"Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest."
We seem to hear all the winds ringing with its "shrill delight," and
seem to glide into and be engulfed by a sea of eternally fresh melody.
This is the youngest, freshest, gladdest pæan of the pure spirit
of freedom. It forms the transition to the long series of poems of
freedom, the great group of works in which Shelley's genius is the
loud herald of the approaching revolutions. His poetry of freedom is
one long war-cry, garbed in ever-changing melodies. Whether it takes
the shape of odes to liberty and its champions (poems as beautiful and
grand as the Marseillaise), of political satires levelled at customs
or persons, of Aristophanic comedy ridiculing the abuses and follies
of the day in England, or of mythical or historical tragedy, it is in
its essence always the same mighty wail over injustice and hypocrisy,
the same powerful appeal to all of his contemporaries who were still
capable of feeling anything whatsoever a degradation.
Immediately after his first marriage Shelley began to play the part
of a political agitator. He went to Dublin to further the cause of
Catholic emancipation, wrote a very juvenile address to the Irish
people, in which he besought them to refrain from the violent deeds
with which the French Revolution had been stained, and was childish
enough to throw down copies of it from the balcony of his hotel,
in front of any of the passers-by who looked as if they might be
responsive. We gain some idea of the childish spirit in which both he
and his young wife regarded the matter, from reading that, one day
when they were walking together, he could not resist amusing himself
by popping the address into the hood of a lady's cloak, a performance
which made his wife, as she herself writes, "almost die of laughing."
Shelley attended several political meetings, and on one occasion
spoke for more than an hour in the presence of O'Connell and other
celebrities. The accounts of his eloquence given by contemporaries are
so enthusiastic that they might almost lead us to believe him to have
been even greater as an orator than as a poet.
The next time Shelley came into collision with the party in power, the
collision was of a much more violent and tragic nature. Harriet was
dead, and her father had filed a petition in Chancery to determine
which was the fit and proper person to educate her children--he, their
grandfather, the retired hotel-keeper, or their father, Shelley, the
author of _Queen Mab_ and _Alastor_, who was accused of atheism, and
would in all probability bring up his children as atheists.
Lord Eldon's judgment was to the effect that, seeing that Shelley's
conduct had hitherto been highly immoral, and that, far from being
ashamed of this, he was proud of his immoral principles and tried
to impress them upon others, the law was in its right in depriving
him entirely of the custody of his children, and at the same time
decreeing that he should be deprived of a fifth of his income for their
maintenance. The children were placed in charge of a clergyman of the
Church of England. Shelley felt this blow so terribly that even his
most intimate friends never dared speak of the children to him.
In his poem _To the Lord Chancellor_ he cries:
"I curse thee by a parent's outraged love;
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost;
By gentle feelings thou could'st never prove;
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom;
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(By) the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, 'My children are no longer mine;
The blood within those veins may be my own,
But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.'"
And in the poem to William Shelley, his little son by Mary, he writes:
"They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time;
And they will curse my name and thee
Because we are fearless and free.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see
Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity."
Fearing that this son of his second marriage might also be taken from
him, Shelley left his native country, never to return. At the time
when the Lord Chancellor was branding him as less fit for the most
rudimentary duties of social life than any other man in England, he was
preparing to prove that he was one of the few men then in existence
who were predestined to immortality. He left England, stamped as a
criminal, and most of the Englishmen whom he met abroad feared and
hated him as capable of any crime. He appears to have been actually
once or twice subjected to personal molestation.
As already mentioned, Shelley in 1817 published a pamphlet on the
subject of Parliamentary Reform. As a proof of the moderation and
practicability of the views elaborated in its pages, it need only be
mentioned that the Tories in 1867 passed almost the very scheme of
Reform which the "atheist and republican" had planned fifty years
before. He "disavowed any wish to establish universal suffrage at
once, or to do away with monarchy and aristocracy." And on many other
occasions he declared himself to be against precipitate changes. His
Radicalism consisted simply in his being fifty years ahead of his day.
Attacked and persecuted by the narrow-minded society of the period,
Shelley now hurled his poems of liberty at England. His political
poems are written with his blood. The employment of such similes for
Castlereagh and Sidmouth as "two bloodless wolves whose dry throats
rattle" and "two vipers tangled into one," was allowable in his case.
It must not be forgotten that to him Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and Eldon,
were not men, but personifications of a principle--of the great,
fateful principle of reaction to which his career and his happiness had
been sacrificed. He writes in _The Masque of Anarchy_:
"I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh.
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Clothed with the bible as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile came by.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said,
But she looked more like Despair;
And she cried out in the air:
'My father Time is weak and grey
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
'He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me--
Misery! oh Misery!'"
It was not, however, only in bellicose lyrics that Shelley incorporated
his political and social ideas and passions at this period. In the year
1818 he wrote two very characteristic narrative poems, _Julian and
Maddalo_ and _Rosalind and Helen_. The first-mentioned gives a vivid
description of the poet's life in Venice with Byron, and affords one of
the many proofs of his noble and ardent admiration for Byron's poetry.
It contains an account of a visit paid by the two friends to a lunatic
asylum in the neighbourhood of Venice and describes the impression
produced upon Shelley. The man "whose heart a stranger's tear might
wear as water-drops the sandy fountain-stone," and who "could moan
for woes which others hear not," could not but be deeply moved by
compassion for the unfortunates who at that time were still kept in
fetters and punished by flogging.
We gain the best idea of the utter want of understanding of mental
disease in those days, and the barbarity displayed in its treatment,
from reading of the manner in which an insane patient of such rank
as King George the Third was treated in 1798. The King's mental
alienation displayed itself chiefly in excessive talkativeness; there
was no inclination to any kind of violence. Nevertheless from the very
beginning, and throughout the whole duration of the attack, he was kept
in a strait-waistcoat, was closely confined, deprived of the use of
knife and fork, and subjected to the whims of his pages, who knocked
him about, struck him, and used abusive language to him. All this
is known because the King retained a distinct remembrance after his
recovery of what had happened during his illness.
Shelley's gentleness and love of his fellow-men are evident in the plea
which he, ignorant of the humaner treatment of the insane inaugurated
in France during the Revolution, utters for these afflicted ones:
"Methinks there were
A cure of these with patience and kind care,
If music thus can move."
The second poem, _Rosalind and Helen_, which gives a powerful general
impression of the misery which prejudice and intolerance have brought
upon the human race, has not hitherto been properly understood or
valued according to its deserts. It attempts to give a comprehensive
representation of all that truly good and liberal-minded human beings
have to suffer from antiquated ideas and principles in combination with
human malignity. We have the description of a father who was a coward
to the strong, a tyrant to the weak; hard, selfish, false, rapacious;
the torturer of his wife and terror of his children, who became pale
and silent if they heard, or thought they heard, his footstep on the
stair. He dies, and Rosalind, the mother, is distressed because her
children involuntarily rejoice at their father's death, and because
she herself cannot but feel it to be a relief. The dead man had been
strictly orthodox. He has, as it appears when his will is read, decreed
that the children shall inherit nothing if they continue to live with
their mother, because she secretly holds the Christian creed to be
false, and he must save his children from eternal fire. The mother
feels that she must leave her children. "Thou know'st," she says--
"Thou know'st what a thing is poverty
Among the fallen on evil days.
'Tis crime, and fear, and infamy,
And houseless want in frozen ways
Wandering ungarmented, and pain,
And, worse than all, that inward stain,
Foul self-contempt, which drowns in sneers
Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears
First hot like gall, then dry for ever.
And well thou know'st a mother never
Could doom her children to this ill,--
And well he knew the same."
Rosalind's fate serves, above all else, to show the misery of an
unhappy marriage, more particularly the wife's condition of dependence
on a bad and tyrannical husband. Shelley's own grief over the loss of
his children is also distinctly perceptible in the poem; and Helen's
fate recalls the persecution to which the author in his character of
philosopher was subjected. The whole representation of Lionel's life
and ideas is self-representation. Could there be a better description
of Shelley's own love of his fellow-man than this:--
"For love and life in him were twins,
Born at one birth. In every other,
First life, then love, its course begins,
Though they be children of one mother."
Young, rich, well-born, Lionel at the time of the Revolution
enthusiastically takes his place in the ranks of the reformers whose
aim it is to emancipate humanity from the tyranny of creeds.
"Men wondered, and some sneered to see
One sow what he could never reap:
'For he is rich,' they said, 'and young,
And might drink from the depths of luxury.
If he seeks Fame, Fame never crowned
The champion of a trampled creed:
If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned
'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed
Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil
Those who would sit near Power must toil.'"
The reaction comes:
"None now hoped more. Grey Power was seated
Safely on her ancestral throne;
And Faith, the python, undefeated.
Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on
Her foul and wounded train; and men
Were trampled and deceived again."
Lionel's enemies succeed in imprisoning him because he has blasphemed
their gods. He passes a long time in solitary confinement, separated
from the woman he loves. Then he meets her again, and they celebrate
their nuptials under the starry sky.
_Rosalind and Helen_ is a poem which bears traces of having been
written in a mood of profound despair; in no other work does Shelley go
to such extremes in his war upon all traditional law and convention.
We have, in a previous volume of this work, touched upon the fact that
many writers at the beginning of this century occupied themselves with
the theory that the horror of incest has its source in prejudice.
Both in _Rosalind and Helen_ and in _The Revolt of Islam_, the hero
and heroine of which would, but for the earnest entreaties of the
publisher, have been brother and sister, Shelley wasted much eloquence
on this sinister paradox--which also greatly occupied Byron's mind, and
was to give occasion to a foolish and revolting attack upon his memory.
The year 1820 was the year of the scandalous royal divorce case. On
the 8th of April 1798, the Prince Regent, compelled by his position
to marry, had wedded Princess Caroline of Brunswick. So little regard
did he show from the very beginning for even the decencies of the
situation, that at their first meeting in St. James's Palace, when the
Princess was kneeling before him, he called to Lord Malmesbury: "Get me
a glass of brandy! I don't feel well." Lord Malmesbury asked if a glass
of water would not be preferable, upon which the Prince rushed out of
the room, swearing, without a word to his fiancée. He was drunk at the
wedding, and hiccupped incessantly during the ceremony. Ere long he was
not content with displaying the utmost indifference to his wife and
slighting her by his liaisons with numbers of other women, but actually
treated her with great brutality--kept her in confinement, surrounded
her with spies, and, on the ground of a false accusation, took her
daughter from her, a proceeding which gave occasion to constant
scenes at court. The Princess's conduct does not seem to have been
long irreproachable. She was at first only incautious, but in course
of time sought consolation in behaviour which was neither blameless
nor dignified. At the age of fifty she was travelling all over Europe
in the company of her courier and chamberlain Bergami--a man who had
formerly been her footman--an Italian Ruy Blas, on whom she conferred
one honour and order after another, and whom she loved devotedly.
When, at the time of her husband's accession to the throne, she
returned to England, expecting to be crowned Queen, the miserable,
contemptible sovereign determined to employ, in procuring a divorce,
all the evidence against her which he had obtained by means of paid
spies. She was accused before the House of Lords of unfaithfulness.
Whole shiploads of foreign hotel waiters and chambermaids were landed
in England amidst the angry demonstrations of the populace, to give
witness against the Queen. Anything more indecent than this trial
it would be difficult to find. Investigations into the positions of
bedrooms and beds, descriptions of the clothing or absence of clothing
of a Queen and her chamberlain, filled the English newspapers day after
day until--the accusation was withdrawn; partly on account of the
supposed insufficiency of the proofs, partly on account of the pitch
which public contempt for the King, as the author of the scandal, had
reached.
It was this divorce case which gave occasion to Shelley's excellent
satire, _Œdipus Tyrannus_, or _Swellfoot the Tyrant_, an essay
in political comedy. The action of the play passes in Bœotia. A
people, who call themselves _Bulls_ (_i.e._ John Bulls), nevertheless
make their appearance as pigs; consequently, the nature and power
and spirit of the English are comprehensively expressed by the word
_piggishness_:--
"The taxes, that true source of piggishness
(How can I find a more appropriate term
To include religion, morals, peace, and plenty,
And all that fit Bœotia as a nation
To teach the other nations how to live?)
Increase with piggishness itself."
The hypocrisy of the royal husband, the Queen's impudent asseverations
of her own chastity, the hypocritical attitude of Castlereagh and
Sidmouth--all this is caricatured with the pen of a master.
But Shelley's genius was not of a nature to spend much of its force in
satirising the distortions of the age. Untrammelled and ethereal, it
was supremely fitted to present to the intellects of the day a glorious
conception of the century's ideal of liberty.
And from his boyhood this had been the aim of all Shelley's endeavours.
His first works were long, melodious, but, unfortunately, formless
poems, which are in their essence protests against kings and priests,
against the religions which "people the earth with fiends, hell with
men, and heaven with slaves," against the injustice of governments and
the servility of the administrators of the law, against compulsory
marriages, against the exclusion of women from free competition in
bread-winning occupations, against cruelty in the slaughtering of
animals. They are protests, in short, against every form of oppression
and intolerance, written with no less ambitious an aim than the
reformation of humanity, which is to be brought about by showing it
how it may remove the causes of its misfortunes and attain to a state
which, in comparison with the existing, would be a true golden age.
Shelley had, as he himself laughingly acknowledges, "a passion for
reforming the world." In spite of his aversion for didactic poetry,
it was (as he puts it in the preface to _The Revolt of Islam_) his
object to excite in his reader a generous impulse, an ardent thirst for
excellence.
"The panic," he writes, "which, like an epidemic transport, seized
upon all classes of men during the excesses consequent upon the French
Revolution, is gradually giving place to sanity. It has ceased to be
believed that whole generations of mankind ought to consign themselves
to a hopeless inheritance of ignorance and misery, because a nation
of men who had been dupes and slaves for centuries were incapable of
conducting themselves with the wisdom and tranquillity of freemen
so soon as some of their fetters were partially loosened.... If the
Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and
superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters
which the captive can unlock with the slightest motion of his fingers,
and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul."
Shelley's purpose was to set forth the principles of the Revolution in
a transfigured form. Hence his poetry became a sermon; his imagination
embodied, not his observations, but his wishes.
He was firmly persuaded that imagination is the true reformatory
power. The man whom crass ignorance has reviled as a materialist
had, in the school of Hume and Berkeley, saturated himself with the
extremest idealism. To him everything was thought--things were layers
of thoughts; the universe itself was but a gigantic coagulation of old
thoughts, images, ideas. Hence it is that the poet, whose calling it is
to create new imagery of the kind which makes the strongest impression,
is always agitating, disturbing, remodelling the world. "Imagination,"
says Shelley, "is the faculty of human nature on which every gradation
of its progress--nay, every, the minutest, change--depends." Either
by gently inducing the congealed ideas to flow again, or by forcibly
breaking through the crust of outworn opinions, the poet shows himself
to be the true reformer.
In his youth devoted to philosophy, but indifferent to history,
Shelley, during the one completed period of his life--that preceding
the writing of _The Cenci_--sought no foundation in time or space
for his visions of reformation; being merely desires, they had no
historic reality. And this deficiency entails the absence of various
essential qualities in his personages, which only historical and local
relations can confer. The qualities they do possess are mainly the
deepest seated, original qualities of human nature. In constructing
his characters, he goes back to the earliest records of the race.
They are half mystical personages--gigantic, vaguely outlined,
spiritualised figures; no ordinary human sympathies can lay hold of
them, for the reason that "history"--what the ordinary mind regards as
the interesting element in a poem--is despised and ignored by Shelley.
Hence his unsuitability for the multitude. An author like Sir Walter
Scott will never cease to find a public among all who can read; Shelley
will always be the author only of the few elect.
When, however, Shelley chooses a theme suited to his peculiar turn of
mind he produces poetry of the very highest rank. His productive gift,
from the point of view from which we are now considering it, was of the
Greek type; and the same may be said of his religious feeling and of
the whole development of his imaginative and reasoning powers. "We are
all Greeks," he says somewhere. It was true of himself.
It was, however, only the earliest Greek poetry which treated of such
natural phenomena, such gods, and such heroes as we find in Shelley's;
therefore it is only with it that his is to be compared. Shelley's
lyrics remind us of the Homeric hymns; his political comedy recalls
Aristophanes both by its reckless satire and the lyric vigour of its
songs, and is worthy of comparison with Aristophanes; it remains to
be told that in serious drama he was a worthy rival of Æschylus. His
_Prometheus Unbound_ is the modern counterpart of the Greek tragedian's
_Prometheus Bound_; his _Hellas_, a prophecy of the triumph of Greece,
the modern counterpart of _The Persians_.
Let us linger for a moment over _Prometheus_, the magnificent poem in
which his poetry of freedom culminates. In Prometheus, Shelley at last
found, and succeeded in representing, the typical figure of his poetry
and his period. Many types had passed through his mind, amongst others
Job and Tasso, who at this time were also engrossing the imagination of
Byron and Goethe. He chose Prometheus. High above the lakes and hills
of contemporaneous English poetry, Byron's Alps with his Manfred, and
Shelley's Caucasus with his Prometheus, soar into the sky.
Ever since the emancipation of the human mind had begun in real
earnest, this typical figure had given occupation to all the great
poets. It suggests itself about the beginning of our century to Goethe,
Byron, and Shelley. Goethe's beautiful poem represents the labours, the
artistic productivity, of the human spirit which has freed itself from
faith in gods--the man, proud of his hut, which no god built for him,
occupied in forming figures in his own image. Goethe's Prometheus is
the creative and free. Byron's hard, short, fiery lines describe the
martyr who suffers with clenched teeth, silently; from whom no torture
can extract confession, and whose ambition it is that no one shall
divine his sufferings; this is a Titan who would never, in the manner
of the Prometheus of the ancients, have accepted consolation from the
daughters of Oceanus or told his woes to them. Byron's is the defiant
and bound Prometheus.
Shelley's resembles neither of these. His is the beneficent human
spirit which, warring with the principle of evil, is for an
immeasurable length of time held in subjugation and tortured by it--and
not by it alone, but by all other beings, even the good, who are fooled
into accepting evil as necessary and right. He is the spirit who can
only for a time be imprisoned and fettered; long as that time may be,
the day comes when, to the joy of all, he is released--he is Prometheus
unbound, Prometheus triumphant, greeted by the acclamations of all the
elements and all the heavenly spheres.
Even during his sufferings he is perfectly calm; for he knows that
Jupiter's reign is but a passing period in the life of the universe.
He would not exchange his place of torture for all the voluptuous joys
of Jupiter's court. When the Furies "laugh into his lidless eyes," and
threaten him, he only says:
"I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer,
Being evil."
How differently a Byronic Prometheus would have answered! This Titan is
full of love--love for his enemies and for the whole human race. Nor
have his sufferings closed his heart to the more earthly love passion.
In the midst of his agony he remembers his bride--
"Asia, who, when my being overflowed,
Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine."
Asia is nature herself, who loves the Titan. She is the child of light,
the life of life, whose
"lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them,
And whose smiles, before they dwindle,
Make the cold air fire."
When the age of suffering and injustice has passed, Jupiter sinks
into the abyss of eternity, with cowardly wails and supplications
to Prometheus to have mercy on him. The Promethean age begins; the
air becomes a sea of sweet, eternally new love melodies; the mighty,
deep-toned jubilation of the Earth is heard in alternation with the
Moon's enchanting song of bliss; and then the whole universe chimes
in in a chorus of rejoicing unsurpassed even by that with which
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ends.
We cannot do much more than allude to the fact that Shelley, after
competing with Æschylus, began to produce on Shakespeare's lines.
Taking a sudden excursion into the realms of history, he gave England
what even Byron pronounced to be the best tragedy written by any of
her sons since the days of Shakespeare. _The Cenci_ reminds the reader
slightly of such a play as _Measure for Measure_, although Shakespeare
was not possessed by the ardent hatred of tyranny which inspired
Shelley's play.
To the Romans the name of Beatrice Cenci is to this day the great
symbol of liberty. The young girl who defended her honour against her
atrocious father (whose deed of violence was indirectly sanctioned by
the corruption of the rulers of the country from the Pope downwards) is
still regarded by the Roman as a heroine and martyr. Whenever, during
the long oppression of the Papacy, there has been a little clearing
of the air, a little brightening of the horizon, her name has been
heard, her picture has circulated, in Rome. Shelley, forgetting all
theories, is here entirely absorbed by history. But what evidently
impressed him in this tragic collision of duties, was the violent break
with all traditional morality which the father's crime necessitated;
and he was also attracted by the opportunity the situation offered for
throwing a glaring search-light on the accepted theological doctrine of
the paternal benevolence displayed in the regulation of the universe.
Beatrice says:
"Thou great God,
Whose image upon earth a father is,
Dost thou indeed abandon me?"
And when she is asked:
"Art thou not guilty of thy father's death?"
She answers:
"Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God
That he permitted such an act as that
Which I have suffered, and which he beheld;
Made it unutterable, and took from it
All refuge, all revenge, all consequence,
But that which thou hast called my father's death?"
In the torture chamber she says:
"My pangs are of the mind and of the heart
And of the soul: ay, of the inmost soul,
Which weeps within tears as of burning gall
To see, in this ill world where none are true,
My kindred false to their deserted selves;
And with considering all the wretched life
Which I have lived, and its now wretched end;
And the small justice shown by Heaven and Earth
To me or mine; and what a tyrant thou art,
And what slaves these; and what a world we make,
The oppressor and the oppressed."
It is plain that what specially attracted Shelley in Beatrice's
character was its combination of energy and gentleness. When the hour
of death has come, a horror seizes her at the thought that after death
she may meet her father again. She cries:
"If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world,
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be my father's spirit,
His eye, his voice, his touch, surrounding me,
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come,
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix
His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!
For was he not alone _omnipotent_
On earth, and ever present? Even though dead
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe,
And work for me and mine still the same ruin,
Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned
To teach the laws of Death's untrodden realm?
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now,
Oh whither, whither?"
It was of this, the most mature and best planned of Shelley's works,
that the _Literary Gazette_ wrote: "_The Cenci_ is the most abominable
work of the time, and seems to be the production of some fiend." The
reviewer hopes never again to see a book "so stamped with pollution,
impiousness, and infamy."
The hostility evinced depressed Shelley, who thought that this time
he had done his best. He was not intimidated by it, but his desire
to produce became less strong. During the last two years of his life
no long works came from his pen. In November 1820 he writes: "The
reception the public have given me might go far to damp any man's
enthusiasm."
His last letters are full of remarks on the criticism meted out to him.
_April_ 1819:--"As to the Reviews, I suppose there is nothing but
abuse; and this is not hearty enough or sincere enough to amuse me."
_March_ 1820:--"If any of the Reviews abuse me, cut them out and send
them; if they praise, you need not trouble yourself. I feel ashamed if
I could believe that I should deserve the latter: the former, I flatter
myself, is no more than a just tribute."
In 1821 he writes the poem on Keats with the terrible outburst against
the reviewer who is supposed to have been the cause of the young poet's
death:
"Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt--as now."
_June_ 1821:--"I hear that the abuse against me exceeds all bounds.
Pray, if you see any one article particularly outrageous, send it me.
As yet, I have laughed; but woe to these scoundrels if they should
once make me lose my temper. I have discovered that my calumniator in
the _Quarterly Review_ was the Reverend Mr. Milman. Priests have their
privilege."
_August_ 1821:--"I write nothing, and probably shall write no more."
Byron, when his enemies irritated him, stopped his work for a moment
and showed them the lion's claw. Shelley was of a different nature.
The satire of the reviewers contained in his _Peter Bell the Third_ is
sportiveness in comparison with Byron's sanguinary attacks on Southey
and the others. Whenever Shelley made his appearance the creeping
things of literature began to swarm and stir beneath his feet. They
stung his heel; he could not bruise their heads, for such creatures
have, as Swinburne has observed, too little head to be perceived
and bruised. Byron's poetry had, moreover, made for him friends and
admirers by the thousand; he shared Parnassus with Goethe; he had begun
to set the stamp of his spirit on the continent of Europe. Shelley
was too far in advance of his age. The crowd will follow a leader who
marches twenty steps in advance; but if he is a thousand steps in
front of them, they do not see and do not follow him, and any literary
freebooter who chooses may shoot him with impunity.
Moore was a man of great talent, and exercised influence as such. What
Shelley had was not talent, either great or small, but genius. He was
the very genius of poetry; and he had all the power which genius gives;
where he fell short was in his grip of reality. He has influenced the
succeeding generations of English poets throughout this whole century,
but he had not the twentieth part of the merely talented Moore's
influence upon his own contemporaries. Byron was, as none had ever been
before, the poet of personality, and as such was excessively egotistic;
prejudice and vanity could not in his case be entirely eradicated
without nobler qualities suffering from the process. Shelley, perfectly
free from vanity and egotism, was absorbed in his ideals; he expanded
his Ego until it embraced the universe. But what was ideal virtue in
him as a man entailed a fatal defect in his poetry, at any rate in
the works produced during the first part of his too short life. This
poet, so devoid of all thought of self, was long entirely deficient
in self-restraint. A sense of form as regarded a great composition
in its entirety was for many years denied him. In making his first
appearance as a poet he stumbled over the threshold, and it takes more
than genius to make the reading public forget such an entrance. _The
Revolt of Islam_, with all the beauty of its detail, is vague and
formless; it hovers transcendentally in the air. With its shadowy,
bloodless characters, it is distended to such proportions that it is a
task to read it to the end; and it was a task which few accomplished.
Until Shelley wrote _The Cenci_ he seems to have had no idea of the
infinite attractiveness and infinite value of the characteristics of
the individual. Even Prometheus and Asia in their quality of types are
destitute of any peculiarly distinguishing feature; their names are
merely headings to the most beautiful lyric verse which England has
ever produced. _The Cenci_ shows how capable Shelley was of acquiring
what he was naturally deficient in; but, alas! he was carried off
before he could fulfil the rich promise of his youth, and before his
contemporaries had had their eyes opened to what they possessed in him.
Although his shorter lyrics surpass in depth and freshness, naturalness
and charm, everything else in the shape of lyric poetry that the
century has produced, they could not influence his own generation, as
most of them were not even printed during his lifetime.
Thus Shelley was no more capable than Moore or Landor of bringing about
the spiritual revolution of which Europe stood in need and expectancy.
It required a poet who was as personal as Shelley was universal,
as passionate as Shelley was idealistic, as savagely satirical as
Shelley was harmonious and graceful, to perform the Herculean task of
clearing the political and religious atmosphere of Europe, awaking the
slumberers, and plunging the mighty into the abyss of ridicule. A man
was required who could win the sympathies of his age alike by his vices
and his virtues, his excellences and his faults. Shelley's instrument
was an exquisite violin; a trumpet was what was needed to pierce the
air and give the signal for battle.
Little remains to be told of Shelley's life--only the story of his
last sail from Leghorn to Lerici, of the sudden gale in which he
perished, of the long days spent by his despairing wife in searching
the coast, and of the discovery of the almost unrecognisable corpse.
The Tuscan law required any object thus cast ashore to be burned.
Shelley's body was committed to the flames by Byron and Trelawny with
Grecian and pagan observances that were in harmony with his character.
Frankincense, wine, salt, and oil, were poured on the fuel. The day was
beautiful and the surroundings were glorious--the calm sea in front,
the Apennines behind. A curlew wheeled round the pyre, and would not
be driven away. The flame arose golden and towering. The body was
consumed, but, to the surprise of all, the heart remained entire.
Trelawny snatched it from the glowing furnace, severely burning his
hand. The ashes were deposited near the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome,
which Shelley had spoken of as an ideal resting-place.
The first-mentioned of the men who consigned his body to the flames was
his spiritual heir. This man's name is to be read on every page of the
history of his day. We see his way prepared by Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Scott; he is hated by Southey, misunderstood by Landor, loved by
Moore, admired, influenced, and sung by Shelley. He occupies a place in
every one's life. It is he who sets the final and decisive stamp on the
poetical literature of the age.
[1] Hans Christian Ørsted.--Transcribers note.
[2] "I am a friend of humanity, a friend of the people and a denier of
God." From the Danish edition--translated into English by transcriber.
[3] Swinburne, who in his masterly little essay on Byron points out
that Byron and Shelley were engrossed by the same natural phenomena,
does not note the difference which existed along with the similarity.