SHELLEY

Above my head in the starry July night goes with soft, swift, silent

movement through the scented air, above the tall leaves of the aloes,

and under the green boughs of the acacias, a little brown owl. Families

of them live on the roof of this great house, and at sunset they descend

and begin hunting for crickets and moths and water-beetles and mice.

These owls are called, in scientific nomenclature, the _scops carniola_;

to the peasantry they are known as the _chiu_; by Shelley they were

called the aziola. I have never found any Italian who called this owl

aziola, but I suppose that Mary Godwin did, since she said, ‘Do you not

hear the aziola cry?’ And Shelley made answer, very truly, of this cry,

that it was music heard,—

‘By wood and stream, meadow and mountain side,

And fields and marshes wide,—

Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird

The soul ever stirred.’

The note is very far-reaching, deep and sweet, clear and melodious, one

single note sounding at intervals of thirty or forty seconds through the

still air of the summer night. It is said to be a love call, but I doubt

it, for it may be heard long after the pairing season; the bird gives it

forth when he is flying as when he is sitting still, and it is

unmistakably a note of contentment. Nor do I think it is sad, as Shelley

terms it; it has a sound as of pleased meditation in it, and it has a

mellow thrill which, once heard, cannot be forgotten ever. For myself,

never do I hear the call of the _chiu_ (which is often heard from May

time until autumn, when these birds migrate to the East) without

remembering Shelley and wishing that he lived to hear.

He is more truly a son of Italy than any one of her own poets, for he

had the sentiment and passion of her natural beauty, which cannot be

said of the greatest of them. Neither he nor Byron can be well

comprehended by those who are not intimately acquainted with Italian

landscape. The exceeding truthfulness of their observation of, and

feeling for, it cannot certainly be appreciated except by those who have

lived amongst the sights and sounds which took so close a hold upon

their imagination and their heart.

Byron must have often ridden over the firm, smooth, yellow shores of the

sea beyond Pisa, for he lived some time in the peaceful city dedicated

to St Ranier, and probably both he and Shelley spent many hours many a

time in a wood I know well, which follows the line of the sea for

sixteen miles, and is many miles in depth. On the shore, pines, rooted

in drifted sand half a mile broad, stand between the deciduous trees and

the sea beach, and protect them from the violence of the westerly winds;

when you are half a mile inland, you leave the pines and find ilex,

acacia, beech, holly, juniper, and many aspen and other forest trees.

Here the wood-dove, the goldfinch, the nuthatch, the woodpecker, the jay

and the cuckoo dwell; here the grassy paths lead down dusky green aisles

of foliage, fringed with dog-roses, where one may roam at pleasure all

the day long, and meet nothing living beside the birds, except sometimes

a stoat or a fox; here the flag-lily and the sword-rush grow in the

reedy pools, and the song of the nightingale may be heard in perfection;

its nests are made in numbers under the bracken, amongst the gorse and

in the impenetrable thickets of the marucca and the heather. These woods

are still entirely wild and natural, and they are rarely invaded except

by the oxen or buffaloes drawing waggons to be filled with cut furze and

dead branches by the rough and picturesque families who sit aloft on the

giddy heights of these sylvan loads. But these invaders are few and far

between, and in spring and summer these forest lands are as still and

solitary as they certainly were when the poets wandered through them,

listening to the sea-breeze sighing through the trees.

No one, I repeat, can fully appreciate the fineness and accuracy of

observation and description of both Byron and Shelley who does not know

Italy well; not with the pretended knowledge of the social hordes who

come to its cities for court, and embassy, and gallery, and tea party,

but such knowledge as can alone be gained by long and familiar intimacy

with its remote and solitary places.

Few, perhaps, if any, think of Shelley as often as I do; and to me his

whole personality seems the most spiritual and the most sympathetic of

the age.

The personality of Byron startles, captivates, entrances; he flashes by

us like a meteor; lover, noble, man of pleasure and of the world,

solitary and soldier by turns, and a great poet always, let the

poetasters and sciolists of the moment say what they will in their

efforts to decry and to deny him. Shelley’s has nothing of this dazzling

and gorgeous romance, as he has nothing in his portraits of that haughty

and fiery challenge which speaks in the pose of the head and the glance

of the eyes in every picture of Byron. Shelley’s eyes gaze outward with

wistful, dreamy tenderness; they are the eyes of contemplative genius,

the eyes which behold that which is not seen by the children of men.

That sweetness and spirituality which are in his physiognomy

characterise the fascination which his memory, like his verse, must

exercise over any who can understand his soul. Nothing is more unfitting

to him than those wranglings over his remains which are called studies

of his life and letters. The solemnity and beauty of his death and

burial should surely have secured him repose in his grave.

In no other country than England would it be possible to find writers

and readers, so utterly incapable of realising what manner of nature and

of mind his was, that they can presume to measure both by their

foot-rule of custom and try to press both into their small pint-pot of

conventional mortality. Would he not have said of his biographers, as he

wrote of critics,—

‘Of your antipathy

If I am the Narcissus, you are free

To pine into a sound with hating me?’

What can his conduct, within the bonds of marriage or without them,

matter to a world which he blessed and enriched? What can his personal

sorrows or failings be to people who should only rejoice to hearken to

his melodious voice? Who would not give the lives of a hundred thousand

ordinary women to make happy for an hour such a singer as he?

The greatest duty of a man of genius is to his own genius, and he is not

bound to dwell for a moment in any circumstances or any atmosphere which

injures, restrains, or depresses it. The world has very little

comprehension of genius. In England there is, more than anywhere else,

the most fatal tendency to drag genius down into the heavy shackles of

common-place existence, and to make Pegasus plough the common fields of

earth. English genius has suffered greatly from the pressure of

middle-class English opinion. It made George Eliot a hypocrite; it made

Tennyson a chanter of Jubilee Odes; it put in chains even the bold

spirit of Browning; and it has kept mute within the soul much noble

verse which would have had rapture and passion in its cadences. The

taint of hypocrisy, of Puritanism, of conventionality, has deeply

entered into the English character, and how much and how great has been

the loss it has caused to literature none will ever be able to measure.

Shelley affranchised himself in its despite, and for so doing he

suffered in his life and suffers in his memory. He was a Republican in a

time when republican doctrines were associated with the horrors of the

guillotine and the excesses of the mob, then fresh in the public mind.

He would now be called an Altruist where he was then called a Jacobin.

His exhortation to the men of England,—

‘Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?’—

would, were it published now, be quoted with admiration by all the good

Radicals, with John Morley at their head; indeed, it is astonishing that

they have never reprinted it in their manuals for the people. It is

wonderful also that ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ has escaped quotation by the

leaders of the Irish opposition, and that the lines written during the

Castlereagh administration have not been exhumed to greet the

administration of any Tory Viceroy. Shelley in these forgot, as poets

will forget, his own law, that the poet, like the chameleon, should feed

from air, not earth. But what then was deemed so terrible a political

crime in one of his gentle birth and culture would now be thought most

generous and becoming, as the democratic principles of Vernon Harcourt

and Lord Rosebery are now considered to be by their political party; the

odes and sonnets which then drew down on him execration and persecution

would now procure him the gratitude of Gladstone and the honour of the

_Nineteenth Century_.

‘A people starved and stabbed in the untillèd field,’

is a line which has been strangely overlooked by orators for Ireland.

Shelley’s political creed—if an impersonal but intense indignation can

deserve the name of creed—was born of his hatred of tyranny and a pity

for pain which amounted to a passion. But his nature was not one which

could long nurture hate; and he says truly that, with him and in all he

wrote, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should

govern the moral world.’

In politics, had he lived now, he would certainly have fared much

better; in moral liberty also he would, I think, have found more

freedom. Though the old hypocrisy clings still in so much to English

society, in much it has been shaken off, and within the last twenty

years there has been a very marked abandonment of conventional opinion.

There is much that is conventional still; much to the falsehood of which

it is still deemed necessary to adhere. But still there is a greater

liberality, a wider tolerance, an easier indulgence; and it may

certainly be said that Shelley, if he lived now, would neither be

worried to dwell beside Harriet Westbrooke, nor would Mary Godwin be

excluded from any society worthy of the name. Society is arriving at the

consciousness that for an ordinary woman to expect the monopoly of the

existence of a man of genius is a crime of vanity and of egotism so

enormous that it cannot be accepted in its pretensions or imposed upon

him in its tyranny. Therefore it is wholly out of date, and unfitting to

the times, to see critics and authors discussing and embittering the

memory of Shelley on account of his relations with women.

These relations are in any man indisputably those which most reveal his

character; but they are none the less indisputably those with which the

public have least permission to interfere. We have the ‘Prometheus

Unbound’ and ‘The Revolt of Islam’; we have the sonnet to England and

the ode to the skylark; we have the ‘Good-night’; and the ‘Song’; and

with all these riches and their like given to us by his bounteous and

beautiful youth, shall we dare to rake in the ashes of his funeral-pyre

and search in the faded lines of his letters to find material for

carping censure or for ingenious misconstruction? It adds greater horror

to death; this groping of the sextons of the press amongst the dust of

the tomb, this unhallowed’’ searching of alien hands amongst the papers

which were written only to be read by eyes beloved. The common mortal is

freed from such violation; he has left nothing behind him worth the

stealing, he has been a decorous and safe creature, and his signature

has been affixed to his weekly accounts, his bank drafts, his household

orders, his epistles to his children at school, and not a soul cares to

disturb the dust on their tied-up bundles. But the man or woman of

genius has no sepulchre buried so deep in earth or barred so strongly

that the vampire of curiosity cannot enter to break in and steal; from

Heloise to Shelley the paper on which the burning words which come

straight from the heart are recorded is the prey of the vulgar, and the

soul bared only to one other soul becomes the sport of those who have

not eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor mind to understand.

I have said ere now often, and I shall say it as long as I have power to

say anything, that with the private life of the man or woman of genius

the world has nothing to do.

What is it to the world who was Allegra’s mother, or who was the

prototype of Mignon, or who was the Lady of Solitude of the Elysian

isles of the ‘Epipsychidion’; what matter whether Shakespeare blessed or

cursed Anne Hathaway, or whether personal pains and longings inspired

the doctrines of the ‘Tetrarchordon’? It matters no more than it matters

whether Lesbia’s sparrow was a real bird or a metaphor, no more than it

matters whether the carmen to Cerinthe were written for the poet’s

pleadings _in propria persona_ or for his friend. It matters nothing. We

have ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister’; we have ‘Hamlet’ and the

‘Lycidas’; we have the songs of Catullus and the elegies of Tibullus;

what wants the world more than these? Alas! alas! it wants that which

shall pull down the greater stature to the lower; it wants that which

shall console it for its own drear dulness by showing it the red spots

visible on the lustre of the sun.

The disease of ‘documents,’ as they are called in the jargon of the

time, is only another name for the insatiable appetite to pry into the

private life of those greater than their fellows, in the hope to find

something therein wherewith to belittle them. Genius may say as it will

that nothing human is alien to it, humanity always sullenly perceives

that genius _is_ genius precisely because it is something other than

humanity, something beyond it, above it—never of it; something which

stands aloof from it, however it may express itself as kin to it. That

the soul of man is divine is a doubtful postulate; but, that whatever

there is divine in a human form is to be found in genius, is true for

all time. The mass of men dimly feel this, and they vaguely resent it,

and dislike genius, as the multitude in India and Palestine disliked

Buddha and Christ. When the tiger tears it or the cross bears it the

mass of men are consoled for their own inferiority to it. In the world

Prometheus is always kept chained; and the fire he brings from heaven is

spat upon.

‘Oh, weep for Adonais!—The quick Dreams,

The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,

Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,

But droop there, whence they spring; and mourn their lot

Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,

They ne’er will gather strength, nor find a home again.

. . . . . . . . . .

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.’

Every line in Shelley’s verse which speaks of Italy is pregnant with the

spirit of the land. Each line is a picture; true and perfect, whether of

day or night, of water or shore, of marsh or garden, of silence or

melody. Take this poem, ‘Julian and Maddalo,’—

‘How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,

Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!

. . . . . . . . . .

As those who pause on some delightful way,

Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood

Looking upon the evening, and the flood

Which lay between the city and the shore

Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar

And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared,

Thro’ mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared

Between the east and west; and half the sky

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew

Down the steep west into a wondrous hue

Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent

Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent

Among the many-folded hills—they were

These famous Euganean hills, which bear,

As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—

And then, as if the earth and sea had been

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

Their very peaks transparent.’

Whoever knows the lagoons of the Lido and of Murano knows the exquisite

justness and veracity of this description. I thought of it not long ago

when, sailing over the shallow water on the way to the city from

Torcello, I saw the sun descend behind the roseate Euganean hills,

whilst the full moon hung exactly opposite, over the more distant chain

of the Istrian mountains.

Then this again:

‘I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit

Built round dark caverns, even to the root

Of the living stems who feed them; in whose bowers,

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;

Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn

Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne

In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance,

Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance

Pale in the open moonshine; but each one

Under the dark trees seems a little sun,

A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray

From the silver regions of the Milky-way.

Afar the Contadino’s song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance;—and a bird

Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet

I know none else that sings so sweet as it

At this late hour;—and then all is still.’

He said, ‘which cannot be a nightingale,’ because he wrote this on the

1st of July, and nightingales rarely sing after June is past. But I have

heard nightingales sing in Italy until the middle of July if the weather

were cool and if their haunts, leafy and shady, were well protected from

the sun; so that this bird which he heard was most likely Philomel.

Blackbirds and woodlarks sing late into the dark of evening, but never

in the actual night.

How he heard and studied the nightingale!

‘There the voluptuous nightingales

Are awake through all the broad noonday,

When one with bliss or sadness fails,

And through the windless ivy-boughs,

Sick with sweet love, droops dying away

On its mate’s music-panting bosom;

Another from the swinging blossom,

Watching to catch the languid close

Of the last strain, then lifts on high

The wings of the weak melody,

Till some new strain of feeling bear

The song, and all the woods are mute;

When there is heard through the dim air

The rush of wings, and rising there

Like many a lake-surrounded flute,

Sounds overflow the listener’s brain

So sweet, that joy is almost pain.’

There is not the slightest exaggeration in these lines, for, exquisite

as they are, they rather fall below than exceed the rapture and riot of

countless nightingales in Italian woods by noon and night, and the

marvellous manner in which the stronger singers will take up and develop

the broken songs of weaker birds.

‘If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip the skyey speed

Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

In the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ written in a wood washed by the Arno

waters, how completely his spirit loses itself in and is identified with

the forces of Nature! how in every line we feel the sweep and motion of

the strong _libeccio_ coming from the grey Atlantic, over ‘the sapless

foliage of the ocean,’ to

‘waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day.’

When that wind sweeps up the broad bed of the Arno, the yellowing

canebrakes bend, the rushes thrill and tremble, the summer’s empty nests

are shaken from the ilex and oak boughs, the great pines bend and

tremble, the river, stirred by the breath of the sea, grows yellow and

grey and swollen and turgid, the last swallow flies southward from his

home under the eaves of granary or chapel, and the nightingales rise

from their haunts in the thickets of laurel and bay and go also where

the shadows of Indian temples or of Egyptian palm-trees lie upon the

sands of a still older world.

In that most beautiful and too little known of poems, ‘Epipsychidion,’

the whole scene, though called Greek, is Italian, and might be taken

from the woods beside the Lake of Garda, or the Sercchio which he knew

so well, or the forest-like parks which lie deep and cool and still in

the blue shadows of Appenine or Abruzzi.

‘There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;

And many a fountain, rivulet and pond,

As clear as elemental diamond,

Or serene morning air; and far beyond,

The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer

(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year),

Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls

Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls

Illumining, with sound that never fails,

Accompany the noonday nightingales;

And all the place is peopled with sweet airs;

The light clear element which the isle wears

Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,

Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers

And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;

And from the moss violets and jonquils peep,

And dart their arrowy odour through the brain,

Till you might faint with that delicious pain.’

In the whole world of poetry Love has never been sung with more beauty

than in this great poem.

‘Ah me!

I am not thine: I am a part of _thee_.

. . . . . . . . . .

Pilot of the Fate

Whose course has been so starless! O too late

Beloved! O too soon adored, by me!

For in the fields of immortality

My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,

A divine presence in a place divine;

Or should have moved beside it on this earth,

A shadow of that substance, from its birth;

. . . . . . . . . .

We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,

For one another, though dissimilar;

Such difference, without discord, as can make

Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake

As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

. . . . . . . . . .

The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me.

To whatsoe’er of dull mortality

Is mine, remain a vestal sister still;

To the intense, the deep, the imperishable,

Not mine, but me, henceforth be thou united

Even as a bride, delighting and delighted.

The hour is come:—the destined Star has risen,

Which shall descend upon a vacant prison.

The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set

The sentinels—but true love never yet

Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence;

Like lightning, with invisible violence

Piercing its continents.

. . . . . . . . . .

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

Thee to be lady of the solitude.

And I have fitted up some chambers there

Looking towards the golden Eastern air.

And level with the living winds which flow

Like waves above the living waves below.

I have sent books and music there, and all

Those instruments with which high spirits call

The future from its cradle, and the past

Out of its grave, and make the present last

In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,

Folded within their own eternity.

Our simple life wants little, and true taste

Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste

The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,

Nature with all her children, haunts the hill.

The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet

Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit

Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance

Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;

The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight

Before our gate, and the slow silent night

Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.

Be this our home in life, and when years heap

Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,

Let us become the overhanging day,

The living soul of this Elysian isle,

Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile

We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,

Under the roof of Blue Ionian weather,

And wander in the meadows, or ascend

The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend

With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;

Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,

Under the quick faint kisses of the sea,

Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,—

Possessing and possest by all that is

Within that calm circumference of bliss,

And by each other, till to love and live

Be one:—or, at the noontide hour, arrive

Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep

The moonlight of the expired night asleep,

Through which the awakened day can never peep;

A veil for our seclusion, close as Night’s,

Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;

Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain

Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.

And we will talk until thought’s melody

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

In words, to live again in looks, which dart

With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,

Harmonising silence without a sound.

Our breaths shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

And our veins beat together; and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them; and the wells

Which boil under our beings inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

Confused in passion’s golden purity,

As mountain springs under the morning Sun.

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

One passion in twin hearts, which grows and grew

Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

Those spheres instinct with it become the same,

Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still

Burning, yet ever inconsumable:

In one another’s substance finding food,

Like flames too pure and bright and unimbued

To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,

Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:

One hope within two wills, one will beneath

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of love’s rare Universe,

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire,—

I pant, I sink, I tremble I expire!’

No words which were ever written ever expressed more truly that infinite

and indefinite yearning which exists in all love that is a passion of

the soul as well as of the senses; that nameless longing for some still

closer union than any which physical and mental union can bestow upon

us; that desire for absolute absorption into and extinction within the

life beloved, as stars are lost in the light of the sun, which never can

find full fruition in life as we know it here.

Keats, Shelley, Savage Landor, Byron, Browning, and Robert Lytton, have

been each and all profoundly penetrated by and deeply imbued with the

influence of Italy; and it may be said of each and all of them that

their genius has been at its highest when under Italian influences, and

has been injured and checked and depressed in its development by all

English influences brought to bear upon it.

Shelley most completely of all escapes the latter, not only because he

died so early, but because his whole temperament resisted conventional

pressure as a climbing plant resists being fastened to the earth; flung

it off with impatience, as the shining plumage of the sea-bird flings

off the leaden-coloured rain and the colourless sands of the shore.

Shelley had not only genius: he had courage; the most rare, most noble,

and most costly of all forms of courage, that which rejects the

measurements and the laws imposed upon the common majority of men by

conventional opinion. And this praise, no slight praise, may be given to

him, which cannot be given to many, that he had the courage to act up to

his opinions. The world had never dominion enough over him to make him

fear it, or sacrifice his higher affections to it. In this, as in his

adoration of Nature and his instinctive pantheism, he was the truest

poet the modern world has known.

To the multitude of men he must be forever unintelligible and alien;

because their laws are not his laws, their sight is not his sight, their

heaven of small things makes his hell, and his heaven of beautiful

visions and of pure passions is a paradise whereof they cannot even

dimly see the portals. But to all poets his memory and his verse must

ever be inexpressibly dear and sacred. His ‘Adonais’ may be repeated for

himself. There is a beauty in the manner of his death which we must not

grudge to him if we truly love him. It fitly rounded a poet’s life. That

life was short, as measured by years! but, ended so, it was more

complete than it would have been had it stretched on to age. Who

knows?—he might have become a magnate in Hampshire, a country squire, a

member of Parliament, a sheriff for the county, any and all things such

as the muses would have wept for; Shelley in England, Shelley old, would

have been Shelley no more. Better and sweeter the waves of the Tyrrhene

Sea and the violet-sown grave of Rome. Sadder and more painful than

earliest death is it to witness the slow decay of the soul under the

carking fret and burdensome conventionalities of the world; more cruel

than the sudden storm is the tedious monotony of the world’s bondage.

The sea was merciful when it took the Adonais who sang of Adonais from

earth when he was yet young. He and his friends, he and those who wrote

the ‘Endymion’ and the ‘Manfred,’ were happy in their deaths; their

spirits, eternally young, live with us and have escaped all

contamination of the commonplace. Byron might have lived to wrangle in

the Lords over the Corn Laws; Keats might have lived to become a London

physician and pouch fees; Shelley might have lived to be _Custos

Rotulorum_ and to take his daughters to a court ball. Their best friend

was the angel of death who came at Rome, at Missolonghi, at Lerici.

‘Whom the gods love die young.’

The monotony, the thraldom and the pettiness of conventional life lie

forever in wait for the man of genius, to sink him under their muddy

waters and wash him into likeness with the multitude: Shelley, Byron and

Keats escaped this fell embrace.

What may be termed the material side of the intellect receives

assistance in England, that is to say, in the aristocratic and political

world of England; wit and perception and knowledge of character are

quickened and multiplied by it. But the brilliancy, liberty and

spirituality of the imagination are in it dulled and lowered. If a poet

can find fine and fair thoughts in the atmosphere of a London Square, he

would be visited by far finer and fairer thoughts were he standing by

the edge of the Adrian or Tyrrhene Sea, or looking down, eagle-like,

from some high spur of wind-vexed Apennine. The poet should not perhaps

live forever away from the world, but he should oftentimes do so.

The atmosphere of Italy has been the greatest fertiliser of English

poetical genius. There is something fatal to genius in modern English

life; its conditions are oppressive; its air is heavy; its habits are

altogether opposed to the life of the imagination. Out-of-door life in

England is only associated with what is called ‘the pleasure of

killing things,’ and is only possible to those who are very robust of

frame and hard of feeling. The intellectual life in England is only

developed in gaslight and lamplight, over dinner-tables and in

club-rooms, and although the country houses in some instances might be

made centres of intellectual life, they never are so by any chance,

and remain only the sanctuaries of fashion, of gastronomy and of

sport. The innumerable demands on time, the routine of social

engagements, the pressure of conventional opinion, are all too strong

in England to allow the man of genius to be happy there, or to reach

there his highest and best development. The many artificial restraints

of life in England are, of all things, the most injurious to the

poetic temperament, which at all times is quickly irritated and easily

depressed by its surroundings. There is not enough leisure or space

for meditation, or freedom to live as the affections or the fancy or

the mind desires; and the absence of beauty—of beauty, artistic,

architectural, natural and physical—oppresses and dulls the poetic

imagination without its being sensible of what it is from the lack of

which it suffers.

It has been said of a living statesman that he is only great in

opposition. So may it be said of the poet who touches mundane things. He

is only great in opposition. Milton could not have written a Jubilee Ode

without falling from his high estate; and none can care for Shakespeare

without desiring to expunge the panegyric on a Virgin Queen written for

the Masque of Kenilworth. The poet is lord of a spiritual power; he is

far above the holders of powers temporal. He holds the sensitive plant

in his hand, and feels every innermost thrill of Nature; he is false to

himself when he denies Nature and does a forced and unreal homage to the

decrees and the dominion of ordinary society or of ordinary government.

‘Both are alien to him, and are his foes.’

This line might fittingly have been graven on Shelley’s tombstone, for

it was essentially the law of his soul. The violence of his political

imprecations is begotten by love, though love of another kind: love of

justice, of truth, of tolerance, of liberty, all of which he beheld

violated by the ruling powers of the state and of the law. With the

unerring vision which is the birthright of genius, he saw through the

hypocrisies and shams of kings, and priests, and churches, and

council-chambers, and conventional morality, and political creeds. The

thunder of the superb sonnet to England which begins with the famous

line,

‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,’

came from his heart’s depths in scorn of lies, in hatred of pretence, in

righteous indignation as a patriot at the corruption, venality and

hypocrisy of

‘Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling.’

It is perhaps to be lamented that the true poetic temperament should

ever turn aside to share the fret and fever of political strife. It is

waste of the spirit of Alastor to rage against Swellfoot. But the poet

cannot wholly escape the influences of baser humanity, and, watching the

struggles of ‘the blind and battling multitude’ from afar, he cannot

avoid being moved either to a passion of pity or to a passion of

disdain, or to both at once, in view of this combat, which seems to him

so poor and small, so low and vile. Men of genius know the mere

transitory character of those religions and those social laws which awe,

as by a phantasm of terror, weaker minds, and they refuse to allow their

lives to be dictated to or bound down; and in exact proportion to their

power of revolt is their attainment of greatness.

The soul of Shelley was, besides, deeply imbued by that wide pantheism

which makes all the received religions of men look so trite, so poor, so

narrow and so mean.

‘Canst those imagine where those spirits live

Which make such delicate music in the woods?

. . . . . . . . . .

’Tis hard to tell:

I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,

The bubbles, which enchantment of the sun

Sucks from the pale, faint water-flowers that pave

The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,

Are the pavilions where such dwell and float

Under the green and golden atmosphere

Which noon-tide kindles through the woven leaves;

And when these burst, and the thin, fiery air,

The which they breathed within those lucent domes,

Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,

They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,

And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire

Under the waters of the earth again.

If such live thus, have others other lives,

Under pink blossoms or within the bells

Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep,

Or on their dying odours when they die,

Or on the sunlight of the sphered dell?’

The loveliness of Nature filled him with awe and deep delight.

‘How glorious art thou, Earth! and if thou be

The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,

Though evil stain its work, and it should be

Like its creation, weak yet beautiful,

I could fall down and worship that and thee.’

‘My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside the helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing

It seems to float ever, forever.

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around

Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.’

This intimate sympathy with Nature, this perception of beauty in things

seen and unseen, this deep joy in the sense of existence, make the very

life of Shelley’s life; he is the ideal poet, feeding

‘on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.’