theory which amounts to a deification of impulse. ‘Love,’ he tells us,
‘is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers
under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither
with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect,
and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and
unreserve.... A husband and wife ought to continue united only so long as
they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for
one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable
tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation
of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which
should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the
caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, of the human mind! And by so
much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those
of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent
on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of
reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.’ This passage, no
doubt, is from an early and crude essay, one of the notes to ‘Queen Mab;’
and there are many indications, in his latter years, that though he might
hold in theory that ‘constancy has nothing virtuous in itself,’ yet in
practice he shrank from breaking a tie hallowed by years of fidelity and
sympathy. But, though his conduct was doubtless higher than his creed,
there is no evidence that his creed was ever changed. The whole tone
of his works is on the other side. The ‘Epipsychidion’ could not have
been written by a man who attached a moral value to constancy of mind.
And the whole doctrine is most expressive of his character. A quivering
sensibility endured only the essence of the most refined love. It is
intelligible, that one who bowed in a moment to every desire should have
attached a kind of consecration to the most pure and eager of human
passions.
The evidence of Shelley’s poems confirms this impression of him. The
characters which he delineates have all this same kind of pure impulse.
The reforming impulse is especially felt. In almost every one of his
works there is some character, of whom all we know is, that he or she
had this passionate disposition to reform mankind. We know nothing else
about them, and they are all the same. Laon, in the ‘Revolt of Islam,’
does not differ at all from Lionel, in ‘Rosalind and Helen.’ Laon differs
from Cythna, in the former poem, only as male from female. Lionel is
delineated, though not with Shelley’s greatest felicity, in a single
passage:—
‘Yet through those dungeon-walls there came
Thy thrilling light, O liberty!
And as the meteor’s midnight flame
Startles the dreamer, sunlight truth
Flashed on his visionary youth,
And filled him, not with love, but faith,
And hope, and courage, mute in death;
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:
And so through this dark world they fleet
Divided, till in death they meet.
But he loved all things ever. Then
He passed amid the strife of men,
And stood at the throne of armed power
Pleading for a world of woe:
Secure as one on a rock-built tower
O’er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro.
’Mid the passions wild of human-kind
He stood, like a spirit calming them;
For, it was said, his words could bind
Like music the lulled crowd, and stem
That torrent of unquiet dream
Which mortals truth and reason deem,
But is revenge, and fear, and pride.
Joyous he was, and hope and peace
On all who heard him did abide,
Raining like dew from his sweet talk,
As, where the evening star may walk
Along the brink of the gloomy seas,
Liquid mists of splendour quiver.’
Such is the description of all his reformers in calm. In times of
excitement, they all burst forth—
‘Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever,
Or the priests of the bloody faith;
They stand on the brink of that mighty 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 in the surge of eternity.’
In his more didactic poems it is the same. All the world is evil, and
will be evil, until some unknown conqueror shall appear—a teacher
by rhapsody and a conqueror by words—who shall at once reform all
evil. Mathematicians place great reliance on the unknown symbol,
great X. Shelley did more; he expected it would take life and reform
our race. Such impersonations are, of course, not real men; they are
mere incarnations of a desire. Another passion, which no man has ever
felt more strongly than Shelley—the desire to penetrate the mysteries
of existence (by Hazlitt profanely called curiosity)—is depicted in
‘Alastor’ as the sole passion of the only person in the poem:—
‘By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips; and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had past, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought
With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men,
His rest and food.’
He is cheered on his way by a beautiful dream, and the search to find
it again mingles with the shadowy quest. It is remarkable how great
is the superiority of the personification in ‘Alastor,’ though one of
his earliest writings, over the reforming abstractions of his other
works. The reason is, its far greater closeness to reality. The one
is a description of what he was; the other of what he desired to be.
Shelley had nothing of the magic influence, the large insight, the bold
strength, the permeating eloquence, which fit a man for a practical
reformer: but he had, in perhaps an unequalled and unfortunate measure,
the famine of the intellect—the daily insatiable craving after the
highest truth which is the passion of ‘Alastor.’ So completely did he
feel it, that the introductory lines of the poem almost seem to identify
him with the hero; at least they express sentiments which would have been
exactly dramatic in his mouth:—
‘Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song; for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black Death
Keeps records of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness;
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist,
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love; until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge ... and though ne’er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms and deep noonday thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now,
And moveless (as a long-forgotten lyre,
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane),
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.’
The accompaniments are fanciful; but the essential passion was his own.
These two forms of abstract personification exhaust all which can be
considered characters among Shelley’s poems—one poem excepted. Of course,
all his works contain ‘Spirits,’ ‘Phantasms,’ ‘Dream No. 1,’ and ‘Fairy
No. 3;’ but these do not belong to this world. The higher air seems never
to have been favourable to the production of marked character; with
almost all poets the inhabitants of it are prone to a shadowy thinness:
in Shelley, the habit of frequenting mountain-tops has reduced them to
evanescent mists of lyrical energy. One poem of Shelley’s, however, has
two beings of another order; creations which, if not absolutely dramatic
characters of the first class—not beings whom we know better than we know
ourselves—are nevertheless very high specimens of the second; persons who
seem like vivid recollections from our intimate experience. In this case
the dramatic execution is so good, that it is difficult to say why the
results are not quite of the first rank. One reason of this is, perhaps,
their extreme simplicity. Our imaginations, warned by consciousness and
outward experience of the wonderful complexity of human nature, refuse
to credit the existence of beings, all whose actions are unmodified
consequences of a single principle. These two characters are Beatrice
Cenci and her father Count Cenci. In most of Shelley’s poems—he died
under thirty—there is an extreme suspicion of aged persons. In actual
life he had plainly encountered many old gentlemen who had no belief in
the complete and philosophical reformation of mankind. There is, indeed,
an old hermit in the ‘Revolt of Islam’ who is praised (Captain Medwin
identifies him with a Dr. Some-one who was kind to Shelley at Eton); but
in general the old persons in his poems are persons whose authority it is
desirable to disprove:—
‘Old age, with its gray hair
And wrinkled legends of unworthy things
And icy sneers, is naught.’
The less its influence, he evidently believes, the better. Not
unnaturally, therefore, he selected for a tragedy a horrible subject
from Italian story, in which an old man, accomplished in this world’s
learning, renowned for the ‘cynic sneer of o’er experienced sin,’ is the
principal evil agent. The character of Count Cenci is that of a man who
of set principle does evil for evil’s sake. He loves ‘the sight of agony:’
‘All men delight in sensual luxury;
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel,
Flattering their secret peace with others’ pain:
But I delight in nothing else.’
If he regrets his age, it is from the failing ability to do evil:
‘True, I was happier than I am while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge: and now
Invention palls.’
It is this that makes him contemplate the violation of his daughter:
‘There yet remains a deed to act,
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
More dull than mine.’
Shelley, though an habitual student of Plato—the greatest modern writer
who has taken great pleasure in his writings—never seems to have read
any treatise of Aristotle; otherwise he would certainly seem to have
derived from that great writer the idea of the ἀκόλαστος; yet in reality
the idea is as natural to Shelley as any man—more likely to occur to
him than to most. Children think that everybody who is bad is very bad.
Their simple eager disposition only understands the doing what they wish
to do; they do not refine: if they hear of a man doing evil, they think
he wishes to do it,—that he has a special impulse to do evil, as they
have to do what they do. Something like this was the case with Shelley.
His mind, impulsive and childlike, could not imagine the struggling kind
of character—either those which struggle with their lower nature and
conquer, or those which struggle and are vanquished—either the ἐγκρατής
or the ἀκρατής of the old thinker; but he could comprehend that which
is in reality far worse than either, the being who wishes to commit sin
because it is sin, who is as it were possessed with a demon hurrying
him out, hot and passionate, to vice and crime. The innocent child is
whirled away by one impulse; the passionate reformer by another; the
essential criminal, if such a being be possible, by a third. They are
all beings, according to one division, of the same class. An imaginative
mind like Shelley’s, belonging to the second of these types, naturally
is prone in some moods to embody itself under the forms of the third. It
is, as it were, the antithesis to itself.—Equally simple is the other
character—that of Beatrice. Even before her violation, by a graphic touch
of art, she is described as absorbed, or beginning to be absorbed, in the
consciousness of her wrongs;
‘_Beatrice._ As I have said, speak to me not of love.
Had you a dispensation, I have not;
Nor will I leave this home of misery
Whilst my poor Bernard, and that gentle lady
To whom I owe life and these virtuous thoughts,
Must suffer what I still have strength to share.
Alas, Orsino! all the love that once
I felt for you is turned to bitter pain.
Ours was a youthful contract, which you first
Broke by assuming vows no Pope will loose:
And yet I love you still, but holily,
Even as a sister or a spirit might;
And so I swear a cold fidelity.’
After her violation, her whole being is absorbed by one thought,—how and
by what subtle vengeance she can expiate the memory of her shame. These
are all the characters in Shelley; an impulsive unity is of the essence
of them all.
The same characteristic of Shelley’s temperament produced also most
marked effects on his speculative opinions. The peculiarity of his
creed early brought him into opposition to the world. His education
seems to have been principally directed by his father, of whom the only
description which has reached us is not favourable. Sir Timothy Shelley,
according to Captain Medwin, was an illiterate country gentleman of an
extinct race; he had been at Oxford, where he learned nothing, had made
the grand tour, from which he brought back ‘a smattering of bad French
and a bad picture of an eruption at Vesuvius.’ He had the air of the
old school, and the habit of throwing it off which distinguished that
school. Lord Chesterfield himself was not easier on matters of morality.
He used to tell his son that he would provide for natural children
_ad infinitum_, but would never forgive his making a _mésalliance_.
On religion his opinions were very lax. He, indeed, ‘required his
servants,’ we are told, ‘to attend church,’ and even on rare occasions,
with superhuman virtue, attended himself; but there, as with others of
that generation, his religion ended. He doubtless did not feel that any
more could be required of him. He was not consciously insincere; but he
did not in the least realise the opposition between the religion which
he professed and the conduct which he pursued. Such a person was not
likely to influence a morbidly sincere imaginative nature in favour
of the doctrines of the Church of England. Shelley went from Eton,
where he had been singular, to Oxford, where he was more so. He was a
fair classical scholar. But his real mind was given to out-of-school
knowledge. He had written a novel; he had studied chemistry; when
pressed in argument, he used to ask, ‘What, then, does Condorcet say
upon the subject?’ This was not exactly the youth for the University of
Oxford in the year 1810. A distinguished pupil of that University once
observed to us, ‘The use of the University of Oxford is, that no one
can over-read themselves there. The appetite for knowledge is repressed.
A blight is thrown over the ingenuous mind, &c.’ And possibly it may be
so; considering how small a space literary knowledge fills in the busy
English world, it may not be without its advantages that any mind prone
to bookish enthusiasm should be taught by the dryness of its appointed
studies, the want of sympathy of its teachers, and a rough contact with
average English youth, that studious enthusiasm must be its own reward;
that in this country it will meet with little other; that it will not
be encouraged in high places. Such discipline may, however, be carried
too far. A very enthusiastic mind may possibly by it be turned in upon
itself. This was the case with Shelley. When he first came up to Oxford
physics were his favourite pursuit. On chemistry, especially, he used
to be eloquent. ‘The galvanic battery,’ said he, ‘is a new engine. It
has been used hitherto to an insignificant extent: yet it has worked
wonders already. What will not an extraordinary combination of troughs
of colossal magnitude, a well-arranged system of hundreds of metallic
plates, effect?’ Nature, however, like the world, discourages a wild
enthusiasm. ‘His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer
to promise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He
had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had
seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should
never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture,
were stained and covered by medical acids,’ and so on. Disgusted with
these and other failures, he abandoned physics for metaphysics. He rushed
head-long into the form of philosophy then popular. It is not likely
that he ever read Locke; and it is easy to imagine the dismay with which
the philosopher would have regarded so ‘heady and skittish’ a disciple:
but he continually invoked Locke as an authority, and was really guided
by the French expositions of him then popular. Hume, of course, was
not without his influence. With such teachers only to control him, an
excitable poet rushed in a moment to materialism, and thence to atheism.
Deriving any instruction from the University, was, according to him,
absurd; he wished to convert the University. He issued a kind of thesis,
stating by way of interrogatory all the difficulties of the subject;
called it the ‘necessity of atheism,’ and sent it to the professors,
heads of houses, and several bishops. The theistic belief of his college
was equal to the occasion. ‘It was a fine spring morning on Lady Day in
the year 1811, when,’ says a fellow-student, ‘I went to Shelley’s rooms.
He was absent; but before I had collected our books, he rushed in. He
was terribly agitated. I anxiously inquired what had happened. “I am
expelled.” He then explained that he had been summoned before the Master
and some of the Fellows; that as he was unable to deny the authorship of
the essay, he had been expelled and ordered to quit the college the next
morning at latest.’ He had wished to be put on his trial more regularly,
and stated to the Master that England was ‘a free country;’ but without
effect. He was obliged to leave Oxford: his father was very angry; ‘if he
had broken the Master’s windows, one could have understood it:’ but to be
expelled for publishing a _book_ seemed an error incorrigible, because
incomprehensible.
These details at once illustrate Shelley’s temperament, and enable us to
show that the peculiarity of his opinions arose out of that temperament.
He was placed in circumstances which left his eager mind quite free. Of
his father we have already spoken: there was no one else to exercise a
subduing or guiding influence over him; nor would his mind have naturally
been one extremely easy to influence. Through life he followed very much
his own bent and his own thoughts. His most intimate associates exercised
very little control over his belief. He followed his nature; and that
nature was in a singular degree destitute of certain elements which most
materially guide ordinary men. It seems most likely that a person prone
to isolated impulse will be defective in the sensation of conscience.
There is scarcely room for it. When, as in common conflicting
characters, the whole nature is daily and hourly in a perpetual struggle,
the faculty which decides what elements in that nature are to have the
supremacy is daily and hourly appealed to. Passions are contending; life
is a discipline; there is a reference every moment to the directory
of the discipline—the order-book of the passions. In temperaments not
exposed to the ordinary struggle there is no such necessity. Their
impulse guides them; they have little temptation; are scarcely under the
law; have hardly occasion to consult the statute-book. In consequence,
simple and beautiful as such minds often are, they are deficient in the
sensation of duty; have no haunting idea of right or wrong; show an easy
_abandon_ in place of a severe self-scrutiny. At first it might seem
that such minds lose little; they are exempted from the consciousness of
a code to whose provisions they need little access. But such would be
the conclusion only from a superficial view of human nature. The whole
of our inmost faith is a series of intuitions; and experience seems
to show that the intuitions of conscience are the beginning of that
series. Childhood has little which can be called a religion; the shows
of this world, the play of its lights and shadows, suffice. It is in
the collision of our nature, which occurs in youth, that the first real
sensation of faith is felt. Conscience is often then morbidly acute; a
flush passes over the youthful mind; the guiding instinct is keen and
strong, like the passions with which it contends. At the first struggle
of our nature commences our religion. Childhood will utter the words; in
early manhood, when we become half-unwilling to utter them, they begin to
have a meaning. The result of history is similar. The whole of religion
rests on a faith that the universe is solely ruled by an almighty and
all-perfect Being. This strengthens with the moral cultivation, and grows
with the improvement of mankind. It is the assumed axiom of the creed
of Christendom; and all that is really highest in our race may have the
degree of its excellence tested by the degree of the belief in it. But
experience shows that the belief only grows very gradually. We see at
various times, and now, vast outlying nations in whom the conviction of
morality—the consciousness of a law—is but weak; and there the belief in
an all-perfect God is half-forgotten, faint, and meagre. It exists as
something between a tradition and a speculation; but it does not come
forth on the solid earth; it has no place in the business and bosoms
of men; it is thrust out of view even when we look upwards by fancied
idols and dreams of the stars in their courses. Consider the state of
the Jewish, as compared with the better part of the Pagan world of
old. On the one side we see civilisation, commerce, the arts, a great
excellence in all the exterior of man’s life; a sort of morality sound
and sensible, placing the good of man in a balanced moderation within
and good looks without;—in a combination of considerate good sense, with
the _air_ of aristocratic, or, as it was said, ‘godlike’ refinement.
We see, in a word, civilisation, and the ethics of civilisation; the
first polished, the other elaborated and perfected. But this is all;
we do not see faith. We see in some quarters rather a horror of the
_curiosus deus_ interfering, controlling, watching,—never letting things
alone,—disturbing the quiet of the world with punishment and the fear
of punishment. The Jewish side of the picture is different. We see a
people who have perhaps an inaptitude for independent civilisation, who
in secular pursuits have only been assistants and attendants on other
nations during the whole history of mankind. These have no equable,
beautiful morality like the others; but instead a gnawing, abiding,
depressing—one might say, a slavish—ceremonial, excessive sense of law
and duty. This nation has faith. By a link not logical, but ethical,
this intense, eating, abiding supremacy of conscience is connected
with a deep daily sense of a watchful, governing, and jealous God. And
from the people of the law arises the gospel. The sense of duty, when
awakened, awakens not only the religion of the law, but in the end the
other religious intuitions which lie round about it. The faith of
Christendom has arisen not from a great people, but from ‘the least of
all people,’—from the people whose anxious legalism was a noted contrast
to the easy, impulsive life of pagan nations. In modern language,
conscience is the _converting_ intuition,—that which turns men from the
world without to that within,—from the things which are seen to the
realities which are not seen. In a character like Shelley’s, where this
haunting, abiding, oppressive moral feeling is wanting or defective, the
religious belief in an Almighty God which springs out of it is likely to
be defective likewise.