We should hold ourselves very ill employed, however, were we to enter at
any length into the reprehensible parts of this remarkable production.
It is sufficient to shew, that we have not been misrepresenting the
purpose of the poet's mind, when we mention, that the whole tragedy ends
with a mysterious sort of dance, and chorus of elemental spirits, and
other indefinable beings, and that the SPIRIT OF THE HOUR, one of the
most singular of these choral personages, tells us:
I wandering went
Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind,
And first was disappointed not to see
Such mighty change as I had felt within
Expressed in other things; but soon I looked,
And behold! THRONES WERE KINGLESS, and men walked
One with the other, even as spirits do, etc.
* * * * *
We cannot conclude without saying a word or two in regard to an
accusation which we have lately seen brought against ourselves in some
one of the London Magazines; we forget which at this moment. We are
pretty sure we know who the author of that most false accusation is--of
which more hereafter. He has the audacious insolence to say, that we
praise Mr. Shelley, although we dislike his principles, just because we
know that he is not in a situation of life to be in any danger of
suffering pecuniary inconvenience from being run down by critics, and,
_vice versâ_, abuse Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt, and so forth, because we
know that they are poor men; a fouler imputation could not be thrown on
any writer than this creature has dared to throw on us; nor a more
utterly false one; we repeat the word again--than this is when thrown
upon us.
We have no personal acquaintance with any of these men, and no personal
feelings in regard to any one of them, good or bad. We never even saw
any one of their faces. As for Mr. Keats, we are informed that he is in
a very bad state of health, and that his friends attribute a great deal
of it to the pain he has suffered from the critical castigation his
Endymion drew down on him in this magazine. If it be so, we are most
heartily sorry for it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we
suspected that young author, of being so delicately nerved, we should
have administered our reproof in a much more lenient shape and style.
The truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in
Mr. Keats's verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become
a real poet of England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all
the tricks of Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of
Mr. Leigh Hunt. We, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could
do, for the flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. In
the last volume he has published, we find more beauties than in the
former, both of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we
find abundance of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial
conceits, which first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are
again very sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly
and entirely prevent Mr. Keats from ever taking his place among the pure
and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to see
how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own
importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such
plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a
contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of any thing
like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being
wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, as
we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people, other
than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. Many of
them, considered in any other character than that of authors are, we
have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people in their
own way. Mr. Hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own sphere,
and we believe him to be so willingly. Mr. Keats we have often heard
spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his manners
and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But what has
all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the name of
wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves, with
mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their
porter at Highgate, Hampstead, or Lisson Green? What is there that
should prevent us, or any other person, that happens not to have been
educated in the University of Little Britain, from expressing a simple,
undisguised, and impartial opinion, concerning the merits or demerits of
men that we never saw, nor thought of for one moment, otherwise than as
in their capacity of authors? What should hinder us from saying, since
we think so, that Mr. Leigh Hunt is a clever wrong-headed man, whose
vanities have got inwoven so deeply into him, that he has no chance of
ever writing one line of classical English, or thinking one genuine
English thought, either about poetry or politics? What is the spell that
must seal our lips, from uttering an opinion equally plain and
perspicuous concerning Mr. John Keats, viz., that nature possibly meant
him to be a much better poet than Mr. Leigh Hunt ever could have been,
but that, if he persists in imitating the faults of that writer, he must
be contented to share his fate, and be like him forgotten? Last of all,
what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that Mr. Shelley, as a
man of genius, is not merely superior, either to Mr. Hunt, or to Mr.
Keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever
being brought into the most distant comparison with either of them. It
is very possible, that Mr. Shelley himself might not be inclined to
place himself so high above these men as we do, but that is his affair,
not ours. We are afraid that he shares, (at least with one of them) in
an abominable system of belief, concerning Man and the World, the
sympathy arising out of which common belief, may probably sway more than
it ought to do on both sides. But the truth of the matter is this, and
it is impossible to conceal it were we willing to do so, that Mr.
Shelley is destined to leave a great name behind him, and that we, as
lovers of true genius, are most anxious that this name should ultimately
be pure as well as great.
As for the principles and purposes of Mr. Shelley's poetry, since we
must again recur to that dark part of the subject; we think they are on
the whole, more undisguisedly pernicious in this volume, than even in
his Revolt of Islam. There is an Ode to Liberty at the end of the
volume, which contains passages of the most splendid beauty, but which,
in point of meaning, is just as wicked as any thing that ever reached
the world under the name of Mr. Hunt himself. It is not difficult to
fill up the blank which has been left by the prudent bookseller, in one
of the stanzas beginning:
O that the free would stamp the impious name,
Of ----- into the dust! Or write it there
So that this blot upon the page of fame,
Were as a serpent's path, which the light air
Erases, etc., etc.
but the next speaks still more plainly:
O that the WISE from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this wide world,
That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle
Into the HELL from which it first was hurled!
This is exactly a versification of the foulest sentence that ever issued
from the lips of Voltaire. Let us hope that Percy Bysshe Shelley is not
destined to leave behind him, like that great genius, a name for ever
detestable to the truly FREE and the truly WISE. He talks in his preface
about MILTON, as a "Republican," and a "bold inquirer into Morals and
religion." Could any thing make us despise Mr. Shelley's understanding,
it would be such an instance of voluntary blindness as this! Let us
hope, that ere long a lamp of genuine truth may be kindled within his
"bright mind"; and that he may walk in its light the path of the true
demigods of English genius, having, like them, learned to "fear God and
Honour the king."