Shelley possessed two remarkable qualities of intellect--a brilliant
imagination, and a logical exactness of reason. His inclinations led him
(he fancied) almost alike to poetry and metaphysical discussions. I say
'he fancied,' because I believe the former to have been paramount, and
that it would have gained the mastery even had he struggled against it.
However, he said that he deliberated at one time whether he should
dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics; and, resolving on the former,
he educated himself for it, discarding in a great measure his
philosophical pursuits, and engaging himself in the study of the poets
of Greece, Italy, and England. To these may be added a constant perusal
of portions of the old Testament--the Psalms, the Book of Job, the
Prophet Isaiah, and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with
delight.
As a poet, his intellect and compositions were powerfully influenced by
exterior circumstances, and especially by his place of abode. He was
very fond of travelling, and ill-health increased this restlessness. The
sufferings occasioned by a cold English winter made him pine, especially
when our colder spring arrived, for a more genial climate. In 1816 he
again visited Switzerland, and rented a house on the banks of the Lake
of Geneva; and many a day, in cloud or sunshine, was passed alone in his
boat--sailing as the wind listed, or weltering on the calm waters. The
majestic aspect of Nature ministered such thoughts as he afterwards
enwove in verse. His lines on the Bridge of the Arve, and his "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty", were written at this time. Perhaps during this
summer his genius was checked by association with another poet whose
nature was utterly dissimilar to his own, yet who, in the poem he wrote
at that time, gave tokens that he shared for a period the more abstract
and etherealised inspiration of Shelley. The saddest events awaited his
return to England; but such was his fear to wound the feelings of others
that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the
indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of
deep unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire
to embody themselves in forms defecated of all the weakness and evil
which cling to real life.
He chose therefore for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty,
some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the
world; but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a
resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on
his fellow-creatures. He created for this youth a woman such as he
delighted to imagine--full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they
both, with will unvanquished, and the deepest sense of the justice of
their cause, met adversity and death. There exists in this poem a
memorial of a friend of his youth. The character of the old man who
liberates Laon from his tower prison, and tends on him in sickness, is
founded on that of Doctor Lind, who, when Shelley was at Eton, had often
stood by to befriend and support him, and whose name he never mentioned
without love and veneration.
During the year 1817 we were established at Marlow in Buckinghamshire.
Shelley's choice of abode was fixed chiefly by this town being at no
great distance from London, and its neighbourhood to the Thames. The
poem was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of
Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is
distinguished for peculiar beauty. The chalk hills break into cliffs
that overhang the Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech; the wilder
portion of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation;
and the cultivated part is peculiarly fertile. With all this wealth of
Nature which, either in the form of gentlemen's parks or soil dedicated
to agriculture, flourishes around, Marlow was inhabited (I hope it is
altered now) by a very poor population. The women are lacemakers, and
lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they were very ill
paid. The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those
who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates.
The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest,
brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley
afforded what alleviation he could. In the winter, while bringing out
his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting
the poor cottages. I mention these things,--for this minute and active
sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousandfold interest to
his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for the human
race.
The poem, bold in its opinions and uncompromising in their expression,
met with many censurers, not only among those who allow of no virtue but
such as supports the cause they espouse, but even among those whose
opinions were similar to his own. I extract a portion of a letter
written in answer to one of these friends. It best details the impulses
of Shelley's mind, and his motives: it was written with entire
unreserve; and is therefore a precious monument of his own opinion of
his powers, of the purity of his designs, and the ardour with which he
clung, in adversity and through the valley of the shadow of death, to
views from which he believed the permanent happiness of mankind must
eventually spring.
'Marlowe, December 11, 1817.
'I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers,
and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to
develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest
which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some
points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be
their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your
censures of "The Revolt of Islam"; but the productions of mine which you
commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures me,
in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts
which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the
precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave
some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with
the same feeling--as real, though not so prophetic--as the
communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it
anything approaching to faultless; but, when I consider contemporary
productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with
confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my
own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this
have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that part
of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am
formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to
apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to
external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to
communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the
moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these
faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist
very imperfectly in my own mind. But, when you advert to my
Chancery-paper, a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of
cramped and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about
"Mandeville", which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two
minutes' thought to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable
than that which grew as it were from "the agony and bloody sweat" of
intellectual travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I
am mistaken in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the
selection of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be
conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity
which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone
would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the
economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I
see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something,
whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers
will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to
their utmost limits.
[Shelley to Godwin.]