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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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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Shelley
Description
An account of the resource
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).
Creator
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Wise, John Richard de Capel
Date
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[n.d.]
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Subject
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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 (Shelley), 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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CT44
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry
Poetry in English
Romantic Poetry