of much of Shelley's poetical significance. When the excellent
Godwin talked about perfectibility and the ultimate triumph of truth
and justice, he was in no sort of hurry about it. He was a good
deal annoyed when Malthus crushed his dreams, by recalling him to
certain very essential conditions of earthly life. Godwin, he said
in substance, had forgotten that human beings have got to find food
and standing-room on a very limited planet, and to rear children
to succeed them. Remove all restraints after the fashion proposed
by Godwin, and they will be very soon brought to their senses by
the hard pressure of starvation, misery, and vice. Godwin made a
feeble ostensible reply, but, in practice, he was content to adjourn
the realisation of his hopes for an indefinite period. Reason, he
reflected, might be omnipotent, but he could not deny that it would
take a long time to put forth its power. He had the strongest possible
objections to any of those rough and ready modes of forcing men to be
reasonable which had culminated in the revolution. So he gave up the
trade of philosophising, and devoted himself to historical pursuits,
and the preparation of wholesome literature for the infantile mind.
To Shelley no such calm abnegation of his old aims was possible. He
continued to assert passionately his belief in the creed of his early
youth; but it became daily more difficult to see how it was to be
applied to the actual men of existence. He might hold in his poetic
raptures that the dreams were the only realities, and the reality
nothing but a dream; but he, like other people, was forced to become
sensible to the ordinary conditions of mundane existence.
The really exquisite strain in Shelley's poetry is precisely that
which corresponds to his dissatisfaction with his master's teaching.
So long as Shelley is speaking simply as a disciple of Godwin, we
may admire the melodious versification, the purity and fineness of
his language, and the unfailing and, in its way, unrivalled beauty
of his aerial pictures. But it is impossible to find much real
satisfaction in the informing sentiment. The enthusiasm rings hollow,
not as suggestive of insincerity, but of deficient substance and
reality. Shelley was, in one aspect, a typical though a superlative
example of a race of human beings, which has, it may be, no fault
except the fault of being intolerable. Had he not been a poet
(rather a bold hypothesis, it must be admitted), he would have been
a most insufferable bore. He had a terrible affinity for the race of
crotchet-mongers, the people who believe that the world is to be saved
out of hand by vegetarianism, or female suffrage, or representation of
minorities, the one-sided, one-ideaed, shrill-voiced and irrepressible
revolutionists. I say nothing against these particular nostrums, and
still less against their advocates. I believe that bores are often
the very salt of the earth, though I confess that the undiluted salt
has for me a disagreeable and acrid savour. The devotees of some of
Shelley's pet theories have become much noisier than they were when
the excellent Godwin ruled his little clique. It is impossible not to
catch in Shelley's earlier poetry, in 'Queen Mab' and in the 'Revolt
of Islam,' the apparent echo of much inexpressibly dreary rant which
has deafened us from a thousand platforms. The language may be better;
the substance is much the same.
This, which to some readers is annoyance, is to others a topic of
extravagant eulogy. Not content with urging the undeniable truth that
Shelley was a man of wide and generous sympathy, a detester of tyranny
and a contemner of superstition, they speak of him as though he were
both a leader of thought and a practical philanthropist. To make such
a claim is virtually to expose him to an unfair test. It is simply
ridiculous to demand from Shelley the kind of praise which we bestow
upon the apostles of great principles in active life. What are we to
say upon this hypothesis to the young gentleman who is amazed because
vice and misery survive the revelations of Godwin, and whose reforming
ardours are quenched—so far as any practical application goes—by the
surprising experience that animosities fostered by the wrongs of
centuries are not to be pacified by publishing a pamphlet or two about
Equality, Justice, and Freedom, or by a month's speechification in
Dublin? If these were Shelley's claims upon our admiration, we should
be justified in rejecting them with simple contempt, or we should have
to give the sacred name of philanthropist to any reckless impulsive
schoolboy who thinks his elders fools and proclaims as a discovery the
most vapid rant of his time. Admit that Shelley's zeal was as pure as
you please, and that he cared less than nothing for money or vulgar
comfort; but it is absurd to bestow upon him the praise properly
reserved for men whose whole lives have been a continuous sacrifice
for the good of their fellows. Nor can I recognise anything really
elevating in those portions of Shelley's poetry which embody this
shallow declamation. It is not the passionate war-cry of a combatant
in a deadly grapple with the forces of evil, but the wail of a dreamer
who has never troubled himself to translate the phrases into the
language of fact. Measured by this—utterly inappropriate—standard,
we should be apt to call Shelley a slight and feverish rebel against
the inevitable, whose wrath is little more than the futile, though
strangely melodious, crackling of thorns.
To judge of Shelley in this mode would be to leave out of account
precisely those qualities in which his unique excellence is most
strikingly manifested. Shelley speaks, it is true, as a prophet;
but when he has reached his Pisgah, it turns out that the land
of promise is by no means to be found upon this solid earth of
ours, or definable by degrees of latitude and longitude, but is an
unsubstantial phantasmagoria in the clouds. It is vain, too, that he
declares that it is the true reality, and that what we call a reality
is a dream. The transcendental world is—if we may say so—not really
the world of archetypal ideas, but a fabric spun from empty phrases.
The more we look at it the more clearly we recognise its origin; it
is the refracted vision of Godwin's prosaic system seen through an
imaginative atmosphere. But that which is really admirable is, not
the vision itself, but the pathetic sentiment caused by Shelley's
faint recognition of its obstinate unsubstantiality. It is with
this emotion that every man must sympathise in proportion as his
intellectual aspirations dominate his lower passions. Forgetting all
tiresome crotchets and vapid platitudes, we may be touched, almost in
proportion to our own elevation of mind, by the unsatisfied yearning
for which Shelley has found such manifold and harmonious utterance.
There are moods in which every sensitive and philanthropic nature
groans under the
heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
Whatever our ideal may be, whatever the goal to which we hope to see
mankind approximate, our spirits must often flag with a sense of our
personal insignificance, and of the appalling dead weight of multiform
impediments which crushes the vital energies of the world, like Etna
lying upon the Titan. This despair of finding any embodiment for his
own ideal, of bridging over the great gulf fixed between the actual
world of sin, and sorrow, and stupidity, and the transcendental
world of joy, love, and pure reason, represents the final outcome
of Shelley's imperfect philosophy, and gives the theme of his most
exquisite poetry. The doctrine symbolised in the 'Alastor' by the
history of the poet who has seen in vision a form of perfect beauty,
and dies in despair of ever finding it upon earth (he seems, poor man!
to have looked for it somewhere in the neighbourhood of Afghanistan),
is the clue to the history of his own intellectual life. He is
happiest when he can get away from the world altogether into a vague
region, having no particular relation to time or space; to the valleys
haunted by the nymphs in the 'Prometheus;' or the mystic island in the
'Epipsychidion,' where all sights and sounds are as the background
of a happy dream, fitting symbols of sentiments too impalpable to be
fairly grasped in language: or that 'calm and blooming cove' of the
lines in the Euganean hills.
The lyrics which we all know more or less by heart are but so many
different modes of giving utterance to—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
He is always dwelling upon the melancholy doctrine expressed in his
last poem by the phrase that God has made good and the means of good
irreconcilable. The song of the skylark suggests to him that we are
doomed to 'look before and after,' and to 'pine for what is not.' Our
sweetest songs (how should it be otherwise?) are those which tell of
saddest thought. The wild commotion in sea, sky, and earth, which
heralds the approach of the south-west wind, harmonises with his
dispirited restlessness, and he has to seek refuge in the vague hope
that his thoughts, cast abroad at random like the leaves and clouds,
may somehow be prophetic of a magical transformation of the world. His
most enduring poetry is, in one way or other, a continuous comment
upon the famous saying in 'Julian and Maddalo,' suggested by the sight
of his fellow-Utopian, whose mind has been driven into madness by an
uncongenial world.
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Some poets suffer under evils of a more tangible kind than those which
tormented Shelley; and some find a more satisfactory mode of escape
from the sorrows which beset a sensitive nature. But the special
beauty of Shelley's poetry is so far due to the fact that we feel it
to be the voice of a pure and lofty nature, however crude may have
been the form taken by some of his unreal inspiration.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Hume's biographer, Mr. Hill Burton, gives some other verses
attributed to Hume; but the impartial critic must admit that they are
of inferior merit.
_GRAY AND HIS SCHOOL_
A remark is every now and then made about Gray by somebody who has
just been reading his charming letters. Gray, it is announced, was
one of the first prophets of the true faith, or, as others call it,
the modern superstition, of which mountains are the temples and
Alpine clubs form the congregations. Their creed may be compressed
into the single article that a love of mountains is the first of the
cardinal virtues. To that doctrine, with some slight reservations, I
yield a very hearty assent and consent; and I am glad to reckon Gray
amongst its sound adherents. A mountainous country alone, he says,
can furnish truly picturesque scenery. His early enthusiasm for the
Chartreuse, his admiration in later years of the Vale of Keswick and
the Pass of Killiecrankie, are symptoms of an orthodoxy creditable,
because rarer in his time than our own. But, though Gray shared the
sentiment which was then growing up, it would be absurd to attribute
to him any influence in its propagation. His descriptive letters are
admirable, and show that he had a true eye for scenery; but they
were not published till after his death, and certainly his 'Life and
Writings,' clipped and docked by the precise Mason, was not the kind
of book to generate a new enthusiasm. The real glory of revealing
to mankind the new pleasure must be given—so far as it can be given
to any individual writers—to men like Rousseau, whose passionate
rhetoric made the love of nature a popular watchword, and Saussure,
who first showed a thorough appreciation of the glories of the Alps.
But in England, and not in England alone, even Rousseau was, in this
respect, eclipsed by Ossian. The general estimate of those singular
poems, considered as descriptive of a mountainous region, coincides,
I imagine, with that of Wordsworth. The mountains of Ossian are mere
daubs, vague abstractions of mist and gloom, gigantesque unrealities
which speak of anything but first-hand impressions of actual scenery.
You may read through Ossian—if you can read through it at all—without
gaining any more distinct impressions of Highland scenery than you
would have received in the Highlands themselves any time since last
November. But the extraordinary influence of Ossian upon the minds
of MacPherson's contemporaries is a matter of history. When Goethe
went to Switzerland, he evidently considered it the correct thing to
have passages from Ossian at his fingers' ends for application to the
Alps; it was the mountaineer's text-book, to be quoted in Switzerland
as a later generation quoted Byron or the present the writings of
Mr. Ruskin. Gray was one of the earliest enthusiasts, and, though he
had a critical qualm or two, was apparently more moved by the new
poems than by any literary event of his time. He is '_extasié_ with
their infinite beauty,' makes 'a thousand inquiries' about their
authenticity, and in one letter declares himself to be 'cruelly
disappointed' with the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' and able to admire nothing
but Fingal. He studies Croma (who now knows Croma even by name?), and
picks out the finest phrase in it as though he were criticising a book
of the 'Iliad.'
The Ossian fever was symptomatic of a widely-spread sentiment or
fashion, due to causes far more general than the influence of any
individual. It would be easy enough to show that worshippers of the
picturesque had discovered the chief beauties of England before Gray
wrote his letters. The tourist was already abroad. When Gray visited
Gordale Scar, in Craven, he already found landscape-painters settled
at the neighbouring inn and preparing views for the engraver. The
reader of that maddest of books, 'John Buncle,' may remember that the
hero contrives at one place to emerge out of a mysterious cavern in
the mountains of Westmoreland. He observes on the occasion that the
Vale of Keswick is considered to offer the finest views in England,
and that they were, in truth, finer than even the Rev. Dr. Dalton
had been able to make them appear in his descriptive poem. Yet
Buncle thinks that Keswick is surpassed by the 'shaded fells' in the
neighbourhood (apparently) of Ambleside, and that the cascades there
are superior to 'dread Lodore.' The 'Rev. Dr. Dalton' appears to have
published his poem—a poem, I am sorry to say, unfamiliar to me—in
1755, some years before Gray's visit. But it is needless to enlarge
upon this point. It is clear enough, from many symptoms, that the love
of picturesque scenery was becoming fashionable in the middle of the
century, and that Gray, as a man of taste, was amongst the first to
feel the impulse.
The whole matter is, perhaps, of less importance than is sometimes
attached to it. There is, after all, a good deal in Macaulay's
common-sense explanation of the phenomenon—that a love of mountain
scenery means simply the formation of good roads and comfortable
inns in mountain districts. But Gray's taste in this respect is
at least significant as to Gray's own position. His contempt for
Rousseau and his love of Ossian are inversions of the judgment of
later times; for no one would now deny the power of Rousseau, or
find much pleasure—unless possessed by some antiquarian or patriotic
mania—in the epics of the mythical bard. And yet we can see that Gray
represents a vein of sentiment allied to some modern modes of thought,
and generally regarded as antipathetic to the spirit of his own time.
With all his popularity, he appears to be an isolated phenomenon.
Everybody knows his poetry by heart. The 'Elegy' has so worked itself
into the popular imagination that it includes more familiar phrases
than almost any poem of equal length in the language. The 'Bard' and
the lines upon Eton have become so hackneyed as perhaps to acquire
a certain tinge of banality. If few English poets have written so
little, none certainly has written so little that has fallen into
oblivion. And yet, though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet
of his day, though he is more read than Young, or Thomson, or Collins,
or Goldsmith, or many others, we do not think of him as stamping his
image upon the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken to be like
an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden spring of perennial freshness
gushing out in the midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative,
monotonous current of versification poured forth by the imitators of
Pope. He never used Pope's measure for serious purposes, except in
one fine fragment—the least read of his poems—and is, as it were, an
outsider in the literature of the time. And yet, again, it must be
remembered that Wordsworth picked him out for special condemnation as
the worst offender in the use of conventional language. He definitely
accepted and has enlarged upon the theory which Wordsworth attempted
to upset—that poetry should use a language differing from that
of common life. Indeed, he gets upon stilts as deliberately and
consciously as any poet of the day, and is nervously sensitive to the
risk of a lapse into the vernacular.
It would be easy to give a paradoxical turn to these remarks, and to
show how Gray was at once the opponent and the representative of the
poetical creed of his day. The puzzle, such as it is, arises from
our habit of absurdly exaggerating the difference between ourselves
and our grandfathers, and speaking as if everybody was 'artificial'
in the reign of Pope and 'natural' in the reign of Wordsworth. No
two words in the language cover more confusion of thought than those
famous phrases. It would be easy enough to twist them so as to prove
that Wordsworth was more artificial than Pope, quite as clearly as
the opposite is so often demonstrated; and, for my part, I am fully
convinced that there was just as much human nature and as little
affectation in the days of Queen Anne as in those of Victoria or in
those of Elizabeth. The contrast usually drawn has, I doubt not, an
important meaning; but it is so obscured by the vague talk about
'nature' that I never see the word without instinctively putting
myself on my guard against some bit of slipshod criticism or sham
philosophy. I heartily wish that the word could be turned out of the
language. Though that, alas! is impossible, we may try to avoid the
misleading associations which it continually introduces. Gray, at any
rate, was a human being who liked looking at trees and hills as much
as anybody does now; and he certainly succeeded in writing some verses
which concentrate into a couple of pages a depth of genuine emotion
such as would furnish whole volumes of modern verbiage. It is another
question whether he ought to be called a natural or an artificial poet.
In the first place, however, it may be observed that Gray was not
so solitary a phenomenon as we might at first sight fancy. He never
entered the circle of literary men who lived in London, and who, in
the later part of his career, acknowledged Johnson as their dictator.
He shrank from the roughness of the 'great bear,' who, in his turn,
seems to have despised Gray as a literary fop—a finikin and affected
spinner of verses, who tried to be grand and succeeded only in being
pompous and obscure. Gray, in his quiet cloister, led the life of a
recluse and followed his own fancies with little direct reference to
the public opinion of accepted dispensers of literary reputation. But
no man is really independent of his time, and Gray had his allies and
his followers. Amongst them were men still worth remembering, though
all of them, like Gray himself, stood more or less apart from the main
current of literature. In one of his early letters he speaks of the
Odes just published by two young authors, who 'both deserve to last
some years, but will not.' Collins, the first of these, has lasted,
though destined to an early death, and scarcely more voluminous than
Gray himself. Collins, like Gray, was sensitive and solitary, though
in a still more morbid degree. It is recorded of him—and I know of
no similar case except that of Landor in regard to 'Pericles and
Aspasia'—that he repaid his publisher for the loss incurred by his
Odes. It is, perhaps, not irrelevant to add that his mind soon gave
symptoms of approaching imbecility. The other young poet was Joseph
Warton, still remembered for his essay on Pope, the elder brother of
Thomas Warton, the historian of poetry; and the two brothers were the
heads of what was once called the school of the Wartons. The 'school'
was not a very large one, and the poems of both the brothers—though
Thomas is held to be better than Joseph—are not amongst the things
that have lasted. The influence of the Wartons, however, was very
conspicuous in reviving the study of the earlier models of our
literature. Joseph tried to persuade the world—unsuccessfully at the
time—that Pope was inferior to Spenser; and his brother's history
is a considerable landmark in that revival of interest in poetical
antiquities indicated by such works as Percy's 'Reliques,' or by the
forgeries of Chatterton and MacPherson. I might have quoted Joseph
Warton's earliest poem (1740) to show that what is called the love
of nature was by no means a novelty when Gray went to the lakes.
It is enough to give the title—'The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of
Nature'—and to observe that Warton wishes to seat himself on a
'pinetopt precipice, abrupt and shaggy,' and to listen to 'Boreas'
blasts' and the sounds of 'hollow winds and everbeating waves,' in the
most approved romantic fashion. Both brothers, too, have a taste for
the 'moss-grown spire and crumbling arch;' and Tom's best sonnet—one
much admired by Lamb—is written on a blank leaf of Dugdale's
'Monasticon' and expresses his delight in surveying the records of
'cloister'd piety'—
Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.
In another he wishes to know whether 'his pipe can aught essay to
reach the ear' of that 'divine bard' Mr. Gray, for whose 'Elegy' and
'Bard' he expresses the warmest admiration.
The similarity of taste shown by the Wartons and Gray does not appear
to have led to personal intercourse. They were divided by that broad,
though to the outward world invisible, gulf which still separates
Oxford from Cambridge. Gray's most enthusiastic disciple, Mason, had
come under his influence at Cambridge, and his first performance led
to a passage of arms with Tom Warton. Mason attacked the Jacobitism
of Oxford in a poem called 'Isis,' stating, of course in a purely
poetical sense, that Oxford men held 'infernal orgies' to the foes of
freedom. Warton replied in verses which Mason admitted to be better
than his own. Modesty, however, was not Mason's strong point. Years
afterwards, when riding into Oxford, he remarked that he was glad that
it was already dark; otherwise, as he intimated, a mob would naturally
have gathered to avenge his insults to the University. Mason's odes
and choruses are so obviously an echo of Gray's that one is rather
surprised to find Gray praising them in language which implies that
he was not aware of his responsibility. Mason himself was cordially
proud of the relationship, though he took amazing liberties as an
editor of his master's letters, and occasionally gave himself airs
of equality, or even patronage, which strike one as a little absurd.
A more distant, but perhaps still more enthusiastic, admirer of Gray
was Beattie, whose early odes (which he judiciously endeavoured to
suppress) are feebler echoes than Mason's of the same model, and
who reverently submitted his best poem, the 'Minstrel,' to Gray's
correction and, more wonderful to relate, accepted one or two of his
critic's emendations. And, finally, we must include in the school of
Gray the man whose levity and coxcombry has blinded many readers to
his very remarkable ability. Horace Walpole, who quarrelled with Gray
as with many others of his friends, for a time, and who, unlike Gray,
was thoroughly immersed in the central current of London society, was
no poet, but was in thorough sympathy with Gray's antiquarian tastes,
and by the 'Castle of Otranto' and the sham Gothic of Strawberry
Hill did more than profounder antiquarians to restore an interest in
mediæval art.