The term Pessimism has in these later days been so intimately associated
with the philosophical theories of a well-known German writer, that I can
well excuse those who ask, What may be the connection between Pessimism
and Poetry? There are few matters of human interest that may not become
suitable themes for poetic treatment; but I scarcely think Metaphysics is
among them. It is not, therefore, to Schopenhauer's theory of the World
conceived as Will and Idea, that I invite your attention. The Pessimism
with which we are concerned is much older than Metaphysics, is as old as
the human heart, and is never likely to become obsolete. It is the
Pessimism of which the simplest, the least cultured, and the most
unsophisticated of us may become the victims, and which expresses the
feeling that, on the whole, life is rather a bad business, that it is not
worth having, and that it is a thing which, in the language used by the
Duke in _Measure for Measure_, in order to console Claudio, none but fools
would keep.
Now, as all forms of feeling, and most forms of thought, are reflected in
the magic mirror of Poetry, it is only natural that gloomy views of
existence, of the individual life, and of the world's destiny should from
time to time find expression in the poet's verse. There is quite enough
pain in the experience of the individual, quite enough vicissitude in the
history of nations, quite enough doubt and perplexity in the functions and
mission of mankind, for even the most cheerful and masculine Song to
change sometimes into the pathetic minor. What I would ask you to consider
with me is if there be not a danger lest poetry should remain for long in
this minor key, and if the Poet does not find ample justification and
warrant--nay, should he be a true and comprehensive interpreter of life,
of
All moods, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
if he does not find himself compelled, in reply to the question, "What of
the night?" to answer, "The stars are still shining."
No survey of the attitude of Poetry towards Pessimism would be
satisfactory that confined itself to one particular age; and I shall ask
you, therefore, to attend to the utterances of poets in other generations
than our own. But, since our own age necessarily interests us the most,
let us at least _begin_ with IT.
I should be surprised to find any one doubting that during the last few
years a wave of disillusion, of doubt, misgiving, and despondency has
passed over the world. We are no longer so confident as we were in the
abstract wisdom and practical working of our Institutions; we no longer
express ourselves with such certainty concerning the social and moral
advantages of our material discoveries; we entertain growing anxiety as to
the future of our Commerce; many persons have questioned the very
foundations of religious belief, and numbers have taken refuge from
conflicting creeds in avowed Agnosticism, or the confession that we know
and can know absolutely nothing concerning what it had long been assumed
it most behoves us to know. One by one, all the fondly cherished theories
of life, society and Empire; our belief in Free Trade as the evangelist of
peace, the solution of economic difficulties and struggles, and the sure
foundation of national greatness; all the sources of our satisfaction with
ourselves, our confidence in our capacity to reconcile the rivalry of
capital and labour, to repress drunkenness, to abolish pauperism, to form
a fraternal confederation with our Colonies, and to be the example to the
whole world of wealth, wisdom, and virtue, are one by one deserting us. We
no longer believe that Great Exhibitions will disarm the inherent ferocity
of mankind, that a judicious administration of the Poor Law will gradually
empty our workhouses, or that an elastic law of Divorce will correct the
aberrations of human passion and solve all the problems of the hearth. The
boastfulness, the sanguine expectations, the confident prophecies of olden
times are exchanged for hesitating speculations and despondent whispers.
We no longer seem to know whither we are marching, and many appear to
think that we are marching to perdition. We have curtailed the authority
of kings; we have narrowed the political competence of aristocracies; we
have widened the suffrage, till we can hardly widen it any further; we
have introduced the ballot, abolished bribery and corruption, and called
into play a more active municipal life; we have multiplied our railways,
and the pace of our travel has been greatly accelerated. Telegraph and
telephone traverse the land. Surgical operations of the most difficult and
dangerous character are performed successfully by the aid of anaesthetics,
without pain to the patient. We have forced from heaven more light than
ever Prometheus did; with the result that we transcend him likewise in our
pain. No one would assert that we are happier, more cheerful, more full of
hope, than our predecessors, or that we confront the Future with greater
confidence. All our Progress, so far, has ended in Pessimism more or less
pronounced; by some expressed more absolutely, by some with more
moderation; but felt by all, permeating every utterance, and infiltrating
into every stratum of thought.
Now let us see to what extent these gloomy views have found expression in
poetry, and, first of all, in the writings of not only the most widely
read but the most sensitive and receptive poet of our time, Alfred
Tennyson. Tennyson came of age in 1830, or just on the eve of the first
Reform Bill, when a great Party in the State, which was to enjoy almost a
monopoly of power for the next thirty years, firmly believed, and was
followed by a majority of the nation in believing, that we had only to
legislate in a generous and what was called a liberal sense, to bring
about the Millennium within a reasonable period. They had every possible
opportunity of putting their belief into practice, and they did so with
generous ardour. Now in that year 1830 there appeared what was practically
Tennyson's first volume; and save in the instance of the short poem
beginning
You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
and the somewhat longer but still comparatively brief one, opening with
Love thou thy land, with love far-brought
From out the storied Past,
there is no reference in it to the political or social condition of the
English people. The bulk of the poems had evidently been composed, so to
speak, in the lofty vacuum created by the poet and the artist for himself,
save where, in the lines,
Vex not thou the Poet's mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poet's mind,
For thou canst not fathom it,
he seemed to be giving the great body of his countrymen notice that they
had nothing in common with him, or he with them. And, in the two
exceptions I have named, what is his attitude? You all remember the lines:
But pamper not a hasty time,
Nor feed with vague imaginings
The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime.
And so he goes on, through stanzas with which, I am sure, you are
thoroughly familiar, ending with the often-quoted couplet:
Earn well the thrifty months, nor wed
Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay.
It would be difficult to find, in verse, a more terse or accurate
embodiment of what, in no Party sense, we may call the Conservative mind,
the Conservative way of looking at things, or a more striking instance of
contemporaneous verse reflecting what had recently been the average public
temper of the moment. The England of the years that immediately preceded
1830 was an England wearied with the strain and stress of the great war
and the mighty agitations of the early part of the century, and now,
craving for repose, was in politics more or less stationary. Therefore in
this earliest volume, of one of the most sensitive and receptive of
writers, we encounter only quiet panegyrics of
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.
Where Faction seldom gathers head,
But, by degrees to fulness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.
Here we have none of the rebellious political protests of Byron, none of
the iconoclastic fervour of Shelley, none even of the philosophic yearning
of Wordsworth. It was a Conservative, a self-satisfied England, and the
youthful Tennyson accordingly was perfectly well satisfied with it,
evidently having as yet no cognizance of the fact that Radicalism was
already more than muling and pewking in the arms of its Whig nurse, and
that Reforms were about to be carried neither "slowly," nor by "still
degrees," nor in accordance with any known "precedent."
Tennyson's next volume was not published till 1842. During the twelve
years that had elapsed since the appearance of its predecessor, a mighty
change had come not only over the dream, but over the practice, of the
English People. It was an England in which the stationary or conservative
tone of thought of which I spoke was, if not extinct, discredited and
suppressed, and the fortunes of the Realm were moulded by the generous and
hopeful theories of Liberalism. Tennyson meanwhile had been subjected to
the influences of what he called the wondrous Mother Age; and harken how
now--it scarcely sounds like the same voice--the eulogist of the "storied
Past," the deprecator of "crude imaginings" and of a "hasty time,"
confronts the dominant spirit and rising impulses of the new generation:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
Did Optimism ever find a clearer, more enthusiastic, or more confident
voice than that? I have sometimes thought that when the Historian comes to
write, in distant times, of the rise, progress, and decline of Liberalism
in England, he will cite that passage as the melodious compendium of its
creed. You all know where the passage comes; for you have, I am sure, the
first _Locksley Hall_ by heart.
But there is another _Locksley Hall_, the _Locksley Hall_ which the Author
himself calls _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_, published as recently as
1886. You are acquainted with it, no doubt; but I should be surprised to
find any one quite so familiar with it as with its predecessor. It is not
so attractive, so fascinating, so saturated with beauty. But for my
purpose it is eminently instructive, and I will ask you to listen to some
of its rolling couplets.
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?
Read the wide world's annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.
Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.
Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:
When was age so cramm'd with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?
Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, "Ye are equals, equal-born."
Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.
Till the Cat thro' that mirage of overheated language loom
Larger than the Lion,--Demos end in working its own doom.
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.
Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rose to greatness,--thro' the tonguesters we may fall.
Was there ever such a contrast as between these two _Locksley Halls_? The
same poet, the same theme, the same metre, but how different the voice,
the tone, the tendency, the conclusion! All the Liberalism, all the
enthusiasm, the hope, the confidence, of former years have vanished, and
in their place we have reactionary despondency. It is as though the same
hand that wrote the Christening Ode to Liberalism, had composed a dirge to
be chanted over its grave.
The genius of Tennyson needs no fresh panegyric. It is but yesterday he
died, in the fullness of his Fame; and that his works will be read so long
as the English language remains a living tongue, I cannot doubt. But if,
while his claim to the very highest place as an artist must ever remain
uncontested, doubts should be expressed concerning his equality with the
very greatest poets, those who express that doubt will, I imagine, base
their challenge on the excessive receptivity, and consequent lack of
serenity of his mind. In the first _Locksley Hall_ the poet is an
Optimist. In the second _Locksley Hall_ he is a Pessimist. And why?
Because, when the first was written, the prevailing tone of the age was
optimistic; and, when the second was composed, the prevailing tone of the
time had become pessimistic.
It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a
very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent
days, not only be closely associated with Pessimism, but should become for
the most part its voice and echo. I am precluded from presenting to you
illustrations of this danger from the works of living writers of verse.
But in truth, the malady of which I am speaking--for malady, in my
opinion, it is--began to manifest itself long before the present
generation, long before Tennyson wrote, and when indeed he was yet a child
in the cradle. The main original source of Modern Pessimism is the French
movement known as the Revolution, which, by exciting extravagant hopes as
to the happy results to be secured from the emancipation of the
individual, at first generated a fretful impatience at the apparently slow
fulfilment of the dream, and finally aroused a sceptical and reactionary
despondency at the only too plain and patent demonstration that the dream
was not going to be fulfilled at all. It is this blending of wild hopes
and extravagant impatience that inspired and informed the poetry of
Shelley, that produced _Queen Mab_, _The Revolt of Islam_, and _Prometheus
Unbound_. In Byron it was impatience blent with disillusion that dictated
_Childe Harold_, _Manfred_, and _Cain_, and finally culminated in the
mockery of _Don Juan_. Keats, while ostensibly holding aloof from the
political and social issues of his time, succumbed and ministered to the
disease, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, more even than either
Byron or Shelley; for _they_ went on fighting against, while _he_
passively submitted, to it. Keats found nothing in his own time worth
sympathising with or singing about, and so took refuge in mythological and
classical themes, or in the expression of states of feeling in which he
grows half in love with easeful death, in which more than ever it seems
sweet to die and to cease upon the midnight with no pain, and to the high
requiem of the nightingale to become a sod that does not hear.
Now it is an instructive circumstance that, in recent years, a distinct
and decided preference has been manifested both by the majority of critics
and by the reading public for the poetry of Keats even over the poetry of
the other two writers I have named in connection with him. In Byron,
notwithstanding his rebellious tendency, notwithstanding the gloom that
often overshadows his verse, notwithstanding his being one of the
exponents of those exaggerated hopes and that exaggerated despondency of
which I have spoken, there was a considerable fund of common sense and a
good deal of manliness. He was a man of the world and could not help being
so, in spite of his attitude of hostility to it. Moreover, in many of his
poems, action plays a conspicuous part, and the general passions,
interests, and politics of mankind are dealt with by him in a more or less
practical spirit, and as though they concerned him likewise. Shelley, too,
not unoften condescended to deal with the political, social, and religious
polemics of his time, though he always did so in a passionate and utterly
impracticable temper, and would necessarily leave on the mind of the
reader, the conviction that everything in the world is amiss, and that
the only possible remedy is the abolition of everything that had hitherto
been regarded as an indispensable part of the foundation of human society.
But Keats does not trouble himself about any of these things. He gives
them the go-by, he ignores them, and only asks to be allowed to leave the
world unseen, and with the nightingale, to fade away into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
This is the voice, I say, which, during the last few years, has been
preferred even to Shelley's, and very much preferred to Byron's. And why?
You will perhaps say that Keats's workmanship is fascinatingly beautiful.
In the passage I have cited, and in the entire poem from which it is
taken, that unquestionably is so. But I trust I shall not give offence if
I say that the number of my countrymen and countrywomen who lay stress on
the artistic manner, whether in verse or prose, in which an opinion is
expressed, compared with the number of those who value poetry or prose
chiefly because it expresses the opinions they value and the sentiments
they cherish, is very small. No, Keats is preferred because Keats turns
aside from the world at large, and thinks and writes only of individual
feeling. Hence he has been more welcomed by recent critics, and by recent
readers of poetry. Indeed, certain critics have laboured to erect it into
a dogma, indeed into an absolute literary and critical canon, that a poet
who wishes to attain true distinction must turn his back on politics, on
people, on society, on his country, on patriotism, on everything in fact
save books--his own thoughts, his own feelings, and his own art. Because
Byron did not do so they have dubbed him a Philistine; and because Pope
did precisely the reverse, and the reverse, no doubt, overmuch, they
assert that he was not a poet at all.
It is not necessary to dwell on the fatuousness of such criticism, more
especially as one discerns welcome signs of a disposition on the part of
the reading public to turn away from these guides, and a disposition even
on the part of the guides themselves in some degree to reconsider and
revise their unfortunate utterances. But I have alluded to the doctrine in
question, in order to show you to what lengths Pessimism, which is only a
compendious expression of dissatisfaction with things in general, in other
words with life, with society, and with mankind, can go, and how it has
culminated in such disdain of them by poets, that they brush them aside as
subjects unworthy of the Muse. Surely Pessimism in Poetry can no farther
go, than to assume, without question, that man, life, society, patriotism
are not worth a song?
I should not wonder if some will have been saying to themselves, "But what
about Wordsworth; Wordsworth, who was the contemporary, and at least the
equal, alike in genius and in influence, of the three poets just named?" I
have not forgotten Wordsworth. Wordsworth was of too pious a temperament,
using the word pious in its very largest signification, to be a Pessimist;
for true piety and Pessimism are irreconcilable. Nevertheless Wordsworth,
as a poet, likewise experienced, and experienced acutely, the influence of
the French Revolution. Upon this point there can be no difference of
opinion; for he himself left it on record in a well-known passage.
Everybody knows with what different eyes Wordsworth finally looked on the
French Revolution; how utterly he broke with its tenets, its promises, its
offspring; taking refuge from his disappointment.
But something akin to despondency, if too permeated with sacred
resignation wholly to deserve that description, may be discovered in the
attitude henceforward assumed by Wordsworth, as a poet, towards the world,
society, and mankind. Not only did he write a long poem, _The Recluse_,
but he himself was a recluse, and the whole of _The Excursion_ is the
composition of a recluse. Matthew Arnold, always a high authority on
Wordsworth, has said:
But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.
Indeed they did; turning instead to the silence that is in the sky, to the
sleep that is in the hills, to the mountains, the flowers, and the poet's
own solitary _meditations_. He declared that he would rather be a Pagan
suckled in a creed outworn than one of those Christian worldlings, of
which society seemed to him mainly to consist. This is not necessarily
Pessimism. But it goes perilously near to it; and the boundary line would
have been crossed, but that Wordsworth's prayer was answered, in which he
petitioned that his days might be linked each to each by natural piety.
Of Matthew Arnold himself, as a poet, I am able to speak; for though he
was not long ago one's contemporary, he is no longer one of ourselves. In
Matthew Arnold it has always seemed to me, the poet and the man, his
reason and his imagination, were not quite one. They were harnessed
together rather than incorporated one with the other; and, many years
before he died, if I may press the comparison a little farther, the poet,
the imaginative part of him became lame and halt, and he conveyed his mind
in the humbler one-horse vehicle of prose. The poetic impulse in him was
not strong enough to carry him along permanently against the prosaic
opposition of life. Nevertheless, he was a poet who wrote some very
beautiful poetry; and he exercised a powerful influence, both as a poet
and as a prose-writer, on the thoughts and sentiments of his time. Now,
what do we find him saying? Listen!
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, My tears, the world deride,
I come to shed them at your side.
There yet perhaps may dawn an age,
More fortunate alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh haste those years!
But, till they rise, allow our tears.
Hark to the words he puts into the mouth of Empedocles:
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy.
* * * * *
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
In another poem he declares:
Achilles ponders in his tent:
The Kings of modern thought are dumb;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
* * * * *
Our fathers watered with their tears
The sea of time whereon we sail;
Their voices were in all men's ears
Who passed within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute and watch the waves.
Last and worst of all, and in utter despondency and pessimism he cries:
Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,
Your social order, too!
Where tarries He, the Power who said,
_See_, I make all things new?
... The past is out of date,
The future not yet born;
And who can be alone elate,
While the world lies forlorn?
Can Pessimism in Poetry go farther than that? Many will perhaps think it
cannot; but, unfortunately, it can. It is only from poets who are dead, if
dead but recently, that one can draw one's illustrations; otherwise I
could suggest you should read to yourselves volume upon volume of verse,
the one long weary burden of which is the misery of being alive. I daresay
you will not be sorry that one is precluded from introducing these
melancholy minstrels. But the spirit that imbues and pervades them is
compendiously and conveniently expressed in a composition that I _can_
read to you, and which I select because it seems to express, in reasonably
small compass, the indictment which our metrical pessimists labour to
bring against existence.
I have confined my survey entirely to poets of our own land, and have said
nothing to you of Giacomo Leopardi, the celebrated Italian Pessimistic
Poet; nothing of Heine, whose beautiful but too often cynical lyrics must
be known to you either in the original German, or in one or other of the
various English versions, into which they have been rendered; nothing of
the long procession of railers, sometimes bestial, nearly always
repulsive, in French verse, beginning with Baudelaire, and coming down to
the _petits creves_ of poetry who are not ashamed to be known by the name
of _decadens_, and who certainly deserve it, for if they possess nothing
else, they possess to perfection the art of sinking. One would naturally
expect to find in the country where occurred the French Revolution, the
most violent forms of the malady which, as I have said, is mainly
attributable to it; and surely it is a strong confirmation of the truth of
that theory that it is in France poetic pessimism has in our day had its
most outrageous and most voluminous expression.
I hope no one supposes that I am, even incidentally, intending to
pronounce a sweeping and unqualified condemnation of the great movement
known in history as the French Revolution. That would indeed be to be as
narrow as the narrowest pessimist could possibly show himself. The French
Revolution, as is probably the case with every great political, religious,
or social movement, was in its action partly beneficial, partly
detrimental. It abolished many monstrous abuses, it propounded afresh some
long-neglected or violated truths; and it gave a vigorous impulse to human
hope. But it was perhaps the most violent of all the great movements
recorded in human annals. Accordingly, it destroyed over much, and it
promised over much. In all probability, action and reaction are as nicely
balanced in the intellectual and moral world as in the physical, and
exaggerated hopes must have their equivalent in correlated and co-equal
disappointment. I sometimes think that the nineteenth century now closed
will be regarded in the fullness of time as a colossal egotist, that began
by thinking somewhat too highly of itself, its prospects, its capacity,
its performances, and ended by thinking somewhat too meanly of what I have
called things in general, or those permanent conditions of man, life, and
society, which no amount of Revolutions, French or otherwise, will avail
to get rid of.
In truth, if I were asked to say briefly what Pessimism is, I should say
it is disappointed Egotism; and the description will hold good, whether we
apply it to an individual, to a community, or to an age.
For nothing is more remarkable in the writings of pessimistic poets than
the attention they devote, and that they ask us to devote, to their own
feelings. Far be it from me to deny that some very lovely and very
valuable verse has been written by poets concerning their personal joys,
sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments. But then it is verse which
describes the joys, sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments common
to the whole human race, and which every sensitive nature experiences at
some time or another, in the course of chequered life, and which are
peculiar to no particular age or generation, but the pathetic possession
of all men, and all epochs. The verse to which I allude with less
commendation, is the verse in which the writer seems to be occupied, and
asking us to occupy ourselves, with exceptional states of suffering which
appertain to him alone, or to him and the little esoteric circle of
superior martyrs to which he belongs, and to some special period of
history in which their lot is cast. The sorrows we entertain in common
with others never lead to pessimism, they lead to pity, sympathy, pathos,
to pious resignation, to courageous hope. I wish these privileged invalids
would take to heart those noble lines of Wordsworth:
So once it would have been--'tis so no more--
I have submitted to a new control--
A power is gone which nothing can restore,
A deep distress hath humanized my soul!
I sometimes think these doleful bards have never had a really deep
distress, that their very woe is fanciful, and that like the young
gentleman in France of whom Arthur speaks in _King John_, they are as sad
as night, only for wantonness. But far from being rebuked by critics for
their sea-green melancholy, they have been hailed as true masters of song
for scarcely any better reason than that they declare themselves to be
utterly miserable, and life to be equally so. Indeed by some critics it
has been raised into a literary canon, not only that all Poetry, to be of
much account, must be written in the pathetic minor, but that the poets
themselves, if we are to recognise them as endowed with true genius and
real sacred fire, must be unhappy from the cradle to the grave. If they
can die young, if they can go mad, or commit suicide, so much the better.
Their credentials as great poets are then firmly established. Even a
pathetic phrase has been invented to describe the natural and inevitable
condition of such sacred persons, a phrase that must be well known to
you--the Sorrows of Genius.
Therefore, in the really sacred name of Genius, of Literature, of Poetry,
I protest against this pitiable, this mawkish, unmanly, unwholesome, and
utterly untrue estimate both of poetry and poets. No first-rate poet ever
went mad, or ever committed suicide, though one or two, no doubt, have
happened to die comparatively young. It is utterly dishonouring to poets,
it is utterly discrediting to men of genius, to represent them as feeble,
whining, helpless, love-sick, life-sick invalids, galvanised from time to
time into activity by a sort of metrical hysteria. Because Shelley has
truly said that