WHEN I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in
a mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and
more interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I
never found anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that
whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and
that one should begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting
nothing as the make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can
recollect my thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and
benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better
discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s
desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation,
wherein the heart withers. Since then I have observed dreams and
visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has
some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its
commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent,
are the most binding we can ever know. I have re-read _Prometheus
Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a
sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than
I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I remember going
to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more
than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin’s _Political
Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist,
and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate
mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to
prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show
that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker,
who mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless
one compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe
the liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief
that lay behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full
of subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he
should be a metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his ‘huntings
after the obscure’ with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_,
which so many for three generations have thought _Political Justice_
put into rhyme, ‘It requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his
own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem.
They elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of
distinction, but they are far from vague. It was his design to write
prose metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man, which would have served
to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered
fragments of observation and remarks alone remain. He considered
these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with
the intensest spirit of poetry.’ From these scattered fragments and
observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon
comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty
of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and
that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration
many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its
perfection till the hours bore ‘Time to his grave in eternity.’ In _A
Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station
by the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the
other in the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the
Intellectual Beauty. ‘Poets, according to the circumstances of the age
and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch
of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things are to be ordained, but he beholds the future in the
present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of
latest time.’ ‘Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits
of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry.’ Poetry
is ‘the creation of actions according to the unchangeable process of
human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself
the image of all other minds.’ ‘Poets have been challenged to resign
the civic crown to reasoners and merchants.... It is admitted that
the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but it is
alleged that that of reason is the more useful.... Whilst the mechanist
abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them be sure
that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first
principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have
in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want.... The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer, ...
such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise
of the calculating faculty.’ The speaker of these things might almost
be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all
other evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the
Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when
she moves over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the
priests cast aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock
his own sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat
their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and
friends are united; while the power which in _Laon and Cythna_ awakens
the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the
tyrannies of the world, is first seen as the star of love or beauty.
And at the end of _The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to ‘the spirit of
beauty’ to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with
its ‘harmonizing ardours.’ He calls the spirit of beauty liberty,
because despotism, and perhaps, as ‘the man of virtuous soul commands
not nor obeys,’ all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards
beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect
freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again
that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it
orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
expressions in thought and in action, by making us ‘seek to awaken
in all things that are, a community with what we experience within
ourselves.’ ‘We are born into the world, and there is something within
us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
its likeness.’ We have ‘a soul within our soul that describes a circle
around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
overleap,’ and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may
possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist
evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive ‘the onset of the cavalry,’ if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, ‘with folded arms,’ and ‘not because active resistance
is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce
greater advantages than the most decisive victory;’ and he gives them
like advice in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries,
‘is love,’ and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who
followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.
He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this
beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the
hearts of men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had
found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words
to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest
thought, he is less anxious to change men’s beliefs, as I think, than
to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the
field, ‘the cause and the effect of tyranny.’ He affirms again and
again that the virtuous, those who have ‘pure desire and universal
love,’ are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when
‘the spirit of nature,’ the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who
has her ‘throne of power unappealable in every human heart,’ shall
have made men so virtuous that ‘kingly glare will lose its power to
dazzle and silently pass by,’ and as it seems commerce, ‘the venal
interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should
purchase not,’ come as silently to an end.
He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that ‘power
unappealable.’ Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is
powerless, and can only, like a ‘dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined
tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart
and pray;’ but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers
of all religions have replied—
‘Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?’
while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has
its sources in ‘the secret strength of things,’ ‘which governs thought
and to the infinite heavens is a law.’ He even thought that men might
be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be
without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus,
she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the
‘Red Comet,’ the image of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its
war with the star of beauty, brought not only ‘Fear, Hatred, Fraud and
Tyranny,’ but ‘Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.’
When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by
Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible
nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes
to _Queen Mab_, that ‘there is no great extravagance in presuming ...
that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical
improvement of the human species,’ and thinks it ‘certain that wisdom
is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the
climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of
the word is out of the reach of civilized man.’ In _Prometheus Unbound_
he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas
of the world without fear of danger
‘by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,’
and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last
Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’
This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part
in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead
and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying
Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries—
‘Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not, that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
That love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought, to the world’s dim boundaries clinging,
And music, when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.’
And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as
of a mistress. ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the
white radiance of eternity.’ ‘Die, if thou wouldst be with that which
thou wouldst seek;’ and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture
of prophecy, for ‘the fire for which all thirst’ beams upon him,
‘consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’ When he is dead he will
still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled ‘to the burning
fountains whence he came,’ and ‘is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,’ and has ‘awaked
from the dream of life,’ he has not gone from ‘the young dawn,’ or the
‘caverns in the forests,’ or ‘the faint flowers and the fountains.’ He
has been ‘made one with nature,’ and his voice is ‘heard in all her
music,’ and his presence is felt wherever ‘that power may move which
has withdrawn his being to its own,’ and he bears ‘his part’ when it is
compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows
men’s minds at their supreme moments, for
‘when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.’
‘Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit
when we appear to die,’ Mrs. Shelley has written, ‘a mystic ideality
tinged these speculations in Shelley’s mind; certain stanzas in the
poem of _The Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost
inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this
state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent,
accordant with our being—but that those who rise above the ordinary
nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in
their “love, beauty, and delight,” in a world congenial to them, and
we, clogged by “error, ignorance, and strife,” see them not till we
are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state.’ Not
merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures
and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions
of the eternal.
‘In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadow of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
’Tis we, ’tis ours are changed, not they.
For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.’
He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
remain for ever, ‘thinking the thought and doing the deed,’ though
not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that ‘love and beauty
and delight’ remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes ‘all
knowledge of the past,’ and the good and evil ‘events of old and
wondrous times,’ was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.
Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of mediæval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley’s ignorance
of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of
rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do
in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in
Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense,
the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of
itself or out of supersensual power. These are ‘gleams of a remoter
world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are
the delights of all the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal
silence,’ ‘visions swift and sweet and quaint,’ which lie waiting their
moment ‘each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among
‘ever-blooming eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or
can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to
the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms
of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’
‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’
who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘the birds within the
wind, or the fish within the wave,’ or man’s thought itself through all
things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing
away—
‘As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep.’
It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all
the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint
songs, by eddies of echoes that draw ‘all spirits on that secret
way,’ by the ‘dying odours’ of flowers and by ‘the sunlight of the
sphered dew,’ beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon,
eternity, that ‘the painted veil called life’ may be ‘torn aside.’
There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus—
‘As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
The aërial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim’s destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round;
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.’
Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_,
coming from the procession that follows the car of life, as ‘hope’
changes to ‘desire,’ shadows ‘numerous as the dead leaves blown in
autumn evening from a poplar tree’; and resembling those they come
from, until, if I understand an obscure phrase aright, they are
‘wrapt’ round ‘all the busy phantoms that live there as the sun shapes
the clouds.’ Some to sit ‘chattering like apes,’ and some like ‘old
anatomies’ ‘hatching their bare broods under the shade of dæmons’
wings,’ laughing ‘to reassume the delegated powers’ they had given to
the tyrants of the earth, and some ‘like small gnats and flies’ to
throng ‘about the brow of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist,’
and some ‘like discoloured shapes of snow’ to fall ‘on fairest bosoms
and the sunniest hair,’ to be ‘melted by the youthful glow which
they extinguish,’ and many to ‘fling shadows of shadows yet unlike
themselves,’ shadows that are shaped into new forms by that ‘creative
ray’ in which all move like motes.
These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than
metaphors or picturesque phrases to one who believed the ‘thoughts
which are called real or external objects’ differed but in regularity
of recurrence from ‘hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,’
and lessened this difference by telling how he had dreamed ‘three
several times, between intervals of two or more years, the same precise
dream,’ and who had seen images with the mind’s eye that left his
nerves shaken for days together. Shadows that were as when there
‘hovers
A flock of vampire bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian isle,’
could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being
to one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had
fainted at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who
had tried to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams’ account,
because he believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had
sought refuge there.
It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age
of faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the
saints have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had
heard the commandment, ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye
do them.’ I have re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time
for many years, in the woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills,
and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country
people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third
day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of
peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple
and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited
to a new age, that will understand with Blake that the holy spirit is
‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty
are the images of its authority.