to the death of his first wife; as melancholy a story as ever shivered
the nerves of an excitable being. The facts are hardly known to us, but
they are something like these: In very early youth Shelley had formed
a half-fanciful attachment to a cousin, a Miss Harriet Grove, who is
said to have been attractive, and to whom, certainly, his fancy often
went back in later and distant years. How deep the feeling was on either
side we do not know; she seems to have taken an interest in the hot
singular dreams which occupied his mind—except only where her image might
intrude—from which one might conjecture that she took unusual interest in
him; she even wrote some chapters, or parts of some, in one of his boyish
novels, and her parents doubtless thought the ‘Rosicrucian’ could be
endured, as Shelley was the heir to land and a baronetcy. His expulsion
from Oxford altered all this. Probably he had always among his friends
been thought ‘a singular young man,’ and they had waited in perplexity
to see if the oddness would turn to unusual good or unusual evil. His
atheistic treatise and its results seemed to show clearly the latter, and
all communication with Miss Grove was instantly forbidden him. What she
felt on the subject is not told us; probably some theistic and undreaming
lover intervened, for she married in a short time. The despair of an
excitable poet at being deprived of his mistress at the same moment that
he was abandoned by his family, and in a measure by society, may be
fancied, though it cannot be known. Captain Medwin observes: ‘Shelley,
on this trying occasion, had the courage to live, in order that he might
labour for one great object—the advancement of the human race, and the
amelioration of society; and strengthened himself in a resolution to
devote his energies to this ultimate end, being prepared to endure every
obloquy, to make every sacrifice for its accomplishment: and would,’
such is the Captain’s English, ‘if necessary, have died in the cause.’
It does not appear, however, that disappointed love took solely the very
unusual form of philanthropy. By chance, whether with or without leave
does not appear, he went to see his second sister, who was at school
at a place called Balham Hill, near London; and, while walking in the
garden with her, ‘a Miss Westbrook passed them.’ She was a ‘handsome
blonde young lady, nearly sixteen;’ and Shelley was much struck. He found
out that her name was ‘Harriett,’—as he, after his marriage, anxiously
expresses it, with two t’s, ‘Harriett;’ and he fell in love at once. She
had the name of his first love; ‘fairer, though yet the same.’ After his
manner, he wrote to her immediately. He was in the habit of doing this to
people who interested him, either in his own or under an assumed name:
and once, Captain Medwin says, carried on a long correspondence with
Mrs. Hemans, then Miss Browne, under his (the captain’s) name; but which
he, the deponent, was not permitted to peruse. In Miss Westbrook’s case
the correspondence had a more serious consequence. Of her character we
can only guess a little. She was, we think, an ordinary blooming young
lady of sixteen. Shelley was an extraordinary young man of nineteen,
rather handsome, very animated, and expressing his admiration a little
intensely. He was doubtless much the most aristocratic person she had
ever spoken to; for her father was a retired innkeeper, and Shelley had
always the air of a man of birth. There is a vision, too, of an elder
sister, who made ‘Harriett dear’ very uncomfortable. On the whole, the
result may be guessed. At the end of August 1811, we do not know the
precise day, they were married at Gretna Green. Jests may be made on it;
but it was no laughing matter in the life of the wife or the husband. Of
the lady’s disposition and mind we know nothing, except from Shelley;
a medium which must, under the circumstances, be thought a distorting
one. We should conclude that she was capable of making many people happy,
though not of making Shelley happy. There is an ordinance of nature at
which men of genius are perpetually fretting, but which does more good
than many laws of the universe which they praise: it is, that ordinary
women ordinarily prefer ordinary men. ‘Genius,’ as Hazlitt would have
said, ‘puts them out.’ It is so strange; it does not come into the room
as usual; it says ‘such things:’ once it forgot to brush its hair. The
common female mind prefers usual tastes, settled manners, customary
conversation, defined and practical pursuits. And it is a great good that
it should be so. Nature has no wiser instinct. The average woman suits
the average man; good health, easy cheerfulness, common charms, suffice.
If Miss Westbrook had married an every-day person—a gentleman, suppose,
in the tallow line—she would have been happy, and have made him happy.
Her mind could have understood his life; her society would have been a
gentle relief from unodoriferous pursuits. She had nothing in common
with Shelley. His mind was full of eager thoughts, wild dreams, singular
aspirations. The most delicate tact would probably have often failed, the
nicest sensibility would have been jarred, affection would have erred,
in dealing with such a being. A very peculiar character was required, to
enter into such a rare union of curious qualities. Some eccentric men of
genius have, indeed, felt in the habitual tact and serene nothingness of
ordinary women, a kind of trust and calm. They have admired an instinct
of the world which they had not—a repose of mind they could not share.
But this is commonly in later years. A boy of twenty thinks he knows
the world; he is too proud and happy in his own eager and shifting
thoughts, to wish to contrast them with repose. The commonplaceness of
life goads him: placid society irritates him. Bread is an incumbrance;
upholstery tedious: he craves excitement; he wishes to reform mankind.
You cannot convince him it is right to sew, in a world so full of sorrow
and evil. Shelley was in this state; he hurried to and fro over England,
pursuing theories, and absorbed in plans. He was deep in metaphysics;
had subtle disproofs of all religion; wrote several poems, which would
have been a puzzle to a very clever young lady. There were pecuniary
difficulties besides: neither of the families had approved of the match,
and neither were inclined to support the household. Altogether, no one
can be surprised that in less than three years the hasty union ended
in a ‘separation by mutual consent.’ The wonder is that it lasted so
long.—What her conduct was after the separation, is not very clear: there
were ‘reports’ about her at Bath—perhaps a loquacious place. She was not
twenty, probably handsome, and not improbably giddy: being quite without
evidence, we cannot judge what was rumour and what was truth. Shelley
has not left us in similar doubt. After a year or two he travelled
abroad with Mary, afterwards the second Mrs. Shelley, the daughter of
Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—names most celebrated in those
times, and even now known for their anti-matrimonial speculations. Of
their ‘six weeks’ tour’ abroad, in the year 1816, a record remains, and
should be read by any persons who wish to learn what travelling was in
its infancy. It was the year when the Continent was first thrown open
to English travellers; and few probably adopted such singular means of
locomotion as Shelley and his companions. First they tried walking,
and had a very small ass to carry their portmanteau; then they tried a
mule; then a _fiacre_, which drove away from them; afterwards they came
to a raft. It was not, however, an unamusing journey. At an ugly and
out-of-the-way château, near Brunen, Shelley began a novel, to be called
‘The Assassins,’ which he never finished—probably never continued—after
his return; but which still remains, and is one of the most curious
and characteristic specimens of his prose style. It was a refreshing
intellectual tour; one of the most pleasant rambles of his life. On
his return he was met by painful intelligence. His wife had destroyed
herself. Of her state of mind we have again no evidence. She is said to
have been deeply affected by the ‘reports’ to which we have alluded;
but whatever it was, Shelley felt himself greatly to blame. He had been
instrumental in first dividing her from her family; had connected himself
with her in a wild contract, from which neither could ever be set free;
if he had not crossed her path, she might have been happy in her own way
and in her own sphere. All this preyed upon his mind, and it is said he
became mad; and whether or not his horror and pain went the length of
actual frenzy, they doubtless approached that border-line of suffering
excitement which divides the most melancholy form of sanity from the
most melancholy form of insanity. In several poems he seems to delineate
himself in the guise of a maniac:
‘“Of his sad history
I know but this,” said Maddalo; “he came
To Venice a dejected man, and fame
Said he was wealthy, or he had been so.
Some thought the loss of fortune wrought him woe;
But he was ever talking in such sort
As you do,—but more sadly: he seem’d hurt,
Even as a man with his peculiar wrong,
To hear but of the oppression of the strong,
Or those absurd deceits (I think with you
In some respects, you know) which carry through
The excellent impostors of this earth
When they outface detection. He had worth,
Poor fellow! but a humourist in his way.”—
—“Alas, what drove him mad?”
“I cannot say:
A lady came with him from France; and when
She left him and returned, he wander’d then
About yon lonely isles of desert sand
Till he grew wild. He had no cash nor land
Remaining:—the police had brought him here—
Some fancy took him, and he would not bear
Removal; so I fitted up for him
Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim;
And sent him busts, and books, and urns for flowers,
Which had adorned his life in happier hours,
And instruments of music. You may guess,
A stranger could do little more or less
For one so gentle and unfortunate—
And those are his sweet strains, which charm the weight
From madmen’s chains, and make this hell appear
A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear.”
“Nay, this was kind of you,—he had no claim,
As the world says.”
“None but the very same,
Which I on all mankind, were I, as he,
Fall’n to such deep reverse. His melody
Is interrupted; now we hear the din
Of madmen, shriek on shriek, again begin;
Let us now visit him: after this strain
He ever communes with himself again,
And sees and hears not any.”
Having said
These words, we called the keeper: and he led
To an apartment opening on the sea—
There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully
Near a piano, his pale fingers twined
One with the other; and the ooze and wind
Rushed through an open casement, and did sway
His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray:
His head was leaning on a music-book,
And he was muttering; and his lean limbs shook;
His lips were pressed against a folded leaf,
In hue too beautiful for health, and grief
Smiled in their motions as they lay apart,
As one who wrought from his own fervid heart
The eloquence of passion: soon he raised
His sad meek face, and eyes lustrous and glazed,
And spoke,—sometimes as one who wrote and thought
His words might move some heart that heeded not,
If sent to distant lands;—and then as one
Reproaching deeds never to be undone,
With wondering self-compassion; then his speech
Was lost in grief, and then his words came each
Unmodulated and expressionless,—
But that from one jarred accent you might guess
It was despair made them so uniform:
And all the while the loud and gusty storm
Hissed through the window; and we stood behind,
Stealing his accents from the envious wind,
Unseen. I yet remember what he said
Distinctly—such impression his words made.’
And casual illustrations—unconscious metaphors, showing a terrible
familiarity—are borrowed from insanity in his subsequent works.
This strange story is in various ways deeply illustrative of his
character. It shows how the impulsive temperament, not definitely
intending evil, is hurried forward, so to say, _over_ actions and crimes
which would seem to indicate deep depravity—which would do so in ordinary
human nature, but which do not indicate in it anything like the same
degree of guilt. Driven by singular passion across a tainted region, it
retains no taint; on a sudden it passes through evil, but preserves its
purity. So curious is this character, that a record of its actions may
read like a libel on its life.
To some the story may also suggest whether Shelley’s nature was one of
those most adapted for love in its highest form. It is impossible to
deny that he loved with a great intensity; yet it was with a certain
narrowness, and therefore a certain fitfulness. Possibly a somewhat
wider nature, taking hold of other characters at more points,—fascinated
as intensely, but more variously.—stirred as deeply, but through more
complicated emotions,—is requisite for the highest and most lasting
feeling. Passion, to be enduring, must be many-sided. Eager and narrow
emotions urge like the gadfly of the poet: but they pass away; they are
single; there is nothing to revive them. Various as human nature must
be the passion which absorbs that nature into itself. Shelley’s mode
of delineating women has a corresponding peculiarity. They are well
described; but they are described under only one aspect. Every one of his
poems almost has a lady whose arms are white, whose mind is sympathising,
and whose soul is beautiful. She has many names—Cythna, Asia, Emily; but
these are only external disguises; she is indubitably the same person,
for her character never varies. No character can be simpler. She is
described as the ideal object of love in its most simple and elemental
form; the pure object of the essential passion. She is a being to be
loved in a single moment, with eager eyes and gasping breath; but you
feel that in that moment you have seen the whole. There is nothing to
come to afterwards. The fascination is intense, but uniform. There is not
the ever-varying grace, the ever-changing expression of the unchanging
charm, that alone can attract for all time the shifting moods of a
various and mutable nature.
The works of Shelley lie in a confused state, like the _disjecta membra_
of the poet of our boyhood. They are in the strictest sense ‘remains.’
It is absurd to expect from a man who died at thirty a long work of
perfected excellence. All which at so early an age can be expected are
fine fragments, casual expressions of single inspirations. Of these
Shelley has written some that are nearly, and one or two perhaps that
are quite, perfect. But he has not done more. It would have been better
if he had not attempted so much. He would have done well to have heeded
Goethe’s caution to Eckerman: ‘Beware of attempting a large work. If you
have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it, all other
thoughts are repelled, and the pleasantness of life itself is for the
time lost. What exertion and expenditure of mental force are required
to arrange and round off a great whole; and then what powers, and what
a tranquil undisturbed situation in life, to express it with the proper
fluency! If you have erred as to the whole, all your toil is lost; and
further, if, in treating so extensive a subject, you are not perfectly
master of your material in the details, the whole will be defective,
and censure will be incurred.’ Shelley did not know this. He was ever
labouring at long poems: but he has scarcely left one which, as a whole,
is worthy of him; you can point to none and say, This is Shelley. Even
had he lived to an age of riper capacity, it may be doubted if a being
so discontinuous, so easily hurried to and fro, would have possessed
the settled, undeviating self-devotion that are necessary to a long and
perfect composition. He had not, like Goethe, the cool shrewdness to
watch for inspiration.
His success, as we have said, is in fragments; and the best of those
fragments are lyrical. The very same isolation and suddenness of impulse
which rendered him unfit for the composition of great works, rendered him
peculiarly fit to pour forth on a sudden the intense essence of peculiar
feeling ‘in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.’ Lord Macaulay has
said that the words ‘bard’ and ‘inspiration,’ generally so meaningless
when applied to modern poets, have a meaning when applied to Shelley.
An idea, an emotion grew upon his brain his breast heaved, his frame
shook, his nerves quivered with the ‘harmonious madness’ of imaginative
concentration. ‘Poetry,’ he himself tells us, ‘is not, like reasoning,
a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man
cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say
it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature
are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.... Poetry is the
record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes
associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone,
and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and
delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the
regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does
in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a
diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a
wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain
only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.’ In verse, Shelley has
compared the skylark to a poet; we may turn back the description on his
own art and his own mind:
‘Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow-clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
...
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view.
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves.
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.’
In most poets unearthly beings are introduced to express peculiar removed
essences of lyrical rapture; but they are generally failures. Lord Byron
tried this kind of composition in ‘Manfred,’ and the result is an evident
failure. In Shelley, such singing solitary beings are almost uniformly
successful; while writing, his mind really for the moment was in the
state in which theirs is supposed always to be. He loved attenuated ideas
and abstracted excitement. In expressing their nature he had but to set
free his own.
Human nature is not, however, long equal to this sustained effort of
remote excitement. The impulse fails, imagination fades, inspiration dies
away. With the skylark it is well:
‘With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.’
But in unsoaring human nature languor comes, fatigue palls, melancholy
oppresses, melody dies away. The universe is not all blue sky; there
is the thick fog and the heavy earth. ‘The world,’ says Mr. Emerson,
‘is mundane.’ A creeping sense of weight is part of the most aspiring
nature. To the most thrilling rapture succeeds despondency, perhaps
pain. To Shelley this was peculiarly natural. His dreams of reform,
of a world which was to be, called up the imaginative ecstasy: his
soul bounded forward into the future; but it is not possible even to
the most abstracted and excited mind to place its happiness in the
expected realisation of impossible schemes, and yet not occasionally be
uncertain of those schemes. The rigid frame of society, the heavy heap
of traditional institutions, the solid slowness of ordinary humanity,
depress the aspiring fancy. ‘Since our fathers fell asleep, all things
continue as they were from the beginning.’ Occasionally we must think of
our fathers. No man can always dream of ever altering all which is. It
is characteristic of Shelley, that at the end of his most rapturous and
sanguine lyrics there intrudes the cold consciousness of this world. So
with his Grecian dreams:—
‘A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls its fountains
Against the morning-star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies:
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.’
But he ends:
‘O, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past—
O, might it die or rest at last!’
In many of his poems the failing of the feeling is as beautiful as its
short moment of hope and buoyancy.
The excellence of Shelley does not, however, extend equally over the
whole domain of lyrical poetry. That species of art may be divided—not
perhaps with the accuracy of science, but with enough for the rough
purposes of popular criticism—into the human and the abstract. The sphere
of the former is of course the actual life, passions, and actions of
real men,—such are the war-songs of rude nations especially; in that
early age there is no subject for art but natural life and primitive
passion. At a later time, when from the deposit of the _débris_ of a
hundred philosophies, a large number of half-personified abstractions
are part of the familiar thoughts and language of all mankind, there
are new objects to excite the feelings,—we might even say there are
new feelings to be excited; the rough substance of original passion
is sublimated and attenuated till we hardly recognise its identity.
Ordinarily and in most minds the emotion loses in this process its
intensity or much of it; but this is not universal. In some peculiar
minds it is possible to find an almost dizzy intensity of excitement
called forth by some fancied abstraction, remote altogether from the
eyes and senses of men. The love-lyric in its simplest form is probably
the most intense expression of primitive passion; yet not in those
lyrics where such intensity is the greatest,—in those of Burns, for
example,—is the passion so dizzy, bewildering, and bewildered, as in the
‘Epipsychidion’ of Shelley, the passion of which never came into the real
world at all, was only a fiction founded on fact, and was wholly—and even
Shelley felt it—inconsistent with the inevitable conditions of ordinary
existence. In this point of view, and especially also taking account of
his peculiar religious opinions, it is remarkable that Shelley should
have taken extreme delight in the Bible as a composition. He is the least
biblical of poets. The whole, inevitable, essential conditions of real
life—the whole of its plain, natural joys and sorrows—are described in
the Jewish literature as they are described nowhere else. Very often
they are assumed rather than delineated; and the brief assumption is
more effective than the most elaborate description. There is none of the
delicate sentiment and enhancing sympathy which a modern writer would
think necessary; the inexorable facts are dwelt on with a stern humanity,
which recognises human feeling though intent on something above it. Of
all modern poets, Wordsworth shares the most in this peculiarity; perhaps
he is the only recent one who has it at all. He knew the hills beneath
whose shade ‘the generations are prepared:’
‘Much did he see of men,
Their passions and their feelings: chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart,
That mid the simple form of rural life
Exist more simple in their elements,
And speak a plainer language.’
Shelley has nothing of this. The essential feelings he hoped to change;
the eternal facts he struggled to remove. Nothing in human life to him
was inevitable or fixed; he fancied he could alter it all. His sphere
is the ‘unconditioned;’ he floats away into an imaginary Elysium or
an expected Utopia; beautiful and excellent, of course, but having
nothing in common with the absolute laws of the present world. Even in
the description of mere nature the difference may be noted. Wordsworth
describes the earth as we know it, with all its peculiarities; where
there are moors and hills, where the lichen grows, where the slate-rock
juts out. Shelley describes the universe. He rushes away among the stars;
this earth is an assortment of imagery, he uses it to deck some unknown
planet. He scorns ‘the smallest light that twinkles in the heavens.’ His
theme is the vast, the infinite, the immeasurable. He is not of our home,
nor homely; he describes not our world, but that which is common to all
worlds—the Platonic idea of a world. Where it can, his genius soars from
the concrete and real into the unknown, the indefinite, and the void.
Shelley’s success in the abstract lyric would prepare us for expecting
that he would fail in attempts at eloquence. The mind which bursts
forward of itself into the inane, is not likely to be eminent in the
composed adjustments of measured persuasion. A voluntary self-control is
necessary to the orator: even when he declaims, he must only let himself
go; a keen will must be ready, a wakeful attention at hand, to see that
he does not say a word by which his audience will not be touched. The
eloquence of ‘Queen Mab’ is of that unpersuasive kind which is admired in
the earliest youth, when things and life are unknown, when all that is
intelligible is the sound of words.
Lord Macaulay, in a passage to which we have referred already, speaks
of Shelley as having, more than any other poet, many of the qualities
of the great old masters; two of these he has especially. In the first
place, his imagination is classical rather than romantic,—we should,
perhaps, apologise for using words which have been used so often, but
which hardly convey even now a clear and distinct meaning; yet they seem
the best for conveying a distinction of this sort. When we attempt to
distinguish the imagination from the fancy, we find that they are often
related as a beginning to an ending. On a sudden we do not know how a
new image, form, idea, occurs to our minds; sometimes it is borne in
upon us with a flash, sometimes we seem unawares to stumble upon it, and
find it as if it had long been there: in either case the involuntary,
unanticipated appearance of this new thought or image is a primitive
fact which we cannot analyse or account for. We say it originated in
our imagination or creative faculty: but this is a mere expression of
the completeness of our ignorance; we could only define the imagination
as the faculty which produces such effects; we know nothing of it
or its constitution. Again, on this original idea a large number of
accessory and auxiliary ideas seem to grow or accumulate insensibly,
casually, and without our intentional effort; the bare primitive form
attracts a clothing of delicate materials—an adornment not altering its
essences, but enhancing its effect. This we call the work of the fancy.
An exquisite delicacy in appropriating fitting accessories is as much
the characteristic excellence of a fanciful mind, as the possession
of large, simple, bold ideas is of an imaginative one. The last is
immediate; the first comes minute by minute. The distinction is like what
one fancies between sculpture and painting. If we look at a delicate
statue—a Venus or Juno—it does not suggest any slow elaborate process
by which its expression was chiselled and its limbs refined; it seems
a simple fact; we look, and require no account of it; it exists. The
greatest painting suggests, not only a creative act, but a decorative
process: day by day there was something new; we could watch the tints
laid on, the dresses tinged, the perspective growing and growing. There
is something statuesque about the imagination; there is the gradual
complexity of painting in the most exquisite productions of the fancy.
When we speak of this distinction, we seem almost to be speaking of the
distinction between ancient and modern literature. The characteristic of
the classical literature is the simplicity with which the imagination
appears in it; that of modern literature is the profusion with which the
most various adornments of the accessory fancy are thrown and lavished
upon it. Perhaps nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the modern
treatment of antique subjects. One of the most essentially modern of
recent poets—Keats,—has an ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn:’ it begins—
‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian! who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy!’