, and the
whole company of humanity, who play on alternate nights and
days the tragedy or the comedy of life. That he should have
taken this abstract view of life is not at all wonderful. All great
minds are ever attracted by the problem of life. This world
riddle is of all things the most fascinating to the ardent and
inquiring spirit. The reason why Shelley sang of the things
he did, was simply that they both interested and pained him more
than others. Living in an age, which gave birth to the French
Revolution, which was agonized with the throes of all sorts of
speculative theories, his verse naturally echoed them. Every true
artist—whether by poetry, or painting, or architecture, it matters
not—gives us the great questions of the day, with his attempted
solution of them. Hence is it that Shelley is really a poet, be
cause in his verse he truly sympathized with the wants of the
day. Before a man can write well, he must have felt. It is not
fine phrases, or similes, or fine anything else that make a poet,
any more than fine clothes make a man. Shelley found out that
the old-established customs, the old morals, the old laws, did not
suit him. The every-day maxims of low prudence sounded to
him very much like baseness; the common religion to him was
synonymous with uncommon irreligion, and public morality
looked to him merely a mask for private immorality. He felt
all this, and felt it bitterly, and sighed after nobler aspirations;
hence his poetry. His great failing is a certain amount of queru
lousness, instead of calmly reposing amidst all his conflicts in an
eternal Justice, which, though it may be far from visible to com
mon eyes, is still the foundation of the world. He had before
his death passed through only one stage of the conflict which
most great minds undergo. Before belief, there must be doubt;
before the fire, the smoke. Shelley never attained that perfect
repose which the greatest poets have possessed, and his poetry
consequently does not rise to the highest order. Now, Shelley
defines poetry as “ the expression of the imagination,”* and he
has Shakspeare on his side—
“ The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.”
* “ A Defence of Poetry.”
�122
Shelley.
Strangely does that word “ lunatic” sound now, as we think of
that tale of “ Mad Shelley.” But this is exactly what Shelley’s
poetry really is—“ the expression of the imagination,” unmodi
fied by experience, and any knowledge of this world of men and
women. Imagination, though doubtless the first requisite of a
poet, is far from all. As Novalis would say, “ a poet is a Tnie.rocosmos.” The great poets are all of them many-sided. Their
poetry is both /ztjtnjtTtc and 7to' ]<tiq. They illustrate both the
u
Aristotelian and Baconian theory of poetry, as well as much
more. They are like lands which bear crops of all kinds. They
possess, in fact, the united faculties of all other men, and these
faculties serve to check and balance one another. Every part
working in unison, nothing unduly developed at the expense of
another, are the characteristics of all great poets, and, in fact, of
all great men, who are only poets in another way. Shelley’s
imagination, unluckily, galloped away with him, instead of his
reining it in. Take some of the most imaginative pieces that
have ever been written, and we shall find how they are all of them
more or less ballasted. There is that most fairy-like of all things,
“ The Birds” of Aristophanes, brilliant with imagination, yet still
occupying our interest by its wit and humour. Again, “The
Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “ The Tempest,” with all
their scenes from Fairyland, and their spirits, are balanced
by the human creations, and the interest and incidents that
arise from the plots. Shelley seems never to have anchored
his imagination to anything.
There was no clog to it.
Nothing to tie it down. Hence his weak, shadowy drawings,
his want of substance, an absence of reality. Hence his
characters are too often mere personified abstractions; thoughts
which have been only half-clothed in human bodies. For
we cannot agree with Lord Macaulay in thinking that they
cease to be abstractions, and interest us as human beings; for
common experience tells us that they do not.
*
Shelley had in
him none of the elements which made Shakspeare essentially
popular. He was a vegetarian, a water-drinker. In philosophical
moods he doubted the existence of matter; but then he was
always in philosophical moods. He is, in short, too spiritual,
too subtle for ordinary men with good appetites, who are not
troubled by the theories of Berkeley. We cannot fancy him at
one of those “ wit-combats” at The Mermaid, drinking sherrissack, and joining in the chorus of a song. He wanted the
faculty of humour, though Captain Medwin assures us he
possessed it strongly. We have looked in vain; we cannot find
* See some incidental remarks on Shelley, in the Essay upon “ The Pil
grim’s Progress.”
,
�if
q
ja
dt
<1
His Poems as illustrated by his Life.
123
a spark of it in his letters, which, on the contrary, are marked hy
his usual melancholy spirits. He was too metaphysical to he
humorous. He had more of the Jaques and the Hamlet vein
than Falstaff’s in him. Hence his bitter outbursts of sarcasm.
We must, however, turn to his Life to account for the peculiarities
of his poetry. We find there that it took him only a few weeks
to write “ The Prometheus Unbound,” whilst he laboured at
“ The Cenci” for months; that he forsook his drama of
“ Charles I.” in disgust, for “ The Triumph of Life,” one of
his most abstruse poems. A curious trait, which gives us no
little clue in the matter, is mentioned by Captain Medwin, that
Shelley was in the habit of noting down his dreams. “ The first
day,” he said, “they made a page, the next two, the third
several, till at last they constituted far the greater part of his
existence, realizing what Calderon says, in his comedy of ‘ La
Vida es Sueno’—
‘ Sueno es Sueno.’
‘ Dreams are but the dreams of other dreams.’ ”
What could be expected of a poet to whom dreams were the only
realities of life ? And yet there is something peculiarly pathetic
in the story; to many of us, as well as to Shelley, probably our
sleeping and our waking dreams are the happiest parts of our ex
istence. We build our air-castles, those dreams of the day, and
take refuge in them from the toil and uproar of the world. There
are times when all of us become disheartened, when the spirit
within us faints, when we sigh in our hearts—
“ 0 cease ! must hate and death return ?
Cease! must men kill and die ?”
Shelley was, notwithstanding his sanguine hopes, subject to such
fits of despondency; no wonder that he should write down his
dreams. After all, we live far more in our world of thoughts,
and fancies, and dreams, and spend a happier existence, too, in
them, than on the real material world. Shelley, too, seems to
have known that the abstract nature of his poetry would be a bar
to his popularity, and says, in a letter to a friend, that there are
not five people who will understand his ‘‘Prometheus Unbound;”
and in his prefatory lines to his “ Epipsychidion,” he writes:—
“ My song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who shall conceive thy reasoning.”
And this might be said, with some limitation, of all his poetry.
Again, when his wife complains of his want of human interest
and story, he wishes to know if she, too, has become “criticbitten.” As he said of Keats, he himself can never become
popular; his effect upon men will be, not to make them applaud,
�124
Shelley.
but to think. Popularity and fame were not the things Shelley
cared for. It would be well if our young poets would remember
this. No great thing ever did become popular at once. The
fact of its becoming popular at once, shows it is not worth much.
If you care for popularity, then write songs which can be played
on street-organs, and by sentimental young ladies in drawing
rooms, and which commonplace critics can understand. But if
you respect yourself—and that’s the only respect worth anything
—never mind if only five people understand you; these five are
worth five millions of others, nay, are worth the whole of the rest
of the world. As to Shelley being difficult to understand, we
apprehend that this is far more the reader’s fault than the poet’s.
Plato, instead of saying “ poets utter wise things which they
do not themselves understand,” should have said, “ which their
readers do not try to understand.” We are not amongst those
who look upon poetry as a mere amusement, as a light recreation.
The office of the poet is the highest in the world. As Shelley finely
says, “ poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world;”
and he himself was the Laureate of Freedom. The poet comes
as spokesman between nature and the rest of his fellow-men: he
is the true priest—the true prophet; extending the tent of our
thoughts, enlarging the horizon of our ideas, teaching whatever
is lovely, whatever is holy and pure, revealing the unseen things
the common eye cannot see, and the melodies the common ear
cannot hear, interpreting the mute symbols of [flower, and cloud,
and hill, drawing his inspiration from the depths within his own
soul.
There is another point in connexion with this want of human
interest in his poems—that though Shelley experienced at times
all the hardships of poverty, yet he was not born poor. Unlike
the Burns and the Shakspeares, he never mingled with the crowd,
never learnt human life in that rough, coarse way, which tinges
their poetry with common every-day experiences, and invests
their characters with a flesh-and-blood reality. At school he was
always reserved, and in after-life much the same. Hence it is that
Sheliey never draws upon our feelings, like the great masters, in
his longer pieces ; there is none of the pathos of life, except, per
haps, in the “ Cenci.” He is too cold ; his characters are like
statues of white marble ; no warm blood flows in their veins, no
tears trickle down their cheeks. They might be inhabitants of
another planet, for what we know, giving us the benefit of their
views on various social problems.
Again, as we are criticising, we must find fault with those dulcia vitia of overloaded imagery and similes. His verse too often
flows not in a clear, deep, rolling stream, but more like a moun
tain current, swollen and impetuous from rain, jostling together
�The Past, Present, and Future.
125
■ everything that floats upon it. His imagery is often so rich that,
E- like the fruit on too luxuriant branches, it completely weighs
k the verse down and requires propping up. A very curious ex|t ample of this may be seen in “ The Skylark,” where, after comk paring the bird to all beautiful things, having said that its song
t is sweeter than the sound of showers, he closes by—
L
r
r
e
“ All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.”
He cannot, in fact, heap simile on simile fast enough, though the
verses are even now overflowing with them, like flowers overpowering with their sweetness. Again, we must notice an opposite vice—a love for unpleasant situations and things—
“ At whose name the verse feels loath ”—
as in “ The Cenciand a disagreeable love for the details of madness and hospital-life, as in “ Julian and Maddaloand we have
finished the catalogue of his principal offences. We dare say
there are plenty more minor faults, but we wont deprive other
critics of the pleasure of exposing them.
Shelley’s imagination was both his stepping-stone and his stumbling-block. It unfortunately mars his poems by its over-excess,
yet it gave him wings, with which he could soar aloft above the
8 grovelling views of our everyday life. The fault of the literature of
E the day is that it is too retrospective ; thinks that the Golden Age
« is in the Past, and not in the Future. It has its eyes fixed in the
a back of its head, and if it ever attempts to look forward, squints
s most abominably. This is the worst sign of the day, or of any
fl day. Let us, if we will, praise the dead Past, and crown its grey
a temples with a wreath of glory; but let us look forward to the
A Future as a happv youth, holding a cornucopia of all good things
9 in his hand. Shelley, at times, when a film came across his
w eyes, sank into this wild sea of despair, but his imagination soon
m buoyed him up.
There is a good Scottish proverb which it
• would be well for us to remember—“We maun live with the
« present, and no’ with the past.” Our duty lies with the present,
m and it is simply by making it as good as possible that we can
< mould the future. Shelley’s imagination, too, prevented him from
js- sharing in our English insularity.
There was nothing local in
•H his mind. It was as catholic as the universe. Hence he was
w ever looking forward with courageous hope. Golden gleams of
-fl the future flashed before him. He could conjure up new Edens,
ai and see Liberty again with Justice walking hand in hand upon a
i® new earth.
Shelley’s poems will not bear studying as a whole, nor will his
ar characters bear analysing. They are, in fact, all representations
■
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ij
k
8
w
V
�126
Shelley.
of Shelley. The reason of this is that Shelley sought to give
his own views to the world, and he had no medium to give it
through hut himself. He had no resources from experience 'to
draw upon, no character but his own that he really knew. His
life was a poem, his poems his life. Alastor sailing in his boat,
is Shelley ; Lionel in his dungeon-walls, Shelley; Laon, with his
visions of Liberty, Shelley. So his female characters are only
Shelley over again with long dresses and short sleeves. In one poem
only, “ The Cenci,” does he make any effort to get behind the
mask of his creations. But even here Count Cenci is only the
reverse of former characters ; he is only their antithesis, as im
pulsive towards evil as they were towards good. Shelley should
have remembered an axiom of his favourite author, Plato—kcckoc
JJ£V fytoV OV^UQ.
Turning to Shelley’s poems, we perceive at once the instinctive
feelings of the true poet. Thus he begins “Alastor” :—
“ Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood !
If our great mother have imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred.”
Mr. Leigh Hunt, in his “Recollections of Lord Byron and
some of his Contemporaries,” speaks thus of Shelley—“ He was
pious towards nature, towards his friends, towards the whole
human race, towards the meanest insect of the forest.” But he
was more than this. He felt that we are all akin, not men
alone, but the cloud above our heads, and the flower beneath our
feet. He felt that man is related to the world as a Part to the
Whole. He felt how all things mysteriously influence us, and how
to these influences we are akin. Such natural stepping-stones as
these lead us to Heaven, to which also we are allied. This rela
tionship it is, above all things, the poet’s office to show. Dearly,
too, does Shelley love Nature, who gives to us all alike her beau
ties, trying to read us the lesson—
“The simple life wantslittie, and true'taste
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.”—(“ Epipsychidion.”)
How long it will be before we shall find out that we can live
without our present costly tastes, that our food will be as sweet
from clean earthenware as from silver dishes (many of them, by
the way though, only plated), that our sleep will be quite as re
freshing from a plain bedstead as one that suffocates us with its
unpaid-for hangings, we cannot undertake to say. The sooner,
�His Love for Personification.
127
however, the better. Very fine is the old fable of Antaeus, who,
when he touched his mother earth, received fresh strength.
Nature is the true corrective of the false bias which our minds
insensibly contract from the present sordid state of the world.
A walk in the woods acts as a tonic. A landscape fills the senses
not only with mere material visions of beauty, but these react
again upon us with a precious moral spirit.
We must not pass over Shelley’s love for personification of in
animate objects, a result of his strong imagination. Take, for
instance—
“ Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,
Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,
The helm sways idly, hither and thither;
Dominic, the boatman, has brought the mast,
And the oars and the sails, but 'tis sleeping fast,
Like a beast unconscious of its tether.”
(“The Boat on the Serchio.”)
There is another well-known example in the “ Cenci,” of the
rock hanging over the precipice, clinging for support, as a dying
soul clings to life. This propensity it is that leads him to
humanize the objects of nature. He cannot see a stream, but he
forthwith converts it into a personage, as the old heathen poets
would have into a god or a goddess. He gazes upon Arethusa ;
it is no longer a stream, but a beautiful nymph with crystal feet
leaping from rock to rock, her tresses floating on the wind, and
wherever she steps, the turf grows greener and brighter. And
then comes Alpheus, no longer a stream but a river-god, with his
fierce beard and glaring eyes, chasing the nymph whom the earth
tries to rescue from his embrace ; and so they rush along in .their
mad pursuit. This is quite in the spirit of the old Greek my
thology. In these prosaic days we are ever analysing the old
Divinities; we put Venus into a crucible and melt her down,
and look at Jupiter through a microscope like any other
specimen of natural history. We will, however, continue our
quotation, as it developes many of Shelley’s characteristics in a
few lines :—
“ The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
And the thin white moon lay withering there;
To tower and cavern, rift and tree,
The owl and the bat fled drowsily.
Day had kindled the dewy woods,
And the rocks above and the stream below,
And the vapours in their multitudes,
And the Apennine's shroud of summer snow,
And clothed with light of airy gold
The mists in their eastern caves uprolled,^
�128
Shelley.
JShelley’s love for the mountains amounted to a passion. Long
before Mr. Ruskin wrote—who seems to arrogate for himself the
priority of seeing any real beauty or use in them—had Shelley
sung their praises. So fond was he of them, that Captain Medwin
tells us he was continually sketching them in his books. A claim,
too, has been put in for Wordsworth, that he first gave us the
scenery of the sky, and all the glorious cloud-scapes and air
tones, which earlier poets had so strangely neglected. Shelley
may at least share this glory with him; though the critics have
forgotten that Aristophanes has a still prior claim. Shelley is
continually alluding to them. His lyric on the “ Cloud” paints them
as they move in their huge battalions across the sky, in all their
colours, from red sunrise to crimson sunset; or as they come
sailing along with their black wings, as if they were Titan ships
waging war one with another; or in the night lying as if they
were silver sands lippled by the waves of the wind, and lighted
by the moon.
In all Shelley’s pieces there is a strange melancholy feeling,
which we have alluded to before; not the result, as Mr. Ruskin
foolishly thinks, of any impiety, but from the poet’s affection for
Humanity, and his sorrow at its ills. Take this picture of
Summer and Winter”:—
“It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon—and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like seternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun—the weeds,
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the bright breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees.
It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod, as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold;
Alas! then, for the homeless beggar old.”
Shelley, with all his love for Nature, could no longer dwell upon
the last scene. The wind sowing the flakes of snow on the
earth, the frozen grass lying on the bald fields like grey hair, and
the icicles hanging like a beard from the rocks, had no charms
for him. He was thinking of all the frost-bitten, homeless,
breadless wanderers. So through all his poetry he is ever musing
�His Melancholy Feelings, and their Causes.
129
on the wrongs and sufferings of poor humanity. This gives it a
peculiar melancholy tone, not morbidness, but a true deep pathos.
He writes more of the fall of the year, than of its birth. He
sings the dirge over its bier, rather than the marriage-song of
the Spring. The wild wind, “the world’s rejected guest,” moans
among his verses, and there finds a home. Ever does he say,
“ the sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
Another reason is there for this feeling with Shelley, his habit of
looking at the world from a metaphysical point of view. The
very grandeur and might of the Universe casts a shadow upon the
heart of man. All great minds have ever known this profound
gloom. Whether CEdipus interprets or not the world-riddle, he
shall die. Mark how in “ Alastor” Shelley writes—
“ The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams.”
How much is conveyed in that word “ homeless.” The
streams wandering along, seeking rest and finding none, until
they reach the haven of the sea, and then are snatched away
again into the air, seeming to say, “ we change, but we cannot
die;” here we are condemned to be for ever, restless, shifting,
changing. So with all things. And Shelley felt this strongly.
The mountains which seem so firm, and “ all that must seternal
be,” are after all but as changeful as the clouds which rest upon
their brows.
Many minor points are there which we might discuss, such as
Shelley’s particular fondness for a certain class of images, and
particular words. On one of these in particular, taken from the
green fields, he seems to dwell with great affection. Thus he
writes—
“ Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms, or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame.”
(“ Sonnet on Political Greatness.”)
So he speaks of Arethusa "‘shepherding her bright fountains
of Adonais, “ whose quick dreams were his flocks
and of the
West Wind—
“ Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed on air.”
So, again, in the “ Witch of Atlas,” he calls the wind “the shep
herdess of ocean flocksand he speaks of the earth itself as
“ the last of the flock of the starry fold.”* Even in his prose
* It is curious to notice how the “ one miud common to all individual men,”
as Mr. Emerson would say, repeats the same idea. Thus Edward Bolton, a
poet but little known, writes thus:—
“ Lo! how the firmament
Within an azure fold
Theflock of the stars hath pent.”—(“ Hymn for Christmas.”)
[Vol. LXIX. No. CXXXV.]—New Series, Vol. XIII. No. I.
K
�130
Shelley.
he returns to this metaphor, and calls Dante “the Lucifer of the
starry flock.”* And even in his translation he uses it, thus
expanding
eXar^pa (3oG>v, i]yhTOp oveipwv
Nvktog,
(“ The Homeric Hymn to Mercury.”)
into “ a Shepherd of thin dreams, a cow stealing.” Other
favourite words, such as “winged,” “islanded,” will readily occur to
every reader. Space fails us, and we must he brief. Much more
is there that might be said about Shelley’s poems, showing how,
in the first place, they were inspired by his early reading, how they
next yielded to German influences, how these developed themselves
into Materialism, and how this, too, was merging into a sort of
Spiritualism at the time of his death; marking each era accu
rately, and showing, too, what effects the French and Italian
schools of poetry had upon him. Especially, too, should we like
to dwell on some of his lyrics; nothing approaches them for
sweetness and melody, except some of Shakspeare’s songs, or some
of Goethe’s minor pieces. But we must turn to the man himself.
Poetry he loved with a religious spirit. Noble was he in work
ing at it as his profession. Noble, too, was he in his choice of
life. On one hand lay ten thousand a-year and its game pre
serves, and its bright smiles of courtly women, its soft-cushioned
and soft-carpeted drawing-rooms, its dinners with endless courses,
its revenue of salutations and bows, its faithful army of faithless
toadies; on the other, poverty with its bleak sharp rocks, where
yet a man may find a cave to live in; its rude angry sea, yet to
which if a man shall listen he may hear the eternal melodies; with
its black clouds overhead, which, though so dense, will sometimes
open out spaces of the clear, blue, unfathomable sky in the day,
and the bright keen stars in the night. Shelley made no hesi
tation which he should choose; and nobly done, we say to him,
and all such. Noble, too, was he that he wrote on fearlessly and
boldly in spite of party-reviews and party-critics. Fame was not
his mistress. He worshipped not at the shrine of that most
fickle of goddesses. Ever higher, was his motto. He was ever
quoting this sentiment from the second volume of St. Leon—
“ There is nothing which the human mind can- conceive which it
may not executeand again, “ Shakspeare was only a human
being.”t His face was ever upward—up the steep hill of poesy,
whose rarest flowers bloom on the highest peaks. What he might
And every one will recollect how Bloomfield’s “ Farmer’s Boy ” so naturally
speaks of the stars as—
“The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest.”
* “Defence of Poetry,” p. 35.
f See Mrs. Shelley’s note on “ The Cenci.”
�His Personal Character.
131
have been, had he lived, we can never tell. Dying at twenty-nine,
we are judging him only by his weaknesses. What could we have
told of Shakspeare or Goethe, if the one had only lived to write
his “ Pericles,” and the other his “ Werter” ?
Let us not forget,- too, the pureness of Shelley s morals. His life
in this respect was as pure as crystal without one flaw, one stain
on it. Many scenes are there in his writings, one especially in
the “ Revolt of Islam,” which could have been treated by no
other man with the same pureness of thought. Above all things,
too, do we prize his letters to his wife; they are so full of genuine
affection and kindness. Well was it that he should die in the
great ocean, pure as he himself was, that ocean which he so
dearly loved. Above all men, too, is Shelley religious, strange
as it will seem to many readers. Love for all that is good and
beautiful and truthful, reverence for all that is great and noble,
a spirit of humility, had their roots deep in the depths of his
soul. What matters it about names and sects ? Let us hear
no more about them; they are all but roads and lanes and paths,
more or less straight, more or less wide, to the great Invisible
Temple.
We must place Shelley amongst the world’s Master-Spirits and
Master-Singers; a younger brother of that grand blind old man,
Cromwell’s secretary. Shelley, too, was one of the world’s
Forlorn Hope; one of those generous martyrs who now and
then appear at such rare intervals, and fill us with undying hope
in the cause of Humanity; one of those who would willingly
lay down his life in the trench, if his body would but bridge
over the chasm for his comrades to pass. Such a man makes us
prouder of our race; and his memory makes the earth itself a
richer world. There is a light flung round Shelley’s life, though
so marked with griefs and disasters, which has never shone on
the most victorious king or Icaiser—a light that shall burn for
ever as a beacon to all Humanity.
�
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Shelley
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 97-131 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliography (p.97) and bibliographical references. Reviews of four works about Shelley: The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. 1853 -- Essays; Letters from Abroad; Translations and Fragments. by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. 1854 -- The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Captain Thomas Medwin. 1847 -- The Shelley Papers by Captain Thomas Medwin. 1833. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 13 (January 1858).
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Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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75
Art.
V.—Shelley.
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A revised Text,
with Notes and a Memoir. By W. M. Rossetti. . 2 vols.
Moxon and Co. 1870.
rpHE connexion of Mr W. M. Rossetti's name with a Memoir of
I Shellev and an edition of his works, is a sufficient guarantee
of the impartiality and thoroughness with which these tasks have
been respectively accomplished. There was ample scope for Mr.
Rossetti’s labours in both departments ; indeed, it is not too much
to say that it has been reserved for him to make the first serious
attempt either at a complete biography or a correct text.. This is
in itself no slight distinction; the intelligence, ingenuity, and
industry he has displayed in it are more commendable still; but
the spirit of affectionate enthusiasm in which he has wrought is
best of all, and will insure him the sincere sympathy of all
admirers of Shelley, independently of any estimate which may
be formed of the actual value of his work.
All biographies of Shelley have hitherto been of a fragmentary
character, either from their partial and limited scope, as those
of Trelawny, Hogg, and Peacock; or from their desultoriness,
as the Shelley Memorials; or from imperfect information,
as the narratives of Medwin and Middleton. Of the latter it
is not necessary to say much. Med win’s incredible heedless
ness and blundering have destroyed the authenticity, and con
sequently the value of excellent materials. Mr. Middleton’s work
is written in an admirable spirit; but in all other respects what
Medwin’s is to a good book it is to Medwin’s. The Shelley
Memorials contain many documents of the highest interest and
much intelligent literary criticism. They answered their pur
pose, more could not be required. Mr. Peacock’s notes also, we
suppose, answered their purpose, together with another not con
templated by the writer—that of demonstrating his entire in
capacity to understand the man in whose intimacy he had spent
so many years. Notwithstanding, however, the cold and unin
viting character of Mr. Peacock’s reminiscences, and the serious
misrepresentations which they have been shown to contain, he
deserves our thanks for having preserved some interesting par
ticulars which would otherwise have been forgotten, and the
precision of his style offers some amends for his singular deficiency
in graphic power. We may dwell somewhat more fully on the
works of Mr. Jefferson Hogg and Captain Trelawny, as it is to
these that we at least are indebted for our most vivid impres-
�76
Shelley.
sions of the poet's personality. Mr. Hogg, besides his unques
tionable power as a raconteur, was well fitted for his task from
his college friendship with Shelley, and the intimacy he continued
to maintain with him until his final departure from England.
We therefore carry away from the perusal of his book, in which
he d wells with infinite gusto on the minute traits of his immortal
friend, a lively picture of the wild yet gracious figure of the poet
in his youth. Fet whatever our enjoyment of the sparkle of
anecdote and humour, whose quaint brilliancy imparts such a
charm to these pages, we cannot help thinking that Mr. Hogg
mistook one matter of essential importance—the style and man
ner in which it became him to write of such a man as Shelley.
His keen appreciation of the ludicrous was evidently too strong
a temptation to be resisted, and has thrown an air of grotesque
ness over his entire work. Another point on which the world has
found it difficult to sympathize with him, is his palpably honest
conviction that the life of Thomas Jefferson Hogg was only
second, if second, in importance to that of Percy Bysshe Shelley
himself. It is almost ungracious to quarrel with irrelevancies
which have afforded us such hearty amusement; but we must
repeat that amusement, although a good thing in itself, is, when
intruded into a biography of Shelley, a good thing out of its
proper place. We believe, however, that his fault was not a want
of love but a lack of imaginative power and keen insight, which
misled him to fasten on the momentary and accidental, instead
of penetrating into the deep and eternal parts of the poet’s
nature.
The other work, which is indeed a mere sketch, but to which
we are most truly indebted for fresh and graphic delineations of
Shelley, is Captain Trelawny’s “ Recollections of the Last Days
of Shelley and Byron,” which, unfortunately for all lovers of
Shelley, scarcely extends over more than the last six months of
the poet’s life. But it bears on every page the impress of love
and sincerity, and possesses at the same time the rare power of
conveying in the simplest language pictures that bear stamped
on them the seal of the most unmistakable reality. The descrip
tion, for example, of his first meeting with Shelley is inimitable
in its way; but as Mr. Rossetti has wisely incorporated it in
Trelawny’s own words into his Memoir, we refrain from quotiug
it here. But, indeed, the book is full of passages where one
catches no less delightful glimpses of the poet’s ways, while every
where, even in the most trifling anecdote, we are kept aware of
the fact that we are brought into closer contact with a higher, a
truly godlike nature. One cause of Captain Trelawny’s supe
riority as a biographer to Shelley’s other friends may probably
be found in the more favourable circumstances under which he
�Shelley.
•
77
approached him in the first instance. Mr. Hogg and Mr. Peacock
made Shelley’s acquaintance when he was young and undistin
guished | they associated with him on a footing of entire equality,
had obviously no conception of his superiority, and spent the
rest of their lives in finding it out, if indeed they ever attained
to this knowledge at all. Captain Trelawny tells us that he was
led to seek Shelley’s acquaintance by the report of his genius,
his adventurous history, and his unlikeness to the mass of men.
Availing himself of all these scattered materials, as well as of
a number of new and interesting particulars obtained from inde
pendent sources of information, Mr. Rossetti has for the first
time combined them into a symmetrical whole. And great praise
indeed is due to him for the clear and methodical arrangement
and the straightforward manly tone of his Memoir, which, far
from being a mere compilation, is a substantial and independent
work, bearing the clear impress of the writer’s powerful indi
viduality» In order, however, to form a correct estimate of Mr.
Rossetti’s Memoir, we should make it clear to ourselves what task
it was he really aimed at accomplishing, and whether he has
accomplished this. He states so plainly that the end he had
in view was to sift and authenticate the extant mass of material
as a contribution towards the systematizing of a “ Life of
Shelley/* that it would be a wilful misrepresentation of the whole
scope of his work to measure it by a standard at which it never
aimed. The condensed scheme on which Mr. Rossetti’s Life had
necessarily to be written has probably made it impossible for him
to enter more deeply into the poet’s character; this drawback,
however, is partly compensated by the resulting compression of
matter and nervousness of style. We confess that in our judg
ment a more vivid picture of the poet’s individuality might have
been obtained if the illustrative anecdotes, instead of being all
massed together in one section, had been distributed over the
whole extent of the Life in the natural order of their occurrence.
We think that by these means a certain local colour would have
been obtained, and greater life and motion imparted to the flow
of the narrative. We question also the desirability, taking of
course the necessary brevity of the Memoir into consideration, of
devoting bo large a portion of the allotted space to Shelley’s
views on Art, while rather hurrying over his opinions on religion
and philosophy, and also perhaps thereby curtailing the writer’s
own criticism on Shelley’s poems.
Our account of Mr. Rossetti’s edition would be very incom
plete without some notice of what forms, after all, its distin
guishing feature, and will always render its appearance an era
in the history of Shelley’s writings. We allude to its character
as the first critical edition of the poet’s works. Respecting the
�78
Shelley.
need of such a revision there has been but one opinion among
the students of Shelley, whose impatience at the frequently
marred and mangled condition of the text has borne a tolerably
fair proportion to their capacity for the apprehension of its
beauties It will suffice to cite the testimony of the late Pro
fessor Craik, of Mr. F. T. Palgrave, and of Mr. Swinburne.
Several partial attempts—among which special recognition is
due to the ingenious emendations of Mr. F. G. Fleay—had pre
viously been made to remedy the defects unmistakably indi
cated ; but to Mr. Rossetti belongs the honour of having first
grappled with the task as a whole. His task has in the main
been exceedingly well performed. His edition is a monument of
unwearied assiduity, of vigilant attention to the minutest detail.
Such labour is the indispensable condition of correctness; but it
needed an interest in his author passing the ordinary love of
editors to enable Mr. Rossetti to spare so much time from the
brilliant but precarious feats of conjectural emendation for the
humbler, but not less essential scrutiny of punctuation and
orthography, and the rectification of annoying grammatical negli
gences. His services in the former department are inestimable,
and it is only to be regretted that they must necessarily elude
the recognition of all but the most critical readers. The amend
ment of Shelley's careless grammar is a more delicate matter;
but we are disposed to think that Mr. Rossetti has not exceeded
the latitude which may be fairly claimed by an editor of clear
judgment, and fully exempt from the taint of hypercriticism. As
regards the several arrangement of the volumes, we are only
disposed to regret (and we cannot help regretting strongly) the
dislocation occasioned by the removal of several of the most
important poems to the appendix of fragments. Not only is
their effectiveness greatly impaired by their juxtaposition with
fugitive and imperfect snatches of verse, but the parts of the
collection from which they have been removed appear impove
rished by their absence. The more we are enabled to regard
Shelley’s pieces as so many passages of one grand poem—the
poetical interpretation of a life—the more we must regret such
interruptions of the sequence of his thought.
As an emendator, Mr. Rossetti has two main resources—
collation with the original editions and conjecture. The first
has assisted him to some admirable corrections ; as, for instance,
the restoration of the vivid and Shelleian word ruining, in
a passage of “ Alastor,” which since the first edition has always
been printed “ Wave running on wave.” As a conjectural
corrector Mr. Rossetti has not always been equally successful,
and we shall be able to show that many of his most plausible
suggestions are unfounded ; but fortunately these have usually
�Shelley.
79
remained in the state of suggestions, and have not been incorpo
rated with the text. To no man was ever less applicable,
indeed, Dryden’s shrewd criticism on critics, that they study
rather to display themselves than to explain their authors. Mr.
Rossetti seldom scruples without some reasonable ground; and
if in many instances his scruples are needless, there are many
others where they have been called forth by a real corruption,
which he has instinctively felt without seeing how to remove it.
In other instances his corrections are brilliant and indisputable,
as in stanza vi. of the dedication of the “ Revolt of Islam,”
where the lines—
“ Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be
Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee,”
are themselves marvellously “revived” by the simple substitution
of clod.
We would gladly have dwelt longer on Mr. Rossetti’s charac
teristics as an editor, but we must pass on to the contribution
which we are ourselves enabled to offer to the improvement of
Shelley’s text, a contribution which we can bring forward without
misgiving, inasmuch as it is derived from the only infallible source
of information, the original MSS. themselves. These documents,
M students of Shelley are aware, were examined by Mr. Garnett
in 1862, with the result of the discovery of ninety pages of pre
viously unknown matter printed in that gentleman’s valuable
Relics of Shelley,” as well as not a little more, which now
appears for the first time in Mr. Rossetti’s edition. From various
circumstances, however, the examination was in some respects
Cursory, and more was done for the enrichment than for the
correction of the text, although some very interesting emendations
were made, such as “ might” and “ earth,” for “ light” and “ air”
in the first stanza of the lines written at Naples. We must
here express how deeply we are indebted to Mr. Garnett, and
to the liberality of Shelley’s representatives, in now being able to
offer, the results of a more minute examination made since the
publication of the recent edition. A few words must suffice to
explain why this examination has proved less productive than
might have been hoped. Shelley’s MSS. may, from our present
point of view, be divided into two classes—those of poems pub
lished during his lifetime, and of poems published after his
death. The former, although a great part of the “ Prometheus”
is fortunately an exception, have in general shared the usual
fate of MSS. sent to the printer—they have been disregarded,
as chrysalis cases for which no man concerns himself after the
emergence of their Psyche. The rough drafts of these poems,
indeed, are extant in many instances, but except where the printed
�so
Shelley.
text is evidently faulty, it would manifestly be unsafe to unsettle it
on their authority. On the other hand, the second class of MSS.,
with a few exceptions, such as the “ Witch of Atlas,” exists solely
in the form of rough drafts, usually written three or four times over,
and in these instances perpetually at variance with each other.
It would be easy to fill pages with such variations, but in all
such cases, as it appears to us, the presumption is in favour of the
received reading, which probably was not adopted without good
authority, perhaps that of some more perfect copy now lost. Thus
for example, we should hesitate to substitute Cl innocent heaven*
for “serene heaven/’ in the “ Ode to Naples/’ although the variad
tion is entitled to great respect from the beautiful condition of the
copy, and from this being the only one which contains the two
“ introductory epodes” as Shelley unclassically styles them—a
circumstance of great interest, as it shows that these exquisitely
beautiful stanzas were an afterthought. The inspection of two
pieces, however, has been fruitful of results, though on opposite
accounts—that of the “ Letter to Maria Gisborne” from the
perfect, that of the “ Triumph of Life” from the chaotic cha
racter of the original MS. The examination of the “ Prome
theus” has also led to the correction of several errors which had
insinuated themselves from the necessity of entrusting the cor
rection of the proofs to others. Several alterations in the minor
poems, generally of much interest, may also be regarded as
indisputable, and as such entitled to a place here. Finally, we
shall enumerate the instances in which emendations proposed by
Mr. Rossetti, or mentioned in his notes, have not been confirmed
upon an appeal to the original. Our references are in all cases
made to his edition.
Vol. I.
Prometheus Unbound, p. 317, 1. 21.—“And gnash beside
the streams of fire, and wail Your foodless teeth.” The punctua
tion is faulty. In the original, which is always carefully punc-i
tuated, there is a comma after gnash and wail respectively, but
not after fire, showing that wail is here not a verb but a sub
stantive. The allusion is to the two infernal streams, Phlegethon
and Cocytus. P. 327, at bottom, for silent footsteps read
killing. P. 330, stage direction at the beginning of act ii.,
for lonely read lovely. P. 333, 1. 29, for morn read moon. P.
337, 1. 6, the much queried lake-surrounded is correct,
though not very intelligible. P. 337, 1. 18, “And wakes the
destined soft emotion.” The sense has hitherto been obscured
by the erroneous punctuation. Destined ought to be followed
by a full stop. L. 21, for streams read steams. P. 338, 1. 15,
for on read in. P. 372, 1. 25, “Radiance and light,” read life,
avoiding the tautology.
�Shelley.
81
Vol. II.
Letter to Maria Gisborne, p. 245, 1. 9, for philosophic read
\ philanthropic, as already acutely conjectured by Mr. Rossetti.
L. 18, 1‘ Which fishes found under the utmost crag,” read
fishers, one of the most striking examples conceivable of
the wonderful way in which the most trifling modification will
Sometimes convert nonsense into sense. An almost equally re
markable instance is afforded by the first line on the following
page, “ Reply to them in lava-cry, halloo,” where the sense has
been utterly perverted by placing a hyphen instead of a comma
between lava and cry. The earthquake demons do not reply
to the gnomes’ toast in lava-cries, but in lava itself, a more
congenial beverage. Same page, L 24, for green read queer.
P. 247, four lines from bottom, for know read knew. P. 248, at
top, for acting read citing. P. 249, 1. 12, the celebrated pas
sage on Godwin has been tampered with. It originally read—•
“ That which was Godwin, greater none than he
Though fallen and fallen on evil times, to stand.”
Consideration for Godwin evidently dictated an alteration which
in justice to Shelley should now be revoked. Same page, three
lines from bottom, for said read read. The blanks on p. 251,
1» 80, should be filled with the names of Hogg, Peacock, and
Smith. That on p. 252, 1. 10, is unfortunately irretrievable.
Triumph of Life, p. 397, eight lines from the bottom,
toursued or spurned the shadows, read shunned. Last line, for
wiocZ lawn-interspersed, read wood-lawns interspersed. P. 899,
1. 8, for thunders read thunder. L. 6, for meet read greet. P.
400, 1. 16, supply while before “the shock.” P. 401, 1. 24, for
sentiment read nutriment. P. 403, eight lines from bottom,
>fill up the chasm thus:—
“ Even as the deeds of others, not as theirs,
And then------”
P. 404, 1. 8, for comest read earnest. L. 23, for years dawn
read season. Same page, three lines from bottom, for her read
the. P. 406, first line, “ out of the deep cavern, with palms so
tender, omit out, and insert and before with. L. 3, omit the.
K 17, for to read in. P. 409,1. 7, “ The words of hate and care,”
for care read awe, thus negativing the ingenious correction of
words into world, proposed by Mr. Rossetti, which we had re
warded as nearly certain, and which still appears to us more
beautiful both in sense and music. Same page, 1. 18, for vale
read isle. The correction is significant from the fact that these
countless swarms of bats are found in the Indian Archipelago,
not upon the continent. The idea was probably suggested to
[Vol. XCIV. No. CLXXXV.J—New Series, Vol. XXXVIII. No. I.
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Shelley.
Shelley by Trelawny’s narratives of his adventures in these
regions. L. 29, for rode like demons read sate like vultures.
P. 410, seven lines from the bottom, for wrapped read wrought.
Mr. Rossetti had divined an error, which he proposed to amend
by reading shaped or warped.
How wonderfully Shelley usually improved on his first drafts
is again shown by the commencement of the “ Triumph of Life,”
which originally stood as follows :—
“ Out of the eastern shadow of the earth
Amid the clouds upon its margin grey,
Scattered by night to swathe in its bright birth
In gold and fleecy snow the infant Day,
The glorious Sun arose, beneath his light
The earth and all.”
As it now stands the Introduction to the “ Triumph of Life”
is one of the most highly wrought and perfect passages we know
in poetry.
Translation from Faust, p. 494, stage direction, Faust
dances and sings with a girl. The song is as follows :—
Faust.
“ I had once a lovely dream
In which I saw an apple tree,
Where two fair apples with their gleam
To climb and taste attracted me.”
The Gibe.
. “ She with apples you desired
From Paradise came long ago :
With you I feel that if required,
Such still within my garden grow.”
Same page, three lines from the bottom, “ Are we so wise, and
is the pond still haunted ?” This is an absurd mistranslation of
the original, “Wir sind so klug, und dennoch spukt’s in
Tegel,” the allusion being to the recent apparition of a spectre
in the hamlet of Tegel, to the scandal of enlightened persons.
The blunder is not, however, attributable to Shelley, who, not
knowing what Tegel meant, left a blank in consequence, but to
the person who published his MS. in the Liberal.
Miscellaneous corrections. Julian and Maddalo, vol. i.
p. 290, 1. 14. For dales read vales, the word employed by
Milton in the passage referred to—Lines to Misery, st. x. 1. 2.
The rough draft has lovers instead of shadows, which having
been also in Med win’s copy, and being, as Mr. Rossetti justly
observes, more uncommon and poetical, should we think be
adopted. Lines to an Indian Air, vol. ii. p. 210, 1. 9, in what
is to all appearance the last written of the many drafts of this
�Shelley.
83
divine song, the words “champak odours” are distinctly altered
into “odours of my chaplet.” The alteration is startling, and we
confess our preference for the poem as it stood in the older
edition. Although it makes the line agree more formally in
metre with the corresponding verses of the other two stanzas,
yet it loses that subtle musical charm which it previously
possessed.
[ The Question, p. 225. The line hitherto missing from the
second stanza of that exquisite poem is, “ Like a child, half in
tenderness and mirth.” Mutability, p. 272, 1. 9, for too read
Aow. Prince Athanase, last line, p. 307, for frame read flame.
Otho, p. 309, 1. 20, for buy read bring, instead of wring, as
'ingeniously surmised by Mr. Rossetti. On Keats, p. 351, 1. 2,
for montldess read prfniZess, omitting and. Evening, p. 358,
1. 8, for enormous read cinereous. Fragment of an unfinished
Drama, p. 358,1. 27, for spring read spray. Cyclops, p. 447,
1. 23, insert “ to be” after “ not,” as suggested by Mr. Rossetti.
Epigram from, Plato, p. 457, 1. 5, for does read doth. Pan
awl Echo, p. 458, 1. 14, omit the.
Besides those already mentioned, the following emendations,
proposed by Mr. Rossetti, or adverted to in his notes, are nega
tived by the evidence of the MS., vol. i. p. 257, 1. 10, there for
¿free. ‘ P. 314, eight lines from bottom, ghostly for ghastly.
P. 327, 1. 10, bestrewn for between. P. 365, 1. 3, obscure for
o&scene. Vol. ii. p. 210, 1. 9, pine for fail. P. 247, 1. 25, age
for eye. P. 449, 1. 20, manoeuvre for measure. Dr. Dobbin’s
ingenious suggestion of “ stony” for “ strong” in the “ Hymn to
Mercury,” st. viii. 1. 1, is confirmed by the MS.
Notwithstanding all that has been effected, the imperfections
of Shelley's MSS. still leave a not inconsiderable field open for
eoniectural emendation, and the following suggestions may
perhaps help to elucidate a few obscure readings :—
I A well-known passage in “ Alastor” (vol. i. p. 107) has occasioned
infinite perplexity to Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne. The latter
abandons it as hopeless ; the former endeavours to render it
intelligible by a change in the punctuation, according to which
it reads as follows :—
“ On every side now rose
Rocks which in unimaginable forms
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and (its precipice
Obscuring) the ravine disclosed above.”
“ According to my punctuation,” says Mr. Rossetti, “ the state
ment is, that there were certain rock-pinnacles which, while they
obscured the precipice (or precipitous descent) of the ravine, left
the ravine itself visible higher up.” If, however, these spires of
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Shelley.
rock were less elevated than the walls of the ravine, we cannot
understand how they should be “ lifted in the light of evening,”
or how they could with any propriety be termed pinnacles at all.
A pinnacle is surely the highest and not the lowest point of the
rock. But if for disclosed we read inclosed, all is plain, and
we get a beautiful picture with scarcely any disturbance of the
text.
In the “Revolt of Islam” (canto iii. st. 15) is a passage abso
lutely preposterous as it stands :—
“ The moon was calm and bright,—around that column
The overhanging sky and circling sea
Spread forth in silentness profound and solemn,
The darkness of brief frenzy cast on me,
So that I knew not mine own misery.”
This is evidently nonsense ; darkness could not be spread forth
by the calm brightness of sky and sea. Cast should be altered
into past, and a colon substituted for the comma at the end of
the third line.
In Prometheus Unbound (vol. i. p. 351), Ocean says—
“ My streams will flow
Round many peopled continents.”
Read many-peopled as a compound epithet. The meaning is
not that there will be more continents than heretofore after the
liberation of Prometheus ; but that, in consequence of their
exemption from war and other calamities, these continents will
henceforth be more populous.
With these few remarks we must take leave of the biography
and textual criticism, and we are indeed sorry that within our
limits it is simply impossible to render justice to the thoroughness,
the impartiality, the indefatigable labour and genuine love which
are Mr. Rossetti’s most eminent characteristics as biographer
and editor. We cannot, however, refrain from expressing our
extreme surprise and disappointment when, on looking over
“Queen Mab” in the new edition, we saw the deforming
transformation which that poem had undergone. It is true
the alterations which Mr. Rossetti has introduced into the
text are taken from the “ Dsemon of the World,” which Shelley
purposed to be a modified extract of “ Queen Mab,” and pub
lished in the same volume with “ Alastor and other Poems.
But we can only infer from this fact that when once the inspira
tion which went to the shaping of any work ot art has totally
passed away, a poet may easily mar his own creation by trying
to make it better. Though “ Queen Mab” may in some respects
be a crude production, yet it is so full of the sap and ferment
of genius, and bears so unmistakably the stamp of Shelley’s
peculiar characteristics, that besides the value it possesses for us
�Shelley.
85
as poetry, it has the additional interest of being the earliest
' production in which we can trace the true workings of the poet’s
mind. And it appears to us that for this reason, if for no other,
1 the text ought to have been allowed to remain as it originally
stood; for with regard to those really juvenile effusions such as
the “Wandering Jew” and the “Posthumous Fragments of
Margaret Nicholson,” which Mr. Rossetti has seen fit to print in
the appendix to this edition, it is a pity he has thus rescued
Ithem from the oblivion they so richly deserve. But indeed the
new readings of “ Queen Mab,” so far from possessing any greater
poetic beauty whether of idea or expression, seem to us invariably
a diluted version of the original.
But let the reader judge for himself. We will first quote the
lines as they stand in the original “ Queen Mab,” and place
underneath them the alterations in the present edition.
“The Fairy’s frame was slight; yon fibrous cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of even,
And which the straining eye can hardly seize
When melting into eastern twilight’s shadow
Were scarce so thin, so slight, but the fair star
That gems the glittering coronet of morn,
Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,
As that which bursting from the Fairy’s form
Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,
Yet with an undulating motion
Swayed to her outline gracefully.”
“ The Fairy’s frame was slight; slight as some cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of day
When evening yields to night—
Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue
Its transitory robe,
Her thin and misty form
Moved with the moving air;
Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds
Of wakening Spring arose,
Filling the chamber and the midnight sky.”
Mark here those changes which, although apparently often
’trifling, yet alter the whole delicate texture of this exquisite
passage : instead of the original and most apt epithet applied to
the cloud, “ fibrous,” we get nothing at all in the later version,
and we are indeed at an utter loss to account for the alteration.
Thus, for the simple expression “ palest tinge of even,” we find
this awkward way of saying the identical thing, “ palest tinge of
day, when evening yields to night,” &c.; but far worse, the
truly lovely line, “ the fair star that gems the glittering coronet
of morn,” is omitted altogether, swallowed up, annihilated.
The limits of our essay will not allow us to give any further
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Shelley.
examples, but we could cite passage after passage where the
original beautiful text has been equally marred. And we must
be allowed here to express the earnest hope, which we can
hardly doubt will be echoed by all lovers of Shelley, that in any
future edition “ Queen Mab” may be restored to its original form.
Let us now, however, turn our attention to the criticism of the
works themselves; and as it is Mr. Rossetti’s evident disposition
to lay the chief stress on the technical execution of Shelley’s
poems, touching but slightly on their subject-matter and general
design, we may perhaps be justified in dwelling somewhat mor®
fully on the latter point, thus endeavouring to supplement a
deficiency highly characteristic of certain tendencies predomi
nant in contemporary art and poetry. For while on the one
hand there is in our age a propensity to depreciate the important
functions of the Beautiful, thus robbing the speculative faculties
of an ally that would impart form and colour to their abstractions,
we have on the other hand the no less mischievous error of
giving an undue prominence to workmanship and execution, and
looking on form and colour, not as the temple where the image
of the god stands enshrined, but as the very deity itself. By
these fatal demarcations and barriers erected in the mental
territories, where one realm is assigned to the Beautiful, another
to the True, and a third to the Good, we impoverish each one
of these three great forces, and in the mistaken conviction of
thereby strengthening their respective activities we obstruct that
interchange of influences which should vivify the .¿Esthetics*
Ethics, and Science of a nation. Let us for one moment stay to
consider what would become of the Beautiful, if, securely dammed
up against the influx of moral convictions and the speculations
and discoveries of the reasoning faculties, it were subsisting in
proud isolation only on and through itself. Assuredly epics such
as the “ Divina Commedia” and “ Paradise Lost,” revolving the
mighty problems “concerning God, free will, and destiny,”
struck and wound their roots inextricably round the deepest
philosophic and religious thought of their time, while the very
structure of tragedy, consisting as it does, not in the blind
and insensate conflict of passion hurtling on passion (else the
commotion of waves and winds would be an equally tragic
spectacle), but of passion lashing in mutinous revolt the iron
front of the moral law, has its foundations laid in the ethical
convictions of mankind.
What then, we may well inquire, is to become of poetry if
cut off from influences of such vital importance to its two great
divisions—the Epos and the Drama. It is evident that the form
and manner, from the imperative necessity of which, however,
we would be the last to detract, would thus truly comprise the
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Alpha and Omega of a work of Art And thus the same care
would be lavished on the polishing of a pebble or a diamond, the
polishing and setting being considered the chief things needful.
This total misapprehension of its divine mission necessarily produces that blight of all true poetry—namely, mannerism. Far
, otherwise indeed was Shelley^s conception of poetry. Both in
I theory and practice be would have extended its limits to an
almost incredible extent, enclosing both science and philosophy
within its domain. In his “ Defence of Poetry,” he goes even so
far as to say that the distinction between poets and prose writers
is a vulgar error, and that not only Plato and Bacon, but “all the
authors of revolution in opinion are not only necessarily poets
as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the per
manent analogy of things by images which participate in the life
of truth, but as their periods are rounded and rhythmical, and
contain in themselves the elements of verse, being the echo of
the eternal music.”
L Considering how marked was Shelley’s bias towards this view,
we think Mr. Rossetti somewhat apt to undervalue what con
stitutes the true centre of gravity of all the poet’s divine crea
tions, when, as for example, in speaking of“ Alastor” with reference
to “Queen Mab” (of which, in our judgment, he speaks too irre
verently when he thinks it necessary to state that it is not
unmitigated rubbish), he remarks that in the former we have
at last “ the genuine, the immortal Shelley.” With all due
deference to Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, we must yet dissent from
this assertion; and while admitting the wonderful advance in
the perfection of form, in the exquisiteness of the language, and
greater musical subtlety in the rhythm of the blank verse, still
we think that in many respects “the genuine, the immortal
Shelley” can more truly be traced in “ Queen Mab” than even in
“ Alastor,” as it palpitates with that intense faith in progress, that
fiery love of liberty, that impetuous passion for reforming the
World, which are, after all, the distinguishing features of Shelley,
and which were brought out in their full glory in his “ Revolt of
Islam,” and “ Prometheus Unbound.” Shelley indeed, when
he launched that enfant terrible of a poem into the world, fully
believed in his power of making a breach in the solid rampart of
custom, so as to take by storm and overnight, as it were, that
great stronghold in which theology, monarchy, and matrimony
have hitherto braved even the sap of Time and Change. It is
with an emotion wavering between a smile and a tear that we
think of this frail, gentle, pure, and lofty being who, with
“ weak hands though mighty heart,” dared that triple-headed
power which rules the world. It is doubtless by the violent
recoil of hopes forced back upon his own mind, and debarred
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Shelley.
their natural fieiy action on the nation at large, that we must
interpret the sad and solemn harmonies of “Alastor.” These
spring from the revulsion of those impassioned aspirations to
which “ Queen Mab” owed its being, and the despair that broods
over them is but the shadow cast by the sun of hope itself. It
is therefore a total misapprehension of the dominant quality of
Shelley s mind, if, as is so often the case, those poems which
express, in however beautiful and inimitable a manner, his
melancholy or despondent moods, are considered as his most re
presentative poems; on the contrary, they are but the expressions
of that dominion which the momentary and the casual must
exercise over every mind still subject to the varying influences
of life; but that which indeed constitutes “the intense, the deep,
the imperishable” Shelley, which will exercise a constraining in
fluence over the centuries, is the aspiration after goodness no
dejection could quench—the faith in humanity which doubts
might assail, but never shake; the love which year after year
of the short life in which he met with so much persecution and
bitter hate, rounded to a fuller and more resplendent orb.
Let us, however, now turn our attention to the poem next in
chronological sequence, “ The Revolt of Islam/’ which Mr.
Rossetti has despatched in a few words, and which appears to us
to be a mine of inexhausted thought. The vast scope, gorgeous
imagination, and enchantment of rhythm and language which
mark this work are so widely known, that we proceed at once
to point out what appears to us to constitute its fundamental
idea, and one which hitherto has been overlooked. This is the
completely changed aspect in which the relation of the sexes
is regarded. Hitherto all poets creating ideals of woman, however
pure or lofty these might be, had depicted her invariably in her
relation as either wife or mistress, mother or daughter—that is,
as a supplement to man’s nature, or, as Milton plainly expresses
it—
“ He for God only, she for God in him
or, in other words, he raised to the contemplation of an infinite;
she condemned to that of his finite nature.
To Shelley belongs the honour of being the first poet who '
has embodied, in a shape of the loftiest loveliness, the most
momentous of all our modern ideas—that of the emancipation of
women from this subjection to men. He is thus the poetic fore
runner of John Stuart Mill, and has achieved in the world of the
ideal that which is now being realized practically by the man of
science. For by making his verse the receptacle of his bold and
lofty speculations on that subject, and by impregnating with
them the highest and most sensitive minds of the generation that
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succeeded his own, he has doubtless opened one of the paths
which have led to the present widespread movement regarding
this question.
In Cythna we hail a new female type, and one indeed which
I hitherto has been repugnant to poets, who, if they approached at
all that side of woman’s character which she represents, approached
it either to distort its features or to soften them down to the more
1 accepted standard. But Shelley, with his usual fearlessness, bates
not one jot of the idea. He holds that woman, just as man, is
or should be a being whose sympathies are too vast—whose
thoughts too multiform to converge to the one focus of personal
love, and that in the self-same way it is at once her right and
her duty to take an active share in the general concerns of
humanity, and to influence them, not only indirectly through
others, but directly by her own thoughts and actions. Thus
►Cythna, prophet, reformer, and martyr—invested with all the
glow and glory which the poet’s imagination could bestow on
her-—is a creation unique in the whole range of fiction.
The poet, with deep insight, indicates in canto ii. that the
task of the regeneration of woman can only be brought about by
woman herself; that it is she who must rouse man’s interest,and
kindle his enthusiasm in her cause, for, as Laon says—
“ This misery was but coldly felt, till she
Became my only friend, who had indued
My purpose with a wider sympathy;
Thus, Cythna mourned with me the servitude
In which the half of humankind were mewed,
Victims of lust and hate, the slave of slaves ;
She mourned that grace and power were thrown as food
To the hyaena lust, who, among graves
Over his loathed meal, laughing in agony, raves.
And I still gazing on that glorious child,
liven as these thoughts flushed o’er her :—‘ Cythna, sweet,
Well with the world art thou unreconciled ;
Never will peace and human nature meet,
Till free and equal man and woman greet
Domestic peace ; and ere this power can make
In human hearts its calm and holy seat,
This slavery must be broken.’ ”
Such an exalted ideal of woman necessarily produced a con
ception and expression of love which is simply supreme. The
sensuous and susceptible temperament which usually underlies
poetic genius has almost inevitably the tendency of stimulating
the passions too strongly in one direction, and from this point
of view Plato had doubtless a fair excuse for his verdict against
the poets as elements of disturbance and fiery insurrection in
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Shelley.
the serene atmosphere of his model state. Shelley, however,
forms in this respect a marvellous exception. His love, indeed,
would almost require the baptism of some new name to distin
guish it from the lower and lesser passion which currently goes
by that appellation, for it “ transcends the senses infinitely as
heaven does earth.” Unrivalled in this respect is the sixth
canto of the “ Revolt of Islam/’ where the poet, secure in the
“ golden purity” of bis nature, has fearlessly penetrated into the
fiery depths of human passion, blending it in strains of laby
rinthine music with the subtlest ecstasy which emanates from the
spirit. Between such a conception, embracing the whole circum
ference of love, and that of Keats, for example, who describes
it much in the same spirit of childlike sensuousness with which
he descants on “lucent syrops” and other “spiced dainties,” or
of Byron, to whom in some of his most powerful flights it revealed
no deeper aspect than that of being “youth’s madness,” what
an immeasurable distance! These remarks naturally lead us
to Epipsychidion, where Shelley, apparently bursting the last
link of “ dull mortality,” has not only sustained the inspiration
of his subject at a dizzy height, but, soaring ever higher in
miraculous ascent, lands us ultimately in the Empyrean of love
itself. We indeed cannot comprehend how Mr. Rossetti, after
some just remarks descriptive of the beauty of its poetry, could
actually bring himself to say of this most exquisitely lovely pro
duction, “ I may confess, however, to doubting whether it is quite
a justifiable poem to write. Its very mood tends towards the
intangible, and its framework of imagery and symbol remains to
this day an enigma to students of the poetry and the life of
¡Shelley /’ to which our only answer is that, to put such a question
with regard to such a poem is in our opinion equivalent to asking
whether the “Symposium” or the “Vita Nuova,” or any work,
in short, where that most delicate bloom of the emotions, neces
sarily the rare attribute of a “ sacred few,” finds its peculiar
expression, was a justifiable production. If Mr. Rossetti had not
shown in his criticism on Walt Whitman a remarkable power of
appreciating qualities of genius the most opposite to what con
stitutes the sculpturesque or the pictorial in poetry, we might
probably have inferred that his intimate appreciation of the
sister art of painting had had an influence in diminishing his
appreciation of works whose subject-matter belonging essentially
to the inward and incommensurable life of thought, necessitated
a mode of treatment which, adapting itself to this quality, occa
sionally verges on the border-land of mysticism ; but this would
evidently have been a wrong inference, and we are therefore at a
loss to account for Mr. Rossetti s estimate of Epipsychidion.
Ot the “Prometheus Unbound,” that greatest production of
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91
Shelley, Mr. Rossetti has given us such a powerful and correct
estimate, that nothing further remains to be said of it in a narrow
compass ; it is, indeed, such a noble specimen both of his style
and criticism that we cannot abstain from quoting it as it
stands—
“ There is, 1 suppose, no poem comparable in the fair sense of that
word to 8 Prometheus Unbound.’ The immense scale and boundless scope
<jf the conception; the marble majesty and extra-mundane passion of
the personages ; the sublimity of ethical aspiration • the radiance of
ideal and poetic beauty, which saturates every phase of the subject,
and almost (as it were) wraps it from sight, as it were, and transforms
it out of sense into spirit; the rolling river of great sound and lyrical
rapture, form a combination not to be matched elsewhere, and scarcely
to encounter competition. There is another source of greatness in
this poem neither to be foolishly lauded nor (still less) undervalued.
It is this—-that Prometheus Unbound, however remote the foundation
of its subject-matter and unactual its executive treatment, does in
reality express the most modern of conceptions, the utmost reach of
speculation of a mind which burst up all crusts of custom and pre
scription like a volcano, and imaged forth a future wherein man should
be indeed the autocrat and renovated renovator of his planet. This it
is, I apprehend, which places Prometheus clearly, instead of disputably,
at the summit of all latter poetry ; the fact that it embodies in forms
of truly ecstatic beauty, the dominant passion of the dominant intel
lects of the age, and especially of one of the extremest and highest
among them all, the author himself. It is the ideal poem of perpetual
and triumphant progression—the Atlantis of Man Emancipated.”
Owing to the necessary limits of our essay, we must pass over
the 88 Cenci,” that drama which is the most magnificent refutation
of the charge often brought against the poet, that he was unable
to conceive and embody any character out of himself, or portray
the dark and malignant passions of human nature, and content
ourselves with a few remarks on 88 Adonais”and “Hellas,” the poet's
last complete compositions, and which doubtless contain the best
and maturest expression of his philosophical thought. Indeed, we
think Mr. Rossetti's section on the religion and philosophy of
Shelley necessarily defective from his scanty recognition of these
two poems, and from his not rendering sufficient justice to the
intense earnestness on these matters, which so essentially cha
racterizes Shelley, as, for example, when he says, 88 The general
tenor of ‘ Adonais’ may seem to amount to the expression of a
positive belief in the immortality of Keats, as a separate individual
soul; but we must be on our guard against poetic abstractions
and (not to use the word disrespectfully) poetic machinery.”
One of the stanzas from which M r. Rossetti would draw such an
inference, where it is said—
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Shelley.
“ He is made one with Nature : there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird ;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone
Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above—”
justifies, in our opinion, the direct opposite of this conclusion—
namely, that Shelley appears, first, to have held that death was
the cessation of the separate insulated consciousness of the
individual, and the redistribution of the atoms that build up
his existence into the general universe of things ; secondly, that
whatever form of ultimate development this separate entity had
attained, during its transit through life, reacted again on passing
thence on the general universe—
“ Compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear.”
Any attempt, however, to range the swift and subtle spirit of
Shelley into a distinct school of philosophy, would, in our opinion,
be an undertaking as ill judged as assuredly futile : for, as he
primarily looks at the world with the eyes of the poet, he arrives
at his deepest convictions concerning it less through any sustained
chain of systematic reasoning, than through flashes of intuitive
perception, born of his intense absorption into, and passionate
worship of, the great Cosmos. As it is fabled that Pygmalion
was consumed by so potent a passion for the marble image that,
clasping it, he mastered the cold repose of the stone itself, and
won a response from its locked lips, even thus every true poet
stands in his relation to Nature, and besieges her with prayers,
tears, and entreaties, weary watches, and devouring aspirations,
till he feels at last the throb in the stony veins, hears the murmur
of the muffled voice, till, from the sun and the sea, the trees and
beasts, yea, the very stones, there burst awful manifestations,
opening glimpses, strange and sudden, into the vast dumb
mystery. To have cast the brilliant net of his language over
these divine but too fugitive moments of spiritual experience,
and thus for ever to have retained them in song, is one of the
highest of the many achievements of this transcendent genius.
But although we are thus convinced that Shelley’s philosophy
cannot, in the strict sense of that word, be classed under any
existing system of metaphysics, yet we think it evident that the
bent of his mind impelled him strongly towards an idealistic
conception of the universe ; and it is curious to note that, even
�Shelley.
93
in his days of rampant materialism, when saturated with the
study of Hume and the French encylopsedists, he sought a
vehicle for those views in “ Queen Mab,” he ever and anon, when
^wrought up to a pitch of high lyrical exaltation, bursts into ex
pressions that are the direct contrary of his professed opinions,
as when he says, for example, “ Soul is the only element.” This
of course by no means implies that Shelley’s thought was
stationary, but merely that his mind possessed an original bias
towards transcendentalism ; and there can be little doubt that
his positive assertions of atheism spring in great part, as is well
illustrated by an anecdote told in Mr. Rossetti’s Memoir, from
the deep conviction that every advance towards truth must be
painfully impeded, till the obstacles which an intolerant faith
opposed to it had been fairly demolished. Many of his asser
tions therefore should be considered relatively rather as missiles
used by a fearless combatant, than statements of an actual con
viction. It is evident however that, although there are passages
in “ Queen Mab” which certainly seem very much in harmony
with “ Hellas” and “Adonais,” yet the main philosophical concep
tion is in fact widely different, and we recognise the clearest
expression of this difference in the address to the “ Spirit of
Nature” (“Queen Mab,” p. 89). In this fine piece of declama
tion, the Spirit of Nature is represented as insensible to all
moral distinctions, and by a necessary consequence, as devoid of
moral beauty. It is therefore no object of adoration, love, or
even admiration : it is a mere machine, and what is still worse,
the human beings produced and controlled by it must be as
little the objects of affection or admiration. The spirit so
gloriously described in “ Adonais” is something widely different.
“Its smile kindles the universe;” “it wields the world with
never-wearied love.” It is compared to a fire, reflected with an
Infinite variety of intensity by an infinite multitude of mirrors;
if the reflection is imperfect, the fault is in the mirror, not in
the fire. In a word, the spirit of “ Queen Mab” is Necessity, and
is addressed as such ; the spirit of “ Adonais” is Love, and is
addressed as such. By so much higher as the idea of love is
than the idea of necessity, by so much better as the poetry of
“Adonais” is than the poetry of “Queen Mab,” by so much
higher and better are Shelley’s last thoughts than his first.
There is another noteworthy distinction. In “ Queen Mab” the
operation of the spirit is limited to the visible universe ; it is
expressly said to be “contained” by Nature. In “Adonais,” on
the other hand, it contains Nature ; it not merely pervades but
invests the universe—“ Sustains it from beneath and kindles it
above,” The same idea is still more forcibly expressed in the
prologue to “ Hellas”—
�94
Shelley.
“ Deem not thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.”
Briefly, the spirit in “ Queen Mab” is contemplated as merely
immanent in the universe. In “Adonais” and “Hellas” it is im
manent still, but also transcendent., In this latter poem, indeed,
we find that the immaterialism of Shelley had reached its cul
minating point, and it is a significant fact that he was studying
Kant in September, 1821, and actually translating Spinoza in
November of the same year, at the time when “ Hellas” was
completed. How intently his mind must have been engaged on
these metaphysical speculations is evident from the fact that he
represents the Sultan in the midst of insurrection, whilst his
throne totters on the verge of ruin, as actually listening during
an interview with Ahasuerus to the most profound exposition
on the non-existence of matter. This is certainly carrying the
love of philosophizing to an incredible extent. But the passage
itself soars to such sublime heights of thought, and is moreover
such a complete resume of Shelley’s last convictions on these
subjects, that we are fain to crown these few inadequate remarks
with its surpassing splendour—
“ Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the future and the past;
But look on that which cannot change—the One,
The Unborn, and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose out wall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds—this whole
Of suns and worlds, and men and beasts and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision ;—all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams ;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought’s eternal flight—they have no being ;
Nought is but that it feels itself to be.”
Is there not a strange significance in this fact, that the last
work of importance on which this restless inquirer was engaged
should have been cut off abruptly at this point of interrogation,
“Then what is Life?” Bewildered cry cast into space whose
mournful reverberations were straightway muffled in death !
Evidently projected on a colossal scale, and wrapped in an
�Shelley.
95
atmosphere of supernatural mystery, where dream is super
imposed on dream, there is in the “ Triumph of Life” a weird
labyrinth of gloom and glare, and amid the cloudy whirl of grey,
half-ghastly phantoms, gleams of a celestial radiance which
almost recd to us the visions of the Apocalypse. Its allegory
is still indeed, and we fear must in part probably remain, a
magnificent riddle; we nevertheless entertain the hope that a
minute comparison with passages both in the poetry and prose
Blight help us to discover coincidences of symbol and imagery
which should throw a ray of light on the dark intricacy. There
can be no doubt that “ the shape all light” which is described as
appearing to Rousseau gliding out of the deep cavern along the
river—
“ With palms so tender
Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow,”
is the Urania of which it is said in “ Adonais”—
“ Out of her secret paradise she sped
Through camp and cities rough with stone and steel,
And human hearts which to her aery tread
Yielding, not wounded, the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where’er they fell.”
I On the other hand, the New Vision of the Car, wherein sits
a hooded figure crouching in the shadow of the tomb, represents
Life, and the Janus-visaged shadow who guides it with bandaged
eyes may be identified with
44 The world’s eyeless charioteer—
Destiny,”
spoken of in “ Hellas.” The excessive glare which is described
as proceeding from that chariot dims the fair shape, as hurrying
©n with solemn speed it whirls the loud million triumphantly
along with it. This probably means that all but a chosen few
are seized and preyed upon by the multitudinous passions of the
world, whose fiercer fires extinguish the celestial flame or aspira
tion after perfection. Rousseau himself is a type of those men
of genius who, having allowed the impure breath of earth to
alloy the spark with which their spirit had been kindled, have
thus in part subjected themselves to corruption. It also appears
probable that “ The Fable,” printed in the “ Relics of Shelley,”
and itself a remarkable fragment, written about the same time
as “ Epipsychidion,” affords a clue to that perplexing allegory of
the phantoms near the end of the poem. It is there said that
by the counsel of Life, Love left man in a savage place with
on|y the company of shrouded figures, of whom it is said,
“None can expound whether these figures were the spectres of
��
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The poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley ... by W.M. Rossetti
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Collation: 75-97 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review (Vol. 38, no. 1, July 1870). Reviewer not named in text; attribution: Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. A review by W.M. Rossetti of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelly. A revised text with Notes and a Memoir. 2 vols. Moxon and Co., 1870. The Westminster Review was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828.
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Conway Tracts
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38
[July
ci ^3
Shelley
as a
Lyric Poet.1
OO many biographies, records, comments, criticisms, of Shelley
0 have lately appeared that I take for granted that all who hear
me have some general acquaintance with the facts of his life.
Of the biographies none, perhaps, is more interesting than the
short work by Mr. J. A. Symonds, which has lately been published
as one of the series edited by Mr. Morley, ‘ English Men of Letters.’
That work has all the charm which intense admiration of its subject,
set forth in a glowing style, can lend it. Those who in the main
hold with Mr. Symonds, and are at one with him in his funda
mental estimate ot things, will no doubt find his work highly attrac
tive. Those, on the other hand, who see in Shelley’s character
many things which they cannot admire, and in the theories that
moulded it much which is deeply repulsive, will find Mr. Symonds’s
work a less satisfactory guide than they could have wished. Of
the many comments and criticisms on Shelley’s character and poetry
two of the most substantial and rational are, the essay by Mr. R. H.
Hutton, and that by the late Mr. Walter Bagehot. To these two
friends Shelley, it would appear, had been one of the attractions of
their youth, and in their riper years each has given his mature
estimate of Shelley’s poetry in its whole substance and tendency.
We all admire that which we agree with; and nowhere have I found
on this subject thoughts which seem tome so adequate and so helpful
as those contained in these two essays, none which give such insight
into Shelley's abnormal character and into the secret springs of his
inspiration. Of the benefit of these thoughts I have freely availed
myself, whenever they seemed to throw light on the subject of this
lecture.
The effort to enter into the meaning of Shelley’s poetry is not
altogether a painless one. Some may ask, Why should it be painful ?
Cannot you enjoy his poems merely in an aesthetic way, take the
marvel of their aerial movement and the magic of their melody,
without scrutinising too closely their meaning or moral import?
This, I suppose, most of my hearers could do for themselves, without
any comment of mine. Such a mere surface, dilettante way of
treating the subject would be useless in itself, and altogether un
worthy of this place. All true literature, all genuine poetry, is the
direct outcome, the condensed essence, of actual life and thought.
Lyric poetry for the most part is—Shelley's especially was—the
vivid expression of personal experience.
It is only as poetry
is founded on reality that it has any solid value ; otherwise it is
1 A Lecture delivered in the theatre of the Museum, Oxford.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
39
worthless. Before, then, attempting to understand Shelley's lyrics I
must ask what was the reality out of which they came—that is, what
manner of man Shelley was, what were his ruling views of life, along
what lines did his thoughts move ?
Those who knew Shelley best speak of the sweetness and refine
ment of his nature, of his lofty disinterestedness, his unworldliness.
They even speak of something like heroic self-forgetfulness. These
things we can in sort believe, for there are in his writings many
traits that look like those qualities. And yet one receives with some
decided reserve the high eulogies of his friends ; for we feel that
these were not generally men whose moral estimates of things we
would entirely accept, and his life contained things that seem
strangely at variance with such qualities as they attribute to him.
When Byron speaks of his purity of mind we cannot but doubt whether
Byron was a good judge of purity. We must, moreover, on the evidence
'of Shelley’s own works demur; for there runs through his poems
a painful taint of supersubtilised impurity, of aweless shamelessness,
which we never can believe came from a mind truly pure. A pene
trating taint it is, which has evilly affected many of the higher minds
who admire him, in a way which Byron's own more commonplace
licentiousness never could have done.
One of his biographers has said that in no man was the moral
sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley, in none was
the perception of right and wrong more acute. I rather think that
the late Mr. Bagehot was nearer the mark when he asserted that in
Shelley the conscience never had been revealed—that he was almost
entirely without conscience. Moral susceptibilities and impulses,
keen and refined, he had. He was inspired with an enthusiasm of
humanity after a kind; hated to see pain in others, and would
willingly relieve it; hated oppression, and stormed against it, but
then he regarded all rule and authority as oppression. He felt for
the poor and the suffering, and tried to help them, and willingly
would have shared with all men the vision of good which he sought
for himself. But these passionate impulses are something very dif
ferent from conscience. Conscience first reveals itself when we become
aware of the strife between a lower and a higher nature within us—
a law of the flesh warring against the law of the mind. And it is out
of this experience that moral religion is born, the higher law rather
leading up and linking us to One whom that law represents. As
Canon Mozely has said, ‘ it is an introspection on which all religion
is built—man going into himself and seeing the struggle within
him ; and thence getting self-knowledge, and thence the knowledge
of God.’ Of this double nature, this inward strife between flesh and
spirit, Shelley knew nothing. He was altogether a child of impulse
—of impulse, one, total, all-absorbing. And the impulse that came
to him he followed whithersoever it went, without questioning either
himself or it. He was pre-eminently roZs ttu6c<tlv aKoXovOyriKos,
and you know that Aristotle tells us that such an one is no fit judge
�40
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[j^y
of moral truth. But this peculiarity, which made him so little fitted
to guide either his own life or that of others, tended, on the other
hand, very powerfully to make him pre-eminently a lyric poet. How
it fitted him for this we shall presently see. But abandonment to
impulse, however much it may contribute to lyrical inspiration, is a
poor guide to conduct; and a poet s conduct in life, of whatever kind
it be, quickly reacts on his poetry. It was so with Shelley.
It is painful to recall the unhappy incidents, but? we cannot
understand his poetry if we forget them. ‘ Strongly moralised,’ Mr.
Symonds tells us, his boyhood was ; but of a strange—I might say,
an unhuman—type the morality must have been which allowed
some of the chief acts of his life. His father was no doubt a com
monplace and worldly-minded squire, wholly unsympathetic with his
dreamy son; but this cannot justify the son’s unfilial and irreverent
conduct towards his parent, going so far as to curse him for the
amusement of coarse Eton companions. Nobility of nature he may
have had, but it was such nobility as allowed him, in order to hurl
defiance at authority, to start atheist at Eton, and to do the same
more boldly at Oxford, with what result you know. It allowed him
to engage the heart of a simple and artless girl, who entrusted her
life in his keeping, and then after two or three years to abandon
her and her child—for no better reason, it would seem, than that
she cared too little for her baby, and had an unpleasant sister, who
was an offence to Shelley. It allowed him first to insult the religious
sense of his fellow men by preaching the wildest atheism, then in the
poem ‘ Laon and Cythna,’ which he intended to be his gospel for the
world, to outrage the deepest instincts of our nature by introducing a
most horrible and unnatural incident. A moral taint there is in this,
which has left its trail in many of his after poems. The furies of
the sad tragedy of Harriet Westbrook haunted him till the close,
and drew forth some strains of weird agony; but even in these
there is no manly repentance, no self-reproach that is true and
human-hearted.
After his second marriage he never repeated the former offence,
but many a strain in his later poems, as in ‘ Epipsychidion,’ and in
his latest lyrics, proves that constancy of affection was not in him, nor
reckoned by him among the virtues. Idolators of Shelley will, I know,
reply, ‘Tou judge Shelley by the conventional morality of the present
day, and, judging him by this standard, of course you harshly con
demn him. But it was against these very conventions which you call
morality that Shelley s whole life was a protest. He was the prophet
of something truer or better than this.’ To this I answer that
Shelley’s revolt was not against the conventional morality of his own
time, but against the fundamental morality of all time. Had he
merely cried out against the stifling political atmosphere and the
dry, dead orthodoxy of the Regency and the reign of George IV., and
longed for some ampler air, freer and more life-giving, one could well
have understood him, even sympathised with him. But he rebelled
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
41
not against the limitations and corruptions of his own day, but
against the moral verities which two thousand years have made good,
and which have been tested and approved not only by eighteen
Christian centuries, but no less by the wisdom of Virgil and Cicero, of
Aristotle and Sophocles. Shelley may be the prophet of a new morality,
but it is one which never can be realised till moral law has been ob
literated from the universe and conscience from the heart of man.
A nature which was capable of the things I have alluded to,
whatever other traits of nobility it may have had, must have been
traversed by some strange deep flaw, marred by some radical inward
defect. In some of his gifts and impulses he was more,—in other
things essential to goodness, he was far less,—than other men ; a
fully developed man he certainly was not. I am inclined to believe
that, for all his noble impulses and aims, he was in some way defi
cient in rational and moral sanity. Alanv of you will remember
Hazlitt’s somewhat cynical description of him. Yet, to judge by
his writings, it looks like truth. He had ‘ a fire in his eye, a fever
in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech,
which mark out the philosophic fanatic.
He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced.’ This is just the outward appearance
we could fancy for his inward temperament. What was that tem
perament ?
He was entirely a child of impulse, lived and longed for highstrung, intense emotion—simple, all-absorbing, all-penetrating emo
tion, going straight on in one direction to its object, hating and
resenting whatever opposed its progress thitherward. The object
which he longed for was some abstract intellectualised spirit of beauty
and loveliness, which should thrill his spirit continually with delicious
shocks of emotion.
Ibis yearning, panting desire is expressed by him in a thousand
forms and figures throughout his poetry. Again and again the
refrain recurs—
I pant for the music which is Divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine,
Loosen the notes in a silver shower;
Like a herbless plain for the gentle rain
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
Let me drink the spirit of that sweet sound ;
More, 0 more ! I am thirsting yet;
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart, to stifle it;
The dissolving strain, through every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.
He sought not mere sensuous enjoyment, like Keats, but keen
intellectual and emotional delight—the mental thrill, the glow of
soul, the ‘ tingling of the nerves,’ that accompany transcendental
�42
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[July
rapture. His hungry craving was for intellectual beauty, and the
delight it yields ; if not that, then for horror, anything to thrill the
nerves, though it should curdle the blood and make the flesh creep.
Sometimes for a moment this perfect abstract loveliness would seem
to have embodied itself in some creature of flesh and blood ; but only
for a moment would the sight soothe him—the sympathy would cease,
the glow of heart would die down—and he would pass on in the hot,
insatiable pursuit of new rapture. ‘ There is no rest for us,’ says the
great preacher, 4 save in quietness, confidence, and affection.’ This
was not what Shelley sought, but something very different from this.
The pursuit of abstract ideal beauty was one form which his
hungry, insatiable desire took. Another passion that possessed him
was the longing to pierce to the very heart the mystery of existence.
It has been said that before an insoluble mystery, clearly seen to be
insoluble, the soul bows down and is at rest, as before an ascertained
truth. Shelley knew nothing of this. Before nothing would his soul
bow down. Every veil, however sacred, he would rend, pierce the
inner shrine of being, and force it to give up its secret. There is in
him a profane audacity, an utter awelessness. Intellectual AZSws
was to him unknown. Beverence was to him another word for hated
superstition. Nothing was to him inviolate. All the natural reserves
he would break down. Heavenward, he would pierce to the heart of
the universe and lay it bare; manward, he would annihilate all the
precincts of personality. Every soul should be free to mingle with
any other, as so many raindrops do. In his own words,
The fountains of our deepest life shall be
Confused in passion’s golden purity.
However fine the language in which such feelings may clothe theme
selves, in truth they are wholly vile ; there is no horror of shameless
ness which they may not generate. Yet this is what comes of the
unbridled desire for ‘ tingling pulses,’ quivering, panting, fainting
sensibility, which Shelley everywhere makes the supreme happiness.
It issues in awelessness, irreverence, and what some one has called
4 moral nudity.’
These two impulses, both combined with another passion, he had
—the passion for reforming the world. He had a real, benevolent
desire to impart to all men the peculiar good he sought for himself
—a life of free, unimpeded impulse, of passionate, unobstructed
desire. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—these of course; but some
thing far beyond these—absolute Perfection, as he conceived it, he
believed to be within every man’s reach. Attainable, if only all the
growths of history could be swept away, all authority and govern
ment, all religion, all law, custom, nationality, everything that
limits and restrains, and if every man were left open to the uncon
trolled expansion of himself and his impulses. The end of this
process of making a clean sweep of all that is, and beginning afresh,
would be that family, social ranks, government, worship, would dis
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
43
appear, and then man would be king over himself, and wise, gentle,
just, and good. Such was his temperament, the original emotional
basis of Shelley s nature ; such, too, some of the chief aims towards
which this temperament impelled him. And certainly these aims do
make one think of the ‘ maggot in his brain.’ But a temperament of
this kind, whatever aims it turned to, was eminently and essentially
lyrical. Those thrills of soul, those tingling nerves, those rapturous glows
of feeling, are the very substance out of which high lyrics are woven.
The insatiable craving to pierce the mystery, of course, drove
Shelley to philosophy for instruments to pierce it with. During his
brief life he was a follower of three distinct schools of thought. At
first he began with the philosophy of the senses, was a materialist,
adopting Lucretius as his master and holding that atoms are the
only realities, with perhaps a pervading life of nature to mould
them—that from atoms all things come, to atoms return. Yet even
over this dreary creed, without spirit, immortality, or God, he shouted
a jubilant ‘ Eureka,' as though it were some new glad tidings.
hrom this he passed into the school of Hume—got rid of matter,
the dull clods of earth, denied both matter and mind, and held that
these were nothing but impressions, with no substance behind them.
This was liker Shelley’s cast of mind than materialism. Not only
dull clods of matter, but personality, the ‘ I ’ and the ‘ thou,’ were by
this creed eliminated, and that exactly suited Shelley’s way of
thought. It gave him a phantom world.
brom Hume he went on to Plato, and in him found still more
congenial nutriment. The solid, fixed entities—matter and mind —
he could still deny, while he was led on to believe in eternal arche
types behind all phenomena, as the only realities. These Platonic
ideas attracted his abstract intellect and imagination, and are often
alluded to in his later poems, as in ‘ Adonais.’ Out of this philosophy
it is probable that he got the only object of worship which he ever
acknowledged, the Spirit of Beauty. Plato’s idea of beauty changed into
a spirit, but without will, without morality, in his own words :—
That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
To the moral and religious truths which are the backbone of
Plato’s thought lie never attained. Shelley’s thought never had any
backbone. Each of these successively adopted philosophies entered
into and coloured the successive stages of Shelley’s poetry; but
through them all his intellect and imagination remained unchanged.
W hat was the nature of that intellect ? It was wholly akin and
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
-juiv
adapted to the temperament I have described as his. Imnatient of
solid substances, inaccessible to many kinds of truth, inappreciative of
solid, concrete facts, it was quick and subtle to seize the evanescent
hues of things, the delicate aromas which are too fine for ordinary
perceptions. His intellect waited on his temperament, and, so to
speak, did its will—caught up one by one the warm emotions as they
were flung off, and worked them up into the most exquisite abstrac
tions. The rush of throbbing pulsations supplied the materials for
his keen-edged thought to work on, and these it did mould into the
rarest, most beautiful shapes. This his mind was busv doing all his
life long. The real world, existence as it is to other minds, he re
coiled from—shrank from the dull, gross earth which we see around
us—nor less from the unseen world of Righteous Law and Will
which we apprehend above us. The solid earth he did not care for.
Heaven—a moral heaven—there was that in him which would not
believe in. So, as Mr. Hutton has said, his mind made for itself a
dwelling-place midway between the two, equally remote from both.
some interstellar region, some cold, clear place—
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane—
which he peopled with ideal shapes and abstractions, wonderful or weird,
beautiful or fantastic, all woven out of his own dreaming phantasy.
This was the world in which he was at home; he was not at home
with any reality known to other men. No real human characters
appear in his poetry; his own pulsations, desires, aspirations, sup
plied the place of these. Hardly any actual human feeling is in
them; only some phase of evanescent emotion, or the shadow of it, is
seized—not even the flower of human feeling, but the bloom of the
flower or the dream of the bloom. A real landscape he has seldom
described, only his own impression of it, or some momentarv gleam,
some tender light, that has fleeted vanishingly over earth and sea he
has caught. Nature he used mainly to cull from it some of its most
delicate tints, some faint hues of the dawn or the sunset clouds, to
weave in and colour the web of his abstract dream. So entirely at
home is he in this abstract shadowv world of his own making, that
when he would describe common visible things he does so bv likening
them to those phantoms of the brain, as though with these last alone
he was familiar. A irgil likens the ghosts bv the banks of Styx to
falling leaves—
Quani mulxa in silvis auciumni frigore prime
Lapsa cadunx folia.
Shelley likens falling leaves to ghosts.
leaves, he says—
Before the wind the dead
Are driven. like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
Others have compared thought to a breeze. With Shelley the
breeze is like thought; the pilot spirit of the blast, he savs—
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
45
Wakens the leaves and waves, ere it hath past,
To such brief unison as on the brain
One tone which never can recur has cast
One accent, never to return again.
We see thus that nature as it actually exists has little place in
Shelley’s poetry. And man, as he really is, may be said to have no
place at all.
Neither is the world of moral or spiritual truth there—not the
living laws by which the world is governed—no presence of a Sove
reign Will, no all-wise Personality, behind the fleeting shows of
time. The abstract world which his imagination dwelt in is a cold,
weird, unearthly, inhuman place, peopled with shapes which we may
wonder at, but cannot love. When we first encounter these we are
fain to exclaim, Earth we know, and Heaven we know, but who and
what are ye ? Ye belong neither to things human nor to things
divine. After a very brief sojourn in Shelley’s ideal world, with its
pale abstractions, most men are ready to say with another poet, after
a voyage among the stars—
Then back to earth, the dear green earth;
Whole ages though I here should roam,
The world for my remarks and me
Would not a whit the better be :
I’ve left my heart at home.
In that dear green earth, and the men who have lived or still
live on it, in their human hopes and fears, in their faiths and aspi
rations, lies the truest field for the highest imagination to work
in. That I believe to be the haunt and main region for the songs
of the greatest poets. The real is the true world for a great poet,
but it was not Shelley’s world.
Yet Shelley, while the imaginative mood was on him, felt this
ideal world of his as real as most men feel the solid earth, and
through the pallid lips of its phantom people and dim abstractions he
pours as warm a flood of emotion as ever poet did through the
rosiest lips and brightest eyes of earth-born creatures. Not more real
to Burns were his bonny Jean and his Highland Mary, than to
Shelley were the visions of Asia and Panthea, and the Lady of the Sen
sitive Plant, while he gazed on them. And when his affections did
light, not on these abstractions, but on creatures of flesh and blood,
yet so penetrated was his thought with his own idealism, that he
lifted them up from earth into that rarefied atmosphere, and de
scribed them in the same style of imagery and language as that with
which he clothes the phantasms of his mind. Thus it will be seen
that it was a narrow and limited tract over which Shelley’s imagina
tion ranged—that it took little or no note of reality, and that bound
less as was its fertility and power of resource within its own chosen
circle, yet the widest realm of mere brain creation must be thin and
�46
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[juiy
small compared with existing reality both in the seen and the
unseen worlds.
We can now see the reason why Shelley’s long poems are such
absolute failures, his short lyrics so strangely succeed. Mere thrills
of soul were weak as connecting bonds for long poems.
Dis
tilled essences and personified qualities were poor material out of
which to build up great works. These things could give neither
unity, nor motive power, • nor human interest to long poems.
Hence the incoherence which all but a few devoted admirers find
in Shelley’s long poems, -despite their grand passages and their splen
did imagery. In fact, if the long poems were to be broken up and
thrown into a heap, and the lyric portions riddled out of them and
preserved, the world would lose nothing, and would get rid of not a
little offensive stuff. An exception to this judgment is generally
made in favour of the ‘ Cenci ’; but that tragedy turns on an
incident so repulsive that, notwithstanding its acknowedged power,
it can hardly give pleasure to any healthy mind.
On the other hand, single thrills of rapture, which are such in
sufficient stuff to make long poems out of, supply the very inspiration
for the true lyric. It is this predominance of emotion, so unhappy to
himself, which made Shelley the lyrist that he was. When he sings
his lyric strains, whatever is most unpleasant in him is softened
down, if it does not wholly disappear. Whatever is most unique and
excellent in him comes out at its best—his eye for abstract beauty,
the subtlety of his thought, the rush of bis eager pursuing de
sire, the splendour of his imagery, the delicate rhythm, the
matchless music. These lyrics are gales of melody blown from a
far-off region, that looks fair in the distance. Perhaps those enjoy
them most who do not inquire too closely what is the nature of that
land, or know too exactly the theories and views of life of which
these songs are the effluence; for if we come too near we might
find that there was poison in the air. Many a one has read those
lyrics and felt their fascination without thought of the unhappy
experience out of which they have come. They understood ‘ a
beauty in the words, but not the words.’ I doubt whether any one
after very early youth, any one who has known the realities of life,
can continue to take Shelley’s best songs to heart, as he can those of
Shakespeare or the best of Burns. For, however we may continue to
wonder at the genius that is in them, no healthy mind will find in
them the expression of its truest and best thoughts. Other lyric
poets, it has been said, sing of what they feel. Shelley in his lyrics
sings of what he wants to feel. The thrills of desire, the gushes of
emotion, are all straining after something seen afar but unat
tained, something distant or future ; or they are passionate despair,
utter despondency for something hopelessly gone. Yet it must be
owned that those bursts of passionate desire after ideal beauty set
our pulses a-throbbing with a strange vibration even when we do
not really sympathise with them. Even his desolate wails make
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
4.7
those seem for a moment to share his despair who do not really
share it. Such is the charm of his impassioned eloquence and the
witchery of his music.
Let us turn now to look at some of his lyrics in detail.
The earliest of them, those of 1814, were written while Shelley
was under the depressing spell of materialistic belief, and at the time
when he was abandoning’ poor Harriet Wbstbrook. For a time he
lived under the spell of that ghastly faith, hugging it, yet hating it;
and its progeny are seen in the lyrics of that time, such as ‘ Death,’
e Mutability,’ ‘ Lines in a Country Churchyard.’ These have a cold,
clammy feel. They are full of ‘ wormy horrors,’ as though the poet
were one
who had made his bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black Death
Keeps record of the trophies •won from Life,
as though by dwelling amid these things he had hoped to force some
lone ghost
to render up the tale
Of what we are.
And what does it all come to ?—what is the lesson he reads there ?__
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call life. . . . Behind lurk Fear
And Hope, twin destinies, who ever weave
Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
That is all that the belief in mere matter taught Shelley, or ever
will teach anyone.
As he passed on, the clayey, clammy sensation is less present.
Even Hume’s impressions are better than mere dust, and the Platonic
ideas are better than Hume’s impressions. When he came under
the influence of Plato his doctrine of ideas, as eternal existences
and the only realities, exercised over Shelley the charm it always
has had for imaginative minds; and it furnished him with a form
under which he figured to himself his favourite belief in the Spirit
of Love and Beauty as the animating spirit of the universe—that
for which the human soul pants. It is the passion for this ideal
which leads Alastor through his long wanderings to die at last in the
Caucasian wilderness without attaining it. It is this which he apos
trophises in the ‘ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ as the power which
consecrates all it shines on, as the awful loveliness to which he looks
to free this world from its dark slavery. It is this vision which
reappears in its highest form in ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ the greatest
and most attractive of all Shelley’s longer poems. That drama is
from beginning to end a great lyrical poem, or I should rather
say a congeries of lyrics, in which perhaps more than anywhere
else Shelley’s lyrical power has reached its highest flight. The
whole poem is exalted by a grand pervading idea, one which in
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[July
its truest and deepest form is the grandest we can conceive—the
idea of the ultimate renovation of man and the world. And although
the powers and processes and personified abstractions which Shelley
invoked to effect this end are ludicrously inadequate, as irrational as
it would be to try to build a solid house out of shadows and moon
beams, yet the end in view does impart to the poem something of
its own elevation. Prometheus, the representative of suffering and
struggling humanity, is to be redeemed and perfected by union with
Asia, who is the ideal of beauty, the light of life, the spirit of love.
To this spirit Shelley looked to rid the world of all its evil and
bring in the diviner day. The lyric poetry, which is exquisite
throughout, perhaps culminates in the well-known exquisite song in
which Panthea, one of the nymphs, hails her sister Asia, as
Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles, before they dwindle,
Make the cold air fire ; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds, ere they divide them ;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.
Lamp of Earth 1 where’er thou movest
The dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.
The reply of Asia to this song is hardly less exquisite. Everyone
here will remember it:—
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm, conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing ;
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon the many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses !
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around
Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
49
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music’s most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar
Without a course, without a star,
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided :
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds on the waves doth move,
Harmonising this earth with what we feel above.
In these two lyrics you have Shelley at his highest perfection.
Exquisitely beautiful as they are, they are, however, beautiful as the
mirage is beautiful, and as unsubstantial. There is nothing in the
reality of things answering to Asia. She is not human, she is not
divine. There is nothing moral in her—no will, no power to subdue
evil; only an exquisite essence, a melting loveliness. There is in
her no law, no righteousness ; something to enervate, nothing to
brace the sold. After her you long for one bracing look on the
stern, severe countenance of Duty, of whom another poet sang—
Stern lawgiver I yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know I anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee in their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
Perfect as is the workmanship of those lyrics in 4 Prometheus ’
and many another, their excellence is lessened by the material out of
which they are woven being fantastic, not substantial, truth. Few
of them lay hold of real sentiments which are catholic to humanity.
They do not deal with permanent emotions which belong to all men
and are for all time, but appeal rather to minds in a particular stage
of culture, and that not a healthy stage. They are not of such stuff
as life is made of. They will not interest all healthy and truthful
minds in all stages of culture and in all ages. To do this, however,
is, I believe, a note of the highest style of lyric poem.
Another thing to be observed is, that while the imagery of Shelley’s
lyrics is so splendid and the music of their language so magical, both
of these are at that point of over-bloom which is on the verge of decay.
The imagery, for all its splendour, is too ornate, too redundant, too
much overlays the thought, which has not strength enough to uphold
such a weight. Then, as to the music of the words, wonderful as it is,
all but exclusive admirers of Shelley must have felt at times as if the
sound runs away with the sense. In some of the 4 Prometheus’ lyrics
No. 595 (no. cxv.
n. s.)
E
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[Juiy
the poet, according to Mr. Symonds, seems to have ‘realised the miracle
of making words, detached from meaning, the substance of a new
ethereal music.’ This is, to say the least, a dangerous miracle to
practise. Even Shelley, overbome by the power of melodious words,
would at times seem to approach perilously near the borders of the
unintelligible, not to say the nonsensical. What it comes to, when
adopted as a style, has been seen plainly enough in some of Shelley’s
chief followers in our own day. Cloyed with overloaded imagery, and
satiated almost to sickening with alliterative music, we turn for re
invigoration to poetry that is severe even to baldness.
The ‘ Prometheus Unbound ’ was written in Italy, and during his
four Italian years Shelley’s lyric stream flowed on unremittingly, and
enriched England’s poetry with many lyrics unrivalled in their kind,
and evoked from its language a new power. These lyrics are on the
whole his best poetic work. To go over them in detail would be im
possible, besides being needless. Perhaps his year most prolific in
lyrics was 1820, just two years before his death. Among the products
of this year were, the ‘ Sensitive Plant,’ more than half lyrical, the
‘ Cloud,’ the ‘ Skylark,’ ‘ Love’s Philosophy,’ ‘ Arethusa,’ 4 Hymns
of Pan and Apollo,’ all in his best manner, with many besides these.
About the lyrics of this time two things are noticeable : more of them
are about things of nature than heretofore, and there are several on
Greek subjects.
Of all modem attempts to reinstate Greek subjects I know nothing
equal to these, except perhaps one or two of the Laureate’s happiest
efforts. They take the Greek forms and mythologies, and fill them
with modem thought and spirit. And perhaps this is the only way
to make Greek subjects real and interesting to us; for if we want
the very Greek spirit we had better go to the originals and not to
any reproductions.
You remember how he makes Pan sing—
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come ;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
*
*
*
*
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded with my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and SyIvans, and Fauns,
And the nymphs of the woods and waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend or follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
5i
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven, and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,
And then I changed my pipings—
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a weed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus !
It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed :
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
Of the lyrics on natural objects the two supreme ones are the
4 Ode on the West Wind ’ and the 4 Skylark.’ Of this last nothing
need be said. Artistically and poetically it is unique, has a place of
its own in poetry; yet may I be allowed to express a misgiving
about it which I have long felt, and others may feel too ? For all its
beauty,, perhaps one would rather not recall it when hearing the
skylark’s song in the fields on a bright spring morning. The poem is
not in tune with the bird’s song and the feelings it does and ought to
awaken. The rapture with which the strain springs up at first dies
down before the close into Shelley’s ever-haunting morbidity. Who
wishes, when hearing the real skylark, to be told that
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught ?
If personal feeling is to be inwrought into the living powers of
nature, let it be such feeling as is in keeping with the object, ap
propriate to the theme in hand.
Such is that personal invocation with which Shelley closes his
grand 4 Ode to the West Wind,’ written the previous year, 1819—
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are fallen like its own !
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit I be thou me, impetuous one !
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth ;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind !
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy ! 0 Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
e
2
�Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
52
[July
This ode ends with some vigour, some hope ; but that is not
usual with Shelley. Everyone must have noticed how almost
habitually his intensest lyrics—those which have started with the
fullest swing of rapture—die down before they close into a wail
of despair. It is as though, when the strong gush of emotion had
spent itself, there was no more behind, nothing to fall back upon, but
blank emptiness and desolation. It is this that makes Shelley’s poetry
so unspeakably sad—sad with a hopeless sorrow that is like none
other. You feel as though he were a wanderer who has lost his way
hopelessly in the wilderness of a blank universe. His cry is, as Mr.
Carlyle long since said, like ‘ the infinite inarticulate wailing of for
saken infants.’ In the wail of his desolation there are many tones—
some wild and weird, some defiant, some full of despondent pathos.
The lines written in ‘ Dejection,’ on the Bay of Naples, in 1818,
are perhaps the most touching of all his wails : the words are so
sweet they seem, by their very sweetness, to lighten the load of heart
loneliness :—
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown :
I sit upon the sands alone ;
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion.
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health,
Nor peace within, nor calm around,
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found.
*
*
*
*
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are ;
I would lie down like a tired child,
And weep away this life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and heai’ the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Who that reads these sighing lines but must feel for the heart
that breathed them ! Yet how can we be surprised that he should
have felt so desolate ? Every heart needs some real stay. And a
heart so sensitive, a spirit so finely touched, as Shelley’s needs, far
more than unsympathetic and narrow natures, a refuge amid the
storms of life. But he knew of none. His universe was a home
less one, had no centre of repose. His universal essence of love,
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
53
diffused throughout it, contained nothing substantial—no will that
could control and support his own. While a soul owns no law, is
without awe, lives wholly by impulse, what rest, what central peace,
is possible for it ? When the ardours of emotion have died down,
what remains for it but weakness, exhaustion, despair ? The feeling
of his weakness woke in Shelley no contriteness or brokenness of spirit,
no self-abasement, no reverence. Nature was to him really the whole,
and he saw in it nothing but ‘ a revelation of death, a sepulchral
picture, generation after generation disappearing and being heard of
and seen no more.’ He rejected utterly that other ‘ consolatory
revelation which tells us that we are spiritual beings, and have a
spiritual source of life,’ and strength, above and beyond the material
system. Such a belief, or rather no belief, as his can engender
only infinite sadness, infinite despair. And this is the deep under
tone of all Shelley’s poetry.
I have dwelt on his lyrics because they contain little of the offen
sive and nothing of the revolting which here and there obtrudes
itself in the longer poems. And one may speak of these lyrics without
agitating too deeply questions which at present I would rather avoid.
Yet even the lyrics bear some impress of the source whence they
come. Beautiful though they be, they are like those fine pearls
which, we are told, are the products of disease in the parent shell.
All Shelley’s poetry is, as it were, a gale blown from a richly
gifted but unwholesome land ; and the taint, though not so percep
tible in the lyrics, still hangs more or less over many of the finest.
Besides this defect, they are very limited in their range of influ
ence. They cannot reach the hearts of all men. They fascinate only
some of the educated, and that probably only while they are young.
The time comes when these pass out of that peculiar sphere of
thought and find little interest in such poetry. Probably the rare
exquisiteness of their workmanship will always preserve Shelley’s
lyrics, even after the world has lost, as we may hope it will lose,
sympathy with their substance. But better, stronger, more vital
far are those lyrics which lay hold on the permanent, unchanging
emotions of man—those emotions which all healthy natures have felt
and always will feel, and which no new stage of thought or civilisa
tion can ever bury out of sight.
J. C. Shairp.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Shelley as a lyric poet
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Shairp, J.C.
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Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: p. 38-53 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Fraser's Magazine 20 (July 1879). Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was a general and literary journal published in London from 1830 to 1882, which initially took a strong Tory line in politics.
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[s.n.]
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1879
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CT43
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Poetry
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry in English
Romantic Poetry
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
worships his kind are bounded, as we have said, by the limita
tions which he knows are incident to humanity; idealize as he
may, he can never free himself of the belief that no perfect man
or woman has ever trod this planet. How, then, is it possible
that any one but the ignorant and unreflective can ever feel the
glow of genuine devotion when he bows himself to a being whose
nature he knows to have been but a fragmentary representative of
the ideal of man, or when he worships his best conception of this
ideal itself knowing it to be an idol of his own creation ? These
fatal weaknesses of Positivism have no application to the Theist:
the fervour of his adoration is deadened by no secret conscious
ness that the object of his worship is marred with imperfection;
for however great and glorious may be the attributes he ascribes
to it, he feels assured that they are infinitely surpassed by the
Reality itself.
Art. II.—Recollections
of
Shelley
and
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron.
Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon. 1858.
Byron.
By E. J.
R. TRELAWNY has done well in giving this manly and
carelessly written little volume to the world: it will at least
revive the personal memory of two Englishmen who, though long
dead, can never be altogether of the past. Without telling much
of either with which we were not previously acquainted, the infor
mation communicated is the result of intimate personal know
ledge, and, gathered during the intervals of a familiar acquaint
ance, comes out with such freshness and vigour, that it possesses
nearly all the merit of novelty; and the striking features of cha
racter are brought forward in much stronger relief, than in the
tame and wearisome biography of whioh one at least was the
victim. It is the least enviable appanage of genius that it perpe
tuates by its own lustre those faults and weaknesses which repose
in the graves of meaner men; the biographer, even though a
friend, cannot ignore these; and while he avoids giving them
undue prominence, cannot forget that truth has its claims, as well
as genius.
We recognise Shelley in these sketches as he appeared in his
works—the gentle, guileless, noble soul who persisted in putting
himself wrong with the world, and who rashly and fearlessly
launched his indignant sarcasm at the cant and bigotry and sei-
M
�Shelley's Personal Appearance.
351
fishness of society, without indicating any rational plan for its
regeneration. Had he possessed a friend sufficiently influential
and judicious to have delayed the publication of “ Queen Mab”
for ten years, Shelley’s lot might have been far different. How
could he reasonably expect forbearance from a society whose
creed, by a portion of it sincerely venerated, he so recklessly out
raged ? The wisest man feels himself to be an infant if he at
tempts to understand the doctrine of Original Sin ; and yet it was
this problem that the youthful and inexperienced Shelley dared to
grapple in his poem, in a spirit of unparalleled rashness and pre
sumption.
Mr. Trelawny was for some time, as is well known, the compa
nion of Byron and Shelley during their voluntary exile in Italy.
Too manly and too honest to believe in the justice of the tremendous
calumnies which drove Shelley from England, and deprived him
of his children, he was yet, like all who ever came to personal
knowledge of Shelley, astonished to find what manner of man
was this of whom all who did not know him spoke so ill. We
see him as Mr. Trelawny saw him, more than thirty years since,
in the following scene:—
“ Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out
both his hands; and although I could hardly believe, as I looked at his
flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it could be the poet, I re
turned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and cour
tesies, he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment; was
it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable mon
ster at war with all the world ?—excommunicated by the fathers of
the Church, deprived of his civil rights by a grim Lord Chancellor,
discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival
sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school ? I could
not believe it; it must be a hoax. He was habited like a boy, in black
jacket and trousers, which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor,
as is the custom, had shamefully stinted him in his 1 sizings.’ ”
His wife’s personal appearance, nee Godwin, the authoress of
“Frankenstein,”is sketched on the same occasion:—
“ The most striking feature in her face was her calm, grey eyes.
She was rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very
fair and fight-haired, witty, social and animated in the society of
friends, though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor
degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and
appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our
vigorous old writers. Neither of them used obsolete or foreign
words.”
The artless and natural character of Shelley endeared him to
the few who had the privilege of personal knowledge; and,
as appears from these sketches, contrasted very favourably with
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
the artificial manner and undisguised egotism of Byron—but, in
truth, the latter was only himself when in the stillness of night
he was engaged in composition, and absorbed into forgetfulness
of his physical deficiences and his chronic starvation.
Mr. Trelawny gives a more minute and circumstantial detail
than has previously appeared, of the miserable circumstances at
tending the deaths of Shelley and his companion Mr. Williams.
The letter which the latter had despatched to his wife on the pre
vious day, informing her and Mrs. Shelley of their proposed return
to the home in the Gulf of Spezzia, where both ladies were
anxiously expecting their husbands, who had been unexpectedly
detained in Leghorn, is surely, breathing as it does the warmest
affection, destined to be so sadly quenched, the most touching
document ever preserved from oblivion. The condition of the two
bodies, when thrown ashore after many days, was such as to make
incremation the most eligible means of disposing of the remains ;
and this proceeding was conducted in both cases—for they were
not burned together—with great care by Mr. Trelawny, in an iron
furnace constructed on purpose. Lord Byron may have given way
to some apparent levity on the occasion; but it was but to conceal
an emotion he deeply felt, but which he lacked the moral courage
to evince publicly. Shelley’s toy skiff, the Don Juan, in which
they embarked with inauspicious omens on that melancholy even
ing, does not appear to have been capsized during the gale, not
withstanding the ominous remark of the Genoese mate of the
Bolivar about the superfluous gaff-topsail; but from her damaged
condition, when afterwards weighed by the exertions of Captain
Roberts, was probably run down by some Italian speronare
scudding before the gale.
Shelley stands far higher in the opinions of his country
men now than when his gentle spirit and ardent love of truth
were quenched for ever in the waves of the Mediterranean. It is
not necessary to vindicate his character from calumnies which are
long forgotten; but if there are any who, not knowing, yet care to
know, how gentle, how generous, how accomplished, and how
unselfish he was, it is written in this late testimony of one who
knew him well, and knowing him well in life, had the hard task
assigned him of communicating his premature death to the de
spairing widow.
Shelley formed a correct and candid estimate of his own writ
ings when he said, “ They are little else than visions which im
personate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and just—they
are dreams of what ought to be, or may be.” He read too much,
was altogether too much imbued with the ideas of others. His
were the azure and vermilion clouds that float in insubstantial
beauty through the atmosphere of an Alpine sunrise, rather than
�Byrons Movements after Shelley’s Death.
353
the enduring creation of grandeur, strength, and beauty which we
recognise in a great poem.
After Shelley’s death, Byron moved from Pisa to Albaro, near
Genoa, where he occupied the Casa Saluzzi; but the loss of one
whom he must have looked on as a friend, and respected for the
nobleness of his nature, together with the failure of the Liberal,
which could hardly succeed undei* the auspices of two such
editors as Hunt and himself, made him dissatisfied with an inac
tive existence, and he looked round for some field, not of enter
prise, but excitement. He was quite unfit constitutionally to en
counter real fatigue or privation; he had courage, no doubt;
contempt of life, and tameless pride, but neither possessed the
physical or mental robustness to see in well-planned, and longsustained action a career of distinction or usefulness. After much
wavering, he determined to revisit Greece, and bought a vessel to
convey himself and his lares to the land which was to witness
his own dissolution, and thus to derive from him another of its
many claims to classic interest. The choice of his vessel seems
to have been decided more by motives of economy than from any
regard to its nautical capabilities, and when its defects were indi
cated by a more critical judgment than his own, he was consoled
by the reflection that he had got it a bargain.
It was on the 13th of July, 1823, that lie sailed in the Hercules
from Genoa with Mr. Trelawny, Count Gamba, and an Italian
crew ; slowly they stood eastward up the Mediterranean, and so
wretched were the sailing qualities of the vessel, that even with
a fair wind the average progress was but twenty miles a day.
They put into Leghorn, which they quitted for Cephalonia, on the
23rd of July.
“ On coming near Lonza, a small islet converted into one of its
many prisons by the Neapolitan government, I said to Byron, ‘ There
is a sight that would curdle the blood of a poet laureate.’ ‘ If
Southey were here,’ he answered, ‘ he would sing hosannahs to the
Bourbons. Here kings and governors are only the jailors and hangmen
of the detestable Austrian barbarians. What dolts and drivellers the
people are to submit to such universal despotism. I should like to see
from this our ark, the world, submerged, and all the rascals drowning on
it like rats.’ I put a pencil and paper into his hand, saying, ‘ Perpe
tuate your curses on tyranny,’ &c. He readily took the paper and set
to work. I walked the deck, and prevented his being disturbed. . . .
After a long spell he said, ‘ You think it is as easy to write poetry as
to smoke a cigar—look, it’s only doggrel. Extemporising verse is non
sense ; Poetry is a distinct faculty—it wont come when called. You
may as well whistle for a wind; a Pythoness was primed when put
into the tripod. I must chew the cud before I write. I have
thought over most of my subjects for years before writing a line.’ . . .
‘ Give me time—I can’t forget the theme ; but for this Greek business
[Vol. LXIX. No. CXXXVI.]—New Sekies, Vol. XIII. No. II. A A
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
I should have been at Naples writing a fifth canto of ‘ Childe Harold,’
expressly to give vent to my detestation of the Austrian tyranny in
Italy.’ ”
But his own earlier lines might well have recurred both to the
poet and to his biographer, for surely none could be more appli
cable to the scene before their eyes then, as before ours now, when
we look on Naples :—
“ It is as though the fiends prevailed
Against the seraphs they assailed,
And fixed on heavenly thrones should dwell
The freed inheritors of hell—
So fair the scene, so formed for joy,
So cursed the tyrants that destroy.”
“ The poet had an antipathy to everything scientific; maps and
charts offended him............ Buildings the most ancient or modern he
was as indifferent to as he was to painting, sculpture, or music. But
dll natural objects, or changes in the elements, he was generally the
first to point out, and the last to lose sight of.” p. 187. [The italics
are our own.]
Mr. Trelawny echoes an old remark of Baron Macaulay’s
(Warren Hastings), which every one’s experience will confirm,
as to the effect of a sea voyage in testing temper and character,
and says—“ I never was on shipboard with a better companion
than Byron : he was generally cheerful, gave no trouble, assumed
no authority, uttered no complaints, and did not interfere with
the working of the ship; when appealed to, he always answered,
‘Do as you like.’” There was much enjoyment of life on board
this dull sailer, the Hercules; and the voyage, if protracted, was
under clear, warm skies, and in smooth water. One scene nar
rated has a grimly comic element: apropos to some remark,
Byron exclaimed, “ Women, you should say; if we had a woman
kind on board, she would set us all at loggerheads, and make a
mutiny; would she not, captain?” “I wish my old woman were
here,” replied the skipper; “ she would make you as comfortable
in my cabin at sea as your own wife would in her parlour on
shore.” Byron started, and looked savage. The skipper went
on unconscious, &c. &c.
Byron had written an autobiography, it seems, conceived in
manly, straightforward fashion,—in a vigorous, fearless style, and
was apparently truthful as regarded himself. It was subse
quently entrusted to Mr. Moore, as literary executor, and by him
suppressed, following the advice of others, it would seem. “ I
told Murray Lady Byron was to read the manuscript if she
wished it, and requested she would add, omit, or make any com
ments she pleased, now, or when it was going through the press.”
(p. 197.) They reached Zante and Cephaloniaat last; and after
�. Byron’s second Visit to Greece.
355
an absence of eleven years, Lord Byron again saw the Morea,
which he loved so well—
“ The sun, the sky, but not the slave the same.”
The reckless greediness of the Suliote refugees at Cephalonia
disgusted him; and the intelligence he received about the pros
pects of liberty in Greece, or the probability of assistance from
the Western Powers, so long withheld, being far from encourag
ing, he determined to remain some time at Cephalonia, but pre
ferred living on board to accepting the warmly-proffered hospi
tality of Colonel Charles Napier, or of the other residents in the
island.
•“ One day, after a bathe, he held out his right leg to me, saying—
‘ I hope this accursed limb will be knocked off in the war.’ ‘ It wont
improve your swimming,’ I answered; ‘ I will exchange legs, if you
will give me a portion of your brains.’ £ You would repent your bar
gain,’ he said, &e. &c.” (p. 20.)
The Greeks, it appears, very rationally desired a strong cen
tralized authority to suppress the hordes of robbers—much more
numerous than usual, since the outbreak of the war with Turkey
■—and talked, at least a portion of them did, of offering the
crown to Byron; he might have bought it, perhaps, afterwards
at Salona, and the Greeks would have had a king for three
months, if he had not abdicated before, worthy of their classical
renown certainly, but not quite the man to disentangle, or divide
the political and social complications in which they were en
tangled. The beauty of Ithaca, visited at this time, seems to
have justified the persevering partiality of Ulysses for his island
kingdom; but there is an inexcusable piece of rudeness to the
abbot of a Greek convent on that island, recorded against Byron.
The poor man had received him with all the honour in his power
or knowledge, but proceeded, unluckily, to inflict an harangue of
such length and solemnity, that Lord Byron, who had missed
the indispensable siesta, broke into ungovernable wrath, and
abused his entertainer with much more emphasis than euphony,
from which his character, and wish to please, should certainly
have protected the abbot. No wonder that the astounded abbot
could find no better excuse for the conduct of the English peer
and poet than madness—“ Ecolo e matto poveretto.”
Mr. Trelawny left Lord Byron at Cephalonia, for he was long
in moving when once settled, and never saw him again in life.
Anxious to know something of the state of matters in the Morea,
the former passed over, accompanied by Mr. Hamilton Browne.
They found only confusion, intrigue, and embezzlement; and after
transacting a little business, his companion, Mr. Browne, went
to London, accompanying certain Greek deputies, who were comAA2
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
missioned to raise a loan there, which, wonderful to relate, they
succeeded in doing ; though the worthy stockbrokers could hardly
have been moved to liberality, or rather credulity, by their
classical sympathies; while Mr. Trelawny, quitting the Morea,
made for Athens, and joined a celebrated robber chief, who had
assumed political functions in the disturbed and anarchic state
of the country, and bore the classical name of Odysseus. In
January, 1824, Mr. Trelawny heard that Byron had gone to
Missolonghi, and then, that he was dead; worn out with fatigue,
anxiety, and disgust, his frame, already shattered by repeated
attacks of remittent fever, acquired during former residence in
the marsh-girt cities of Ravenna and Venice, succumbed in the
prime of life to the miasma which in greater or less intensity,
according to the season, constitutes the atmosphere of Misso
longhi. Mr. Trelawny was at Salona, but left for Missolonghi
directly, which he entered on the third day from his departure,
and found it “ situated on the verge of the most dismal swamp I
had ever seen.”
“ No one was in the house but Fletcher, who withdrew the black
pall and the white shroud, and there lay the embalmed body of the
Pilgrim—more beautiful even in death than in life. The contraction
of the skin and muscles had effaced every line traced by time or
passion; few marble busts could have matched its stainless white, the
harmony of its proportions, and its perfect finish. Yet he had been
dissatisfied with that body, and longed to cast its slough. How often
have I heard him curse it. I asked Fletcher to bring me a glass of
water; and on his leaving the room, to confirm or remove my doubts
as to the cause of his lameness, I uncovered the Pilgrim’s feet, and
was answered—both his feet were clubbed, and the legs withered to
the knee: the form and face of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a
.sylvan satyr.”
The remaining chapters are exclusively autobiographical, and
are not without interest, for Mr. Trelawny’s name has become
historical in Gordon’s “ History of the Greek Revolution.” His
adventures are not commonplace; and his intimate connexion
with the family and fortunes of Odysseus afforded an opportunity
of seeing and knowing more of the wilder and worthier elements
of Romaic character than has fallen to the lot of any other edu
cated Englishman. For some time he held watch and ward in
the fortified, inaccessible cave on Mount Parnassus, where Odys
seus had placed his family and property, with a garrison of a few
men, and his brother-in-law, Mr. Trelawny, in command. He
was at last desperately wounded in a very treacherous manner,
by a Scotchman named Fenton, whom he had unduly trusted,
but who had been bribed to act as a spy on Odysseus and him
self, He tells his story, regardless of criticism, in a frank and
�Byron’s early Poetry.
357
candid manner; and it must be a captious critic indeed, who can
object to the consciousness of that superior physical strength and
vigour, which sustained with ease exertions that exhausted the
more delicate powers of the two celebrated companions, whose
names lend so much interest to his book, and to whose intel
lectual pre-eminence he renders respectful and affectionate
homage.
We have so recently recorded our opinions on Shelley’s
*
writings, that we shall now offer a few remarks on some portion
of Lord Byron’s poetry, which, with all its popularity, has not,
it appears to us, been always rightly estimated. He unaffectedly
repudiated the opinion so generally entertained, that he was the
hero of his own compositions—that the monotonous protagonists
of his early and brilliantly successful Eastern tales, no less than
the blase and reflective “ Childe,” or the fortunate and brilliant
“Don Juan,” were drawn from the inspiration of a too partial
egotism. We are inclined to believe in the sincerity of his pro
test, and to attribute to dramatic poverty the uniformity of his
characters, and to his own physical imperfection the bodily
strength and activity by which his heroes are so generally distin
guished. In those short pieces which were the fruits of his early
travels, and which at once attracted the attention of every reader
by the unequalled brilliancy of the language, we perceive the
immature judgment and the vehement sensation of his character;
the verse flows onward in a torrent of splendour, and a false lustre
is given to the passion whose fruit is ashes; beauty of form, and
the easy and over-valued achievements of physical courage, are
the artless and ordinary attractions of his actors; there is no
depth or refinement of character, no difficult invention; the
poems are but pictures of ordinary merit, in splendid frames.
But a deeper knowledge dawned upon him—a larger experience
of his own heart, though little of the actual world from which he
shrunk; and if he, as most men have done, regretted the delu
sions of the master-passion, and wished that the deception had
lasted for ever, or had never existed, yet his later strains, in their
deeper tone and wider sympathies, evince that better self-know
ledge, without which no man has successfully mapped even the
narrowest province of the human heart; for that knowledge is itself
but the evidence and the record of sufferings which the conflicts
of reason with passion must ever produce.
In the crude though not inharmonious products of his youth,
we see how little he had felt his strength, and how he was fettered
by the rules which had been the guide of his model and antithesis
Pope; nowhere does he dare to be original, and the spirit which
* Vide Number for January of this year.
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
dictated his first and weakest satire, was but the natural resent
ment of an Englishman who had no mind to he bullied: the mere
mechanical versification gives small promise of the matchless
powers which produced “ Don Juan ” and “ Beppo;” and in the
matter, there is nothing to warn us of that contemplative and
deeply poetical thought which is so apparent in the “Prophecy of
Dante,” and in the two later cantos of “ Childe Harold.” Even
those unequalled satiric powers which culminated in the “ Irish
Avatar,” are but shadowed, not developed, and the commonplace
abuse and half-affected contempt of his first satire are calculated
to produce a very different effect from the withering ridicule and
careless contempt which overwhelmed those who provoked the
displeasure of his later years.
The German critics, with a severity of taste that does them
honour, place the three great poets, whose names at once occur
to us—Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe—so far above all rivalry,
as to accord to these alone that supremacy and universality of
intellect which we call poetic genius; and this may be just, but
the human mind is so constituted in its appreciation of poetry,
as sometimes to derive superior pleasure from strains which have
emanated from minds of far inferior order. We like best that
poetry which addresses most strongly and directly the prevailing
sentiments of our own characters; and hence thousands in whom
the finest of Homer’s rhapsodies, Shakspeare’s “ Tempest,” or
Goethe’s “ Iphigenia,” would awake no other sentiment than cool
admiration, would be moved to tears or to enthusiasm by Pindar,
Campbell, or Gray. It is no less certain that men of even the
keenest intellect merely, are not unfrequently deficient in poetic
taste and judgment. We know, for example, that Napoleon pre
ferred Ossian, and Robert Hall Virgil to Homer; and that
Lord Byron himself, utterly wanting in dramatic power, but little
appreciated the true strength of Shakspeare.
Poetry, indeed,
especially of the first order, must be felt in the heart as well as
judged by the head, and the greatest merit is least apparent to a
superficial glance; long study, contemplation, and comparison
are required to comprehend the consummate excellence of a
masterpiece, whether it be from the hand of Shakspeare or the
pencil of Raphael.
But if the very few of the first order of poets completely satisfy
all the requirements of the most refined and matured intellect,
the poetry of Lord Byron will always appeal strongly to those,
and they are not a few, whose passions, at some period of their
lives, have proved too strong for the control of reason, and where
regret, if not remorse, has followed the fruitless contest—a contest
which has left the mind vacant for want of strong excitement,
�Characteristics of Byron’s Poetry.
359
and wearied with a scene which offers no sufficient substitute for
what has been lost. Flashes of the melancholy wisdom which
follows on such experience are frequent in his later works, and
their deep, and perhaps not barren truth, may sink with some
thing of a healing and enlightening influence into hearts whose
scars are not yet callous.
There is, too, a strong and ardent reverence for the nobleness
of intellect, ever felt most strongly by those most highly endowed;
that reverence which, rightly considered, is the only true religion,
and a scorn, as strongly expressed, for the vulgar or tinsel idols
of mob idolatry.
His spirit had wrestled with itself in vain; the vehement and
unwise desire for something denied to mere mortality was his;
the self-condemnation of performance so grievously inadequate to
the lofty resolution, which more or less dwells in every heart,
rebelling against the sway of low desires, was strong upon him;
so that he hated life, and sought at first wildly, but afterwards
more calmly, to give that feeling utterance : but the “ voiceless
thought” could not so be spoken, and he, the most eloquent,
went to his grave without succeeding in the vain effort to
unburden his full heart. Not by words, however eloquent, can
man satisfy himself, or vindicate liis life to others. Consistent
action alone can satisfy the conscience, or justify us to our own
hearts; and when action is denied or unsought, we strive for the
relief, however inadequate, that words can furnish. Thus Chaucer:
“ For when we may not do, then will we speken,
And in our ashen colde, is fire yreken.”
Had any suitable career of action been open to him, or had he
lived in feudal times, he might have surpassed Bertrand de Born
in thirst for irregular warlike achievement, and in the strains that
celebrated it; the monotony of a modern.military career, and the
subordination which can recognise no superiority but professional
rank, where the opportunity of achievement is an accident, and
routine the rule of life, was utterly unsuited to his character and
his physical constitution. No better career offered to him than that
miserable one of Missolonghi, and here he gave evidence of a
moderation and self-command little to have been expected from
a man whose vanity and egotism were not less conspicuous than
his genius; this desire for an active career is translated into his
eastern stories, and his heroes are rather models of what he
wished to be, than what he was.
His forte, however, as he knew, was vivid description, varied
and illuminated by flashes of earnest thought, and the results of
a melancholy, if a short experience.
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
In sustained diamatic, or epic power, he was deficient; but
this is an imperial endowment, and, in his own language,
“ Not Hellas could unrol
From her Olympiads two such names.”
His “Manfred,” despite Mr. Moore’s crude criticism, is a dramatic
failure ; and when he calls this creation of Lord Byron’s “ loftier
and worse ” than Milton’s Satan, the critic shows how little of
the dramatic or epic element he must have himself possessed.
“ Manfred ” is not a great creation—he is but a dreamer, who,
finding no pleasure in an earthly pursuit, itself a morbid and
unhealthy feeling, strives to o’erpass the limits of mortality, and
to coerce the Spirits whom the elements obey. Such a desire, as
common as it was vain, before men had emerged from the super
stitious element of the middle ages, evinces no elevation or great
ness of character, and if with dauntless courage he defies the
spirits whom he had evoked by his spells, and provoked by his
contempt of their power, he does so as one who knows they
cannot injure him, and who seeks death rather than shuns it.
The great blot of the piece, however, is the doubt that encom
passes the fate of Astarte; the imagination can conceive no adequate
cause for the terrible implacability which could reign in the bosom
of a beatified spirit, and deny to a despairing brother one word
of consolation in his awful abandonment. If she could condemn
him, how can he be forgiven ?
Such a subject, however attractive to a writer of strong imagi
nation, and however promising in appearance, proves much more
difficult to treat adequately, if, indeed, it can ever be so treated
at all, than scenes and characters of a more earthly nature, where
strictly human agents appeal to a kindred reason and sympathy.
The communion of the supernatural with the natural has been
a favourite theme, and a certain stumbling-block, to the greatest
poets. Homei' succeeded best, because he invented little, taking
the materials within his reach—and his gods and goddesses are
but human beings, with a loftier physical and mental stature; it
was easy to introduce them implementing the inferior powers of
their favourite heroes, but we feel that, in all that should distin
guish the supernatural Being above the human nature, the greatest
of all, the tyrant Zeus, was inferior. Like some vulgar earthly
ruler, he uses his power but to gratify passions unworthy of
a God------ and the charm of divine beauty and celestial grace
which hovers for ever round the name of Aphrodite, is insufficient
to overcome the disgust with which we regard her threat to
Helena, when the latter indignantly refuses to return to her van
quished and fugitive paramour.
And when, in the “ Tempest,” Shakspeare introduces Ariel to-
�The Supernatural as an Element of Poetry.
361
delude and torment a set of drunken menials, or frighten a brutal
and ignorant drudge, he scarcely redeems the character of that
“ dainty” creation by his services in reconstructing the shattered
ship, or even in deceiving the wretches who were plotting the
death of the Duke. An inspired genius may walk through pro
prieties at will, as he so constantly does, but even Shakspeare
might have remembered in the “Tempest,” “NecDeus intersit,” &c.
When Goethe, following the popular superstition, introduces
the Devil, thinly disguised, as the companion and mentor of
Faust, he goes easily enough with the pair through the tempta
tions and the punishment of his neophyte and of Margaret—an
episode too common in daily life to require the Devil as its agent
—and Faust, when on the blasted heath he upbraids Mephisto
with the cruel fate of her he should have protected from all harm,
and curses himself as the dupe of a pitiless fiend, does but vent
the reproaches many a man has heaped on himself, shuddering, if he
had a conscience, at the cruel treachery which has rent a heart that
beat only for him. But when the great German leaves the popular
guide to invent a sphere of supernatural action, when Faust
appears in scenes where the author has no guide from tradition,
and subject to temptations of a less human character, we see how
little mere mortal wit can observe any semblance of probability,
or appearance of cohesion, in attempting that for which there is
no actual precedent in human experience. There is but one
Magician, and he has long laid aside all pretensions above morta
lity. Patient and sagacious interrogation of nature, in disclosing
the hidden properties of matter, has evoked powers which the
genii of the lamp might have envied, and wealth, which would
have satisfied the avarice of the alchemists.
The greatest can but draw the supernatural from knowledge of
the natural, and we have but human nature exaggerated in the
majority of instances; Shakspeare’s Ariel, and the spirits in
“Manfred” are nearly the only exceptions. Homer is greatest
where he describes the actions of men, and the submissive grace
and tenderness of women. Shakspeare stirs the heart, and
awakens our admiration most strongly when he depicts the
loving constancy of the gentler sex, and the masculine heroism of
Coriolanus or of Henry the Fifth. Goethe has an easy task when
he echoes the sarcastic mockery, or paints the demon heart of
Mephisto; but the master-hand is seen in the calm and natural
beauty of the “ Iphigenia,” and above all in his unequalled delinea
tion of the female nature; he who could draw such characters
as Gretchen, Clara, Mignon, and Adelheid von Weislingen, has
surpassed all others, Shakspeare himself, in this the most inte
resting province of observation and invention.
And Lord Byron, though he has clothed his demons with
�362
Recollections of Shelley ancl Byron.
majesty and power, though he has avoided the vulgar error of
too easily vanquishing evil by good, Satan by Abdiel, yet hardly
introduces these for purposes worthy their supernatural powers,
unless it be to justify the magnificent “ Hymn of the Spirits” in
worship round the throne of Ahrimanes.
In the first two cantos of “ Childe Harold,” the objective
element is strongly ascendant, written as they were at a period of
life when the world was still fresh, and the essential identity of
human nature, under all its phases, hardly appreciated. The
boundless command of his own language, and the liveliest sus
ceptibility to the beauty or grandeur of nature, produced a poem
which riveted immediately the attention of contemporaries, partly,
indeed, due to a comparative novelty of style, and the want of
sustained originality, in the poetry which immediately preceded
its publication; something too may have been owing to the lesser
preoccupation of the public by the floods of ephemeral and
amusing literature which dissipate the intellectual tastes of the
readers of our day. It is in the two latter cantos, and especially
the last, in which wTe find his powers completely matured, whether
reflective or descriptive. In these cantos he has carried those
important elements of poetry to their highest excellence, though
of invention, the test of the highest genius, we find no traces.
There is throughout a want of cohesion, if we consider “ Childe
Harold ” as an attempt at poetic creation, for the “ Childe” is a
voice, not a living pilgrim; but if we recognise Lord Byron him
self under an alias, narrating what he saw, and expressing in
just and vivid language what he felt, we have a poem, the various
merit of which it is difficult to over-estimate.
The vigour of description therein displayed is indeed without a
parallel; who has equalled, or even approached, the power displayed_ in stanzas 27, 28, 29 of the fourth canto ; in them we
see actually brought before us by the magical force of his lan
guage, the exquisite and fugitive beauties of an Italian sunset,
which would have mocked the pictorial art of Claude or Turner
to transfer to canvas. Mere words are made to appeal to the
mind more effectively than the consummate skill of the masters of
painting could appeal to the sense of vision. Even Homer is
here surpassed for a moment, for nowhere does he bring before
us so striking and so difficult a phase of nature’s ever-varying
countenance; not even in the familiar passage in the eighth
Rhapsody—
S’ or ev ovpavu aarpa (]>aeivi)v apuju (teXt]vt]v
<baivErai apLirpe7TEa. k. t. X.
though it well deserves the homage Byron pays it in the fourth
canto of the “ Prophecy of Dante”—
�Childe Harold.
363
a The kindled marble’s bust may wear
More poesy upon its speaking brow
Than aught less than the Homeric page may bear.”
In stanza 102, canto 3, we even seem to hear and see the
busy summer forest life of birds and insects in the woods of
Clarens, the rustle of the leaves in the early summer breath of
June, and the very plash of Alpine waterfalls; the beautiful
living solitude, unspoilt by the intrusion of man, comes before
us as if in spirit, or in a dream we were transported to the Swiss
wilderness ; it is transferred to paper as delicately and with truer
colouring than could have been effected by the calotype: but these
scenes in their quiet loveliness yet suggest reminiscences of the
world which the author and the reader have for a moment for
gotten, and the vigorous sketches of Gibbon and Voltaire, who
had long lived within sight of that beautiful scenery, come like
a cloud over the mind which had just been revelling in the
laughing sunshine of a Swiss landscape. Applied to graver
scenes, the same matchless power nearly rivals the merit of inven
tion, and when by the lake of Thrasymene (c. iv., w. 62, 63, 64),
he recals the strife that made Rome to reel on her seven-hilled
throne, and strove with inexorable fate to reverse her stern de
cree, the ancient battle comes before us as by a lightning-flash
darted into the abysses of the past; as the soldiers of Carthage
and of Rome pass before us in their deadly struggle.
Nothing can be more exquisite than the various harmony of
the stanzas from 86 to 104 of canto iii.: in these every variety of
emotion and of feeling is characterized; of admiration, reverence,
love, awe; and in the apostrophe to “ Clarens, sweet Clarens,”
that passion which he felt with so much of its earthly alloy is
exalted to a refinement almost unearthly, and to a dignity which
truly belongs to it, as in its purity the least selfish of human
desires.
Was there ever a tribute to the Divinity of Love so exquisite
as that contained in stanza 100 of canto iii.?—
“ O’er the flower
His eye is sparkling, and his breath hath blown
His soft and summer breath, whose tender power
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour.”
Such language may fairly excite a rapturous admiration, resem
bling that which he professes, and only professes to have felt,
when beholding the marble loveliness of the Medicean Venus.
But in a different mood, and with feelings disappointed or
blunted, he afterwards recurs to this, the dream of youth, and the
disenchantment of maturity; and as a warning against the in
dulgence of that passionate and eager credulity, what homily or
�350
Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
worships his kind are hounded, as we have said, by the limita
tions which he knows are incident to humanity; idealize as he
may, he can never free himself of the belief that no perfect man
or woman has ever trod this planet. How, then, is it possible
that any one but the ignorant and unreflective can ever feel the
glow of genuine devotion when he bows himself to a being whose
nature he knows to have been but a fragmentary representative of
the ideal of man, or when he worships his best conception of this
ideal itself knowing it to be an idol of his own creation? These
fatal weaknesses of Positivism have no application to the Theist:
the fervour of his adoration is deadened by no secret conscious
ness that the object of his worship is marred with imperfection;
for however great and glorious may be the attributes he ascribes
to it, he feels assured that they are infinitely surpassed by the
Reality itself.
——
C7I
Art. II.—Recollections of Shelley
and
Recollections of the Last Lays of Shelley and Byron.
Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon. 1858.
Byron.
By E. J.
R. TRELAWNY has done well in giving this manly and
carelessly written little volume to the world: it will at least
revive the personal memory of two Englishmen who, though long
dead, can never be altogether of the past. Without telling much
of either with which we were not previously acquainted, the infor
mation communicated is the result of intimate personal know
ledge, and, gathered during the intervals of a familiar acquaint
ance, comes out with such freshness and vigour, that it possesses
nearly all the merit of novelty; and the striking features of cha
racter are brought forward in much stronger relief, than in the
tame and wearisome biography of which one at least was the
victim. It is the least enviable appanage of genius that it perpe
tuates by its own lustre those faults and weaknesses which repose
in the graves of meaner men; the biographer, even though a
friend, cannot ignore these; and while he avoids giving them
undue prominence, cannot forget that truth has its claims, as well
as genius.
We recognise Shelley in these sketches as he appeared in his
works—the gentle, guileless, noble soul who persisted in putting
himself wrong with the world, and who rashly and fearlessly
launched his indignant sarcasm at the cant and bigotry and sei-
M
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Title
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 350-368 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Review essay of "Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron" by Edward John Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon, 1858. Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 13 (April 1858).
Publisher
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[s.n.]
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1858
Identifier
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CT42
Creator
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[Unknown]
Subject
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Book reviews
Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Recollections of Shelley and Byron), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
George Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry in English
Romantic Poetry
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus : or, Pious poverty and heterodox happiness
Creator
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Bradlaugh, Charles [1833-1891.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 24 cm.
Notes: Printed by Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. Marginal mark on p. 10.
Publisher
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Freethought Publishing Company
Date
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[1877]
Identifier
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G4347
Subject
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Free thought
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus : or, Pious poverty and heterodox happiness), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Free Thought
Jesus Christ
Malthusianism
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thomas R Malthus