A portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.
After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the lover
of Shelley leans most lovingly, which he has oftenest in his mind, which
best represent Shelley to him and which he instinctively reverts to when
Shelley's name is mentioned are some of the shorter poems and detached
lyrics. Here Shelley forgets for a while all that ever makes his verse
turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he
is anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the clouds.
He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy into
heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that absolute
virgin-gold of song which is the scarcest among human products, and for
which we can go to but three poets--Coleridge, Shelley, Chopin, {8} and
perhaps we should add Keats. _Christabel_ and _Kubla-Khan_; _The
Skylark_, _The Cloud_, and _The Sensitive Plant_ (in its first two
parts). _The Eve of Saint Agnes_ and _The Nightingale_; certain of the
Nocturnes;--these things make very quintessentialised loveliness. It is
attar of poetry.
Remark, as a thing worth remarking, that, although Shelley's diction is
at other times singularly rich, it ceases in these poems to be rich, or
to obtrude itself at all; it is imperceptible; his Muse has become a
veritable Echo, whose body has dissolved from about her voice. Indeed,
when his diction is richest, nevertheless the poetry so dominates the
expression that we feel the latter only as an atmosphere until we are
satiated with the former; then we discover with surprise to how imperial
a vesture we had been blinded by gazing on the face of his song. A
lesson, this, deserving to be conned by a generation so opposite in
tendency as our own: a lesson that in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God,
we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall be clothed, but
seek first {9} the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us.
On the marvellous music of Shelley's verse we need not dwell, except to
note that he avoids that metronomic beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe
introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the
rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully
over-polished as Pope's one metre. Shelley could at need sacrifice
smoothness to fitness. He could write an anapaest that would send Mr.
Swinburne into strong shudders (e.g., "stream did glide") when he
instinctively felt that by so forgoing the more obvious music of melody
he would better secure the higher music of harmony. If we have to add
that in other ways he was far from escaping the defects of his merits,
and would sometimes have to acknowledge that his Nilotic flood too often
overflowed its banks, what is this but saying that he died young?
* * * * *
It may be thought that in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have
been blind to its evil side. That, however, is not the case. We see
clearly that he committed grave sins, and one cruel crime; but we
remember also that he was an Atheist from his boyhood; we reflect how
gross must have been the moral neglect in the training of a child who
_could_ be an Atheist from his boyhood: and we decline to judge so
unhappy a being by the rules which we should apply to a Catholic. It
seems to us that Shelley was struggling--blindly, weakly, stumblingly,
but still struggling--towards higher things. His Pantheism is an
indication of it. Pantheism is a half-way house, and marks ascent or
descent according to the direction from which it is approached. Now
Shelley came to it from absolute Atheism; therefore in his case it meant
rise. Again, his poetry alone would lead us to the same conclusion, for
we do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can write consistently
ethereal poetry. We should believe in nothing, if we believed that, for
it would be the consecration of a lie. Poetry is a thermometer: by
taking its average height you can estimate the normal temperature of its
writer's mind. The devil can do many things. But the devil cannot write
poetry. He may mar a poet, but he cannot make a poet. Among all the
temptations wherewith he tempted St. Anthony, though we have often seen
it stated that he howled, we have never seen it stated that he sang.
Shelley's anarchic principles were as a rule held by him with some
misdirected view to truth. He disbelieved in kings. And is it not a
mere fact--regret it if you will--that in all European countries, except
two, monarchs are a mere survival, the obsolete buttons on the coat-tails
of rule, which serve no purpose but to be continually coming off? It is
a miserable thing to note how every little Balkan State, having obtained
liberty (save the mark!) by Act of Congress, straightway proceeds to
secure the service of a professional king. These gentlemen are plentiful
in Europe. They are the "noble Chairmen" who lend their names for a
consideration to any enterprising company which may be speculating in
Liberty. When we see these things, we revert to the old lines in which
Persius tells how you cannot turn Dama into a freeman by twirling him
round your finger and calling him Marcus Dama.
Again, Shelley desired a religion of humanity, and that meant, to him, a
religion for humanity, a religion which, unlike the spectral Christianity
about him, should permeate and regulate the whole organisation of men.
And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age
when--if we may say so without irreverence--the Almighty has been made a
constitutional Deity, with certain state-grants of worship, but no
influence over political affairs. In these matters his aims were
generous, if his methods were perniciously mistaken. In his theory of
Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim was
as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical.
His theory was repulsive, but comprehensible. Whereas from our present
_via media_--facilitation of divorce--can only result the era when the
young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but
will be open to engagement as wife at a reasonable stipend.
We spoke of the purity of Shelley's poetry. We know of but three
passages to which exception can be taken. One is happily hidden under a
heap of Shelleian rubbish. Another is offensive, because it presents his
theory of Free Love in its most odious form. The third is very much a
matter, we think, for the individual conscience. Compare with this the
genuinely corrupt Byron, through the cracks and fissures of whose heaving
versification steam up perpetually the sulphurous vapours from his
central iniquity. We cannot credit that any Christian ever had his faith
shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he
read Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and
make for a flag planted on the very reef where the planter himself was
wrecked?
* * * * *
Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in concluding) should it be that the
poets who have written for us the poetry richest in skiey grain, most
free from admixture with the duller things of earth--the Shelleys, the
Coleridges, the Keats--are the very poets whose lives are among the
saddest records in literature? Is it that (by some subtile mystery of
analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like
water, fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so
from fire and tears ascend the "visions of aerial joy"; that the harvest
waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the
earth, smells sweetest after rain; that the spell on which depend such
necromantic castles is some spirit of pain charm-poisoned at their base?
{10} Such a poet, it may be, mists with sighs the window of his life
until the tears run down it; then some air of searching poetry, like an
air of searching frost, turns it to a crystal wonder. The god of golden
song is the god, too, of the golden sun; so peradventure song-light is
like sunlight, and darkens the countenance of the soul. Perhaps the rays
are to the stars what thorns are to the flowers; and so the poet, after
wandering over heaven, returns with bleeding feet. Less tragic in its
merely temporal aspect than the life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of
Shelley in its moral aspect is, perhaps, more tragical than that of
either; his dying seems a myth, a figure of his living; the material
shipwreck a figure of the immaterial.
Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of
Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful
and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind;
bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag
to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a
ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and
descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and
sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the
rolling tides of Time. Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of
Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius! Beauty, music,
sweetness, tears--the mouth of the worm has fed of them all. Into that
sacred bridal-gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity
let not our rash speculations follow him. Let us hope rather that as,
amidst material nature, where our dull eyes see only ruin, the finer eye
of science has discovered life in putridity and vigour in decay,--seeing
dissolution even and disintegration, which in the mouth of man symbolise
disorder, to be in the works of God undeviating order, and the manner of
our corruption to be no less wonderful than the manner of our health,--so,
amidst the supernatural universe, some tender undreamed surprise of life
in doom awaited that wild nature, which, worn by warfare with itself, its
Maker, and all the world, now
Sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's.