--Love with quiet blending,
Slow to begin and never ending,
the "serious faith and inward glee."
But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the
blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and
best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to
Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in
images. The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of
Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort
for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with
figure. Suspended in the dripping well of his imagination the commonest
object becomes encrusted with imagery. Herein again he deviates from the
true Nature poet, the normal Wordsworth type of Nature poet: imagery was
to him not a mere means of expression, not even a mere means of
adornment; it was a delight for its own sake.
And herein we find the trail by which we would classify him. He belongs
to a school of which not impossibly he may hardly have read a line--the
Metaphysical School. To a large extent he _is_ what the Metaphysical
School should have been. That school was a certain kind of poetry trying
for a range. Shelley is the range found. Crashaw and Shelley sprang
from the same seed; but in the one case the seed was choked with thorns,
in the other case it fell on good ground. The Metaphysical School was in
its direct results an abortive movement, though indirectly much came of
it--for Dryden came of it. Dryden, to a greater extent than is (we
imagine) generally perceived, was Cowley systematised; and Cowley, who
sank into the arms of Dryden, rose from the lap of Donne.
But the movement was so abortive that few will thank us for connecting
with it the name of Shelley. This is because to most people the
Metaphysical School means Donne, whereas it ought to mean Crashaw. We
judge the direction of a development by its highest form, though that
form may have been produced but once, and produced imperfectly. Now the
highest product of the Metaphysical School was Crashaw, and Crashaw was a
Shelley _manque_; he never reached the Promised Land, but he had fervid
visions of it. The Metaphysical School, like Shelley, loved imagery for
its own sake: and how beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery may
be, let _The Skylark_ and _The Cloud_ witness. It is only evil when the
poet, on the straight way to a fixed object, lags continually from the
path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The
Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but
because it toyed with it frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's
hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your
relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may
toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as
well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you
may write a _Sensitive Plant_. In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they
went astray cannot be said to have done anything so dainty as is implied
by _toying_ with imagery. They cut it into shapes with a pair of
scissors. From all such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate
spontaneity. No trappings are too splendid for the swift steeds of
sunrise. His sword-hilt may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of
an Excalibur. His thoughts scorch through all the folds of expression.
His cloth of gold bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked poetry.
* * * * *
It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in
figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so
almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known
power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe
threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest
infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality
Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract. The
dustiest abstractions
Start, and tremble under his feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous
imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and
scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson
of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more
intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed
of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here
afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn
from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that
pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their
poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge. They laid their
fancies chill on the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated
Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that
we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley
should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The
generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his
_Ode on the Passions_. In this, despite its beauty, there is still a
_soupcon_ of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth
century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary
student reads that little masterpiece, the _Ode to Evening_, which
sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole
things in the language comparable to the miniatures of _Il Penseroso_.
Crashaw, Collins, Shelley--three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets
from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy
light," is near of kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmy-eyed"; and the
"shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of "Thought's crowned
powers." This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and
Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern
poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large
moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions. Take the passage
(already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come
From the temples high
Of man's ear and eye
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,
* * * * *
From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And beyond our eyes
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.
Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the
root of such a power. The root, we take it, is this. He had an
instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for
its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret
subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the chromatic scales,
whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the
keys of creation. Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does
it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress, whose constant changes
of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her
parts.
To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music
traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things.
He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible,
and could shift the points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted
infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to
horse. He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in
terms of each other. Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as
regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in
the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on
the tree of heaven and shake down the golden leaves. {7}
The finest specimens of this faculty are probably to be sought in that
Shelleian treasury, _Prometheus Unbound_. It is unquestionably the
greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing
lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the
blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in
the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all
a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and a weeping mist of music fills the
air. The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic reel and rout and
revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like
wine, music runs to drunken waste. The choruses sweep down the wind,
tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost cries
for respite from the unrolling splendours. Yet these scenes, so
wonderful from a purely poetical standpoint that no one could wish them
away, are (to our humble thinking) nevertheless the artistic error of the
poem. Abstractedly, the development of Shelley's idea required that he
should show the earthly paradise which was to follow the fall of Zeus.
But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should
have ceased with it. A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings
(such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the
scene) would have been legitimate enough. Instead, however, the
bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after
scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there
is no longer an action to advance. It is as if the choral _finale_ of an
opera were prolonged through two acts.
We have, nevertheless, called _Prometheus_ Shelley's greatest poem
because it is the most comprehensive storehouse of his power. Were we
asked to name the most _perfect_ among his longer efforts, we should name
the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely
fancy giving the slain bird a silken burial. Seldom is the death of a
poet mourned in true poetry. Not often is the singer coffined in laurel-
wood. Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is
_Adonais_. In the English language only _Lycidas_ competes with it; and
when we prefer _Adonais_ to _Lycidas_, we are following the precedent set
in the case of Cicero: _Adonais_ is the longer. As regards command over
abstraction, it is no less characteristically Shelleian than
_Prometheus_. It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with
daring exquisiteness, from Morning who sought:
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
and who
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day,
to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead shepherd, the Dreams
Whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed; and whom he taught
The love that was its music;
of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning over him,
Upon the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some dream has loosened from his brain!
Lost angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded like a cloud which hath outwept its rain.
In the solar spectrum, beyond the extreme red and extreme violet rays,
are whole series of colours, demonstrable, but imperceptible to gross
human vision. Such writing as this we have quoted renders visible the
invisibilities of imaginative colour.
One thing prevents _Adonais_ from being ideally perfect: its lack of
Christian hope. Yet we remember well the writer of a popular memoir on
Keats proposing as "the best consolation for the mind pained by this sad
record" Shelley's inexpressibly sad exposition of Pantheistic
immortality:
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely, _etc_.
What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan
countenance is as the countenance of a despair? What deepest depth of
agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality
which thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved
elements may circulate through her veins?
Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am
as the vocal breath floating from an organ. I too shall fade on the
winds, a cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in
the ears of men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and
from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition
of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour,
Pessimism. Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws
from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery that hiss
against his tears.
With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, _Adonais_ is
lighted; but they are obtained by implicitly assuming the personal
immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to
greet the dead youth,
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
Far in the unapparent.
And again the final stanza of the poem:
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest riven;
The massy earth, the sphered skies are given:
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais like a star
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.