the abstract character of his intellect. We have shown that no character
except his own, and characters most strictly allied to his own, are
delineated in his works. The tendency of his mind was rather to personify
isolated qualities or impulses—equality, liberty, revenge, and so on—than
to create out of separate parts or passions the single conception of an
entire character. This is, properly speaking, the mythological tendency.
All early nations show this marked disposition to conceive of separate
forces and qualities as a kind of semi-persons; that is, not true
actual persons with distinct characters, but beings who guide certain
influences, and of whom all we know is that they guide those influences.
Shelley evinces a remarkable tendency to deal with mythology in this
simple and elementary form. Other poets have breathed into mythology
a modern life; have been attracted by those parts which seem to have
a religious meaning, and have enlarged that meaning while studying to
embody it. With Shelley it is otherwise; the parts of mythology by which
he is attracted are the bare parts—the simple stories which Dr. Johnson
found so tedious:—
‘Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains.
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains,
She leapt down the rocks
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine,
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing,
She went ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The earth seemed to love her,
And heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook,’
&c. &c.
Arethusa and Alpheus are not characters: they are only the spirits of
the fountain and the stream. When not writing on topics connected with
ancient mythology, Shelley shows the same bent. ‘The Cloud,’ and the
‘Skylark,’ are more like mythology—have more of the impulse by which
the populace, if we may so say, of the external world was first fancied
into existence—than any other modern poems. There is, indeed, no habit
of mind more remote from our solid and matter-of-fact existence; none
which was once powerful, of which the present traces are so rare. In
truth, Shelley’s imagination achieved all it could with the materials
before it. The materials for the creative faculty must be provided by
the receptive faculty. Before a man can imagine what will seem to be
realities, he must be familiar with what are realities. The memory
of Shelley had no heaped-up ‘store of life,’ no vast accumulation of
familiar characters. His intellect did not tend to the strong grasp of
realities; its taste was rather for the subtle refining of theories,
the distilling of exquisite abstractions. His imagination personified
what his understanding presented to it. It had nothing else to do. He
displayed the same tendency of mind—sometimes negatively and sometimes
positively—in his professedly religious inquiries. His belief went
through three stages—first, materialism, then a sort of Nihilism, then
a sort of Platonism. In neither of them is the rule of the universe
ascribed to a character: in the first and last it is ascribed to animated
abstractions; in the second there is no universe at all. In neither of
them is there any strong grasp of fact. The writings of the first period
are clearly influenced by, and modelled on, Lucretius. He held the same
abstract theory of nature—sometimes of half-personified atoms, moving
hither and thither of themselves—at other times of a general pervading
spirit of nature, holding the same relation to nature, as a visible
object, that Arethusa the goddess bears to Arethusa the stream:
‘The magic car moved on.
As they approached their goal
The coursers seemed to gather speed:
The sea no longer was distinguished; earth
Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere:
The sun’s unclouded orb
Rolled through the black concave;
Its rays of rapid light
Parted around the chariot’s swifter course,
And fell like ocean’s feathery spray
Dashed from the boiling surge
Before a vessel’s prow.
The magic car moved on.
Earth’s distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens:
Whilst round the chariot’s way
Innumerable systems rolled,
And countless spheres diffused
An ever-varying glory.
It was a sight of wonder: some
Were horned like the crescent moon;
Some shed a mild and silver beam
Like Hesperus o’er the western sea;
Some dash’d athwart with trains of flame,
Like worlds to death and ruin driven;
Some shone like stars, and, as the chariot passed,
Bedimmed all other light.
Spirit of Nature! here,
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,—
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee:
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.
Spirit of Nature! thou,
Imperishable as this glorious scene,—
Here is thy fitting temple.’
And he copied not only the opinions of Lucretius, but also his tone.
Nothing is more remarkable than that two poets of the first rank should
have felt a bounding joy in the possession of opinions which, if true,
ought, one would think, to move an excitable nature to the keenest and
deepest melancholy. That this life is all; that there is no God, but only
atoms and a moulding breath; are singular doctrines to be accepted with
joy: they only could have been so accepted by wild minds bursting with
imperious energy, knowing of no law, ‘wreaking thoughts upon expression’
of which they knew neither the meaning nor the result. From this stage
Shelley’s mind passed to another; but not immediately to one of greater
belief. On the contrary, it was the doctrine of Hume which was called
in to expel the doctrine of Epicurus. His previous teachers had taught
him that there was nothing except matter: the Scotch sceptic met him at
that point with the question—Is matter certain? Hume, as is well known,
adopted the negative part from the theory of materialism and the theory
of immaterialism, but rejected the positive side of both. He held, or
professed to hold, that there was no substantial thing, either matter or
mind; but only ‘sensations and impressions’ flying about the universe,
inhering in nothing and going nowhere. These, he said, were the only
subjects of consciousness; all you felt was your feeling, and all your
thought was your thought; the rest was only hypothesis. The notion
that there was any ‘_you_’ at all was a theory generally current among
mankind, but not, unless proved, to be accepted by the philosopher.
This doctrine, though little agreeable to the world in general, has an
excellence in the eyes of youthful disputants; it is a doctrine which
no one will admit, and which no one can disprove. Shelley accordingly
accepted it; indeed it was a better description of his universe than
of most people’s; his mind was filled with a swarm of ideas, fancies,
thoughts, streaming on without his volition, without plan or order. He
might be pardoned for fancying that they were all; he could not see the
outward world for them; their giddy passage occupied him till he forgot
himself. He has put down the theory in its barest form: ‘The most refined
abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life which, though startling
to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its
repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were,
the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one
of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those
philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.’ And
again: ‘The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
intellectual philosophy is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is
perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of
thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of
external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence
of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in
now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion.
The words, _I_, _you_, _they_, are not signs of any actual difference
subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are
merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one
mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous
presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one
mind. I am but a portion of it. The words, _I_, and _you_, and _they_,
are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally
devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It
is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as
that to which the intellectual philosophy has conducted us. We are on
that verge where words abandon us; and what wonder if we grow dizzy to
look down the dark abyss of how little we know!’ On his wild nerves these
speculations produced a great effect. Their thin acuteness excited his
intellect; their blank result appalled his imagination. He was obliged to
pause in the last fragment of one of his metaphysical papers, ‘dizzy from
thrilling horror.’ In this state of mind he began to study Plato; and it
is probable that in the whole library of philosophy there is no writer
so suitable to such a reader. A common modern author, believing in mind
and matter, he would have put aside at once as loose and popular. He was
attracted by a writer who, like himself, in some sense did not believe
in either—who supplied him with subtle realities different from either,
at once to be extracted by his intellect and to be glorified by his
imagination. The theory of Plato, that the all-apparent phenomena were
unreal, he believed already; he had a craving to believe in something
noble, beautiful, and difficult to understand; he was ready, therefore,
to accept the rest of that theory, and to believe that these passing
phenomena were imperfect types and resemblances—imperfect incarnations,
so to speak—of certain immovable, eternal, archetypal realities. All
his later writings are coloured by that theory, though in some passages
the remains of the philosophy of the senses with which he commenced
appear in odd proximity to the philosophy of abstractions with which he
concluded. There is, perhaps, no allusion in Shelley to the _Phædrus_;
but no one can doubt which of Plato’s ideas would be most attractive to
the nature we have described. The most valuable part of Plato he did
not comprehend. There is in Shelley none of that unceasing reference to
ethical consciousness and ethical religion which has for centuries placed
Plato first among the preparatory preceptors of Christianity. The general
doctrine is that
‘The one remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light for ever shines, earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.’
The particular worship of the poet is paid to that one spirit whose
‘Plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven’s light.’
It is evident that not even in this, the highest form of creed to which
he ever clearly attained, is there any such distinct conception of a
character as is essential to a real religion. The conception of God is
not to be framed out of a single attribute. Shelley has changed the
‘idea’ of beauty into a spirit, and this probably for the purposes of
poetry; he has given it life and animal motion; but he has done no more;
the ‘spirit’ has no will, and no virtue: it is animated, but unholy;
alive, but unmoral: it is an object of intense admiration; it is not an
object of worship.
We have ascribed this quality of Shelley’s writings to an abstract
intellect; and in part, no doubt, correctly. Shelley had, probably by
nature, such an intellect; it was self-enclosed, self-absorbed, teeming
with singular ideas, remote from character and life; but so involved is
human nature, that this tendency to abstraction, which we have spoken of
as aggravating the consequences of his simple impulsive temperament,
was itself aggravated by that temperament. It is a received opinion in
metaphysics, that the idea of personality is identical with the idea of
will. A distinguished French writer has accurately expressed this: ‘Le
pouvoir,’ says M. Jouffroy, ‘que l’homme a de s’emparer de ses capacités
naturelles et de les diriger fait de lui une _personne_; et c’est parce
que les _choses_ n’exercent pas ce pouvoir en elles-mêmes, qu’elles ne
sont que des choses. Telle est la véritable différence qui distingue
les choses des personnes. Toutes les natures possibles sont douées de
certaines capacités; mais les unes out reçu par-dessus les autres le
privilège de se saisir d’elles-mêmes et de se gouverner: celles-là sont
les personnes. Les autres en ont été privées, en sorte qu’elles n’ont
point de part à ce qui se fait en elles: celles-là sont les choses.
Leurs capacités ne s’en développent pas moins, mais c’est exclusivement
selon les lois auxquelles Dieu les a soumises. C’est Dieu qui gouverne
en elles; il est la personne des choses, comme l’ouvrier est la personne
de la montre. Ici la personne est hors de l’être; dans le sein même des
choses, comme dans le sein de la montre, la personne ne se rencontre pas;
on ne trouve qu’une série de capacités qui se meuvent aveuglément, sans
que la nature qui en est douée sache même ce qu’elles font. Aussi ne
peut-on demander compte aux choses de ce qui se fait en elles; il faut
s’adresser à Dieu: comme on s’adresse à l’ouvrier et non à la montre,
quand la montre va mal.’ And if this theory be true—and doubtless it is
an approximation to the truth—it is evident that a mind ordinarily moved
by simple impulse will have little distinct consciousness of personality.
While thrust forward by such impulse, it is a mere instrument. Outward
things set it in motion. It goes where they bid; it exerts no will upon
them; it is, to speak expressively, a mere conducting thing. When such
a mind is free from such impulse, there is even less will; thoughts,
feelings, ideas, emotions, pass before it in a sort of dream. For the
time it is a mere perceiving thing. In neither case is there a trace
of voluntary character. If we want a reason for anything, ‘il faut
s’adresser à Dieu.’
Shelley’s political opinions were likewise the effervescence of his
peculiar nature. The love of liberty is peculiarly natural to the simple
impulsive mind. It feels irritated at the idea of a law; it fancies it
does not need it: it really needs it less than other minds. Government
seems absurd—society an incubus. It has hardly patience to estimate
particular institutions: it wants to begin again—to make a _tabula rasa_
of all which men have created or devised; for they seem to have been
constructed on a false system, for an object it does not understand. On
this _tabula rasa_ Shelley’s abstract imagination proceeded to set up
arbitrary monstrosities of ‘equality’ and ‘love,’ which never will be
realised among the children of men.
Such a mind is clearly driven to self-delineation. Nature, no doubt, in
some sense remains to it. A dreamy mind—a mind occupied intensely with
its own thoughts—will often have a peculiarly intense apprehension of
anything which by the hard collision of the world it has been forced to
observe. The scene stands out alone in the memory; is a refreshment from
hot thoughts; grows with the distance of years. A mind like Shelley’s,
deeply susceptible to all things beautiful, has many pictures and images
shining in its recollection which it recurs to, and which it is ever
striving to delineate. Indeed, in such minds it is rather the picture in
their mind which they describe than the original object; the ‘ideation,’
as some harsh metaphysicians call it, rather than the reality. A certain
dream-light is diffused over it; a wavering touch, as of interfering
fancy or fading recollection. The landscape has not the hues of the
real world; it is modified in the _camera obscura_ of the self-enclosed
intelligence. Nor can such a mind long endure the cold process of
external delineation. Its own hot thoughts rush in; its favourite topic
is itself and them. Shelley, indeed, as we observed before, carries this
to an extent which no poet probably ever equalled. He described not only
his character but his circumstances. We know that this is so in a large
number of passages; if his poems were commented on by some one thoroughly
familiar with the events of his life, we should doubtless find that it
was so in many more. On one strange and painful scene his fancy was
continually dwelling. In a gentle moment we have a dirge—
‘The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the year
On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves, dead
Is lying.
Come months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
‘The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling;
For the year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play—
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.’
In a frenzied mood he breaks forth into wildness:
‘She is still, she is cold
On the bridal couch;
One step to the white deathbed,
And one to the bier,
And one to the charnel—and one, O, where?
The dark arrow fled
In the noon.
Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d,
The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest,
And the worms be alive in her golden hair;
While the spirit that guides the sun
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sleep.’