SHELLEY
If it were possible to blot out from our mind its memory of the Bible
and of Protestant theology, and with that mind of artificial vacancy to
read _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson Agonistes_, how strange and great and
mad would the genius of Milton appear. We should wonder at his creative
mythological imagination, but we should marvel past all comprehending at
his conceptions of the divine order, and the destiny of man. To attempt
to understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly more
promising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible.
The parallel is so close that one is tempted to pursue it further, for
there is between these two poets a close sympathy amid glaring
contrasts. Each admitted in spite of his passion for an ideal world an
absorbing concern in human affairs, and a vehement interest in the
contemporary struggle for liberty. If the one was a Republican Puritan
and the other an anarchical atheist, the dress which their passion for
liberty assumed was the uniform of the day. Neither was an original
thinker. Each steeped himself in the classics. But more important even
than the classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the
dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power
of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a
purely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created in
metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of
imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the
universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images
which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as
the grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession.
The name of Shelley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floats
before our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. But
Shelley's world was the world of the utilitarian Godwin and the
mathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not a
common characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and Shelley to
the choir in which Dante and Goethe are leaders. For Keats beauty was
truth, and that was all he cared to know. Coleridge, indeed, was a
metaphysician of some pretensions, but the "honey dew" on which he fed
when he wrote _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ was not the _Critique of
Pure Reason_. But to Shelley _Political Justice_ was the veritable "milk
of paradise." We must drink of it ourselves if we would share his
banquet. Godwin in short explains Shelley, and it is equally true that
Shelley is the indispensable commentary to Godwin. For all that was
living and human in the philosopher he finds imaginative expression. His
mind was a selective soil, in which only good seed could germinate. The
flowers wear the colour of life and emotion. In the clear light of his
verse, gleaming in their passionate hues, they display for us their
values. Some of them, the bees of a working hive will consent to
fertilise; from others they will turn decidedly away. Shelley is
Godwin's fertile garden. From another standpoint he is the desert which
Godwin laid waste.
It is, indeed, the commonplace of criticism to insist on the reality
which the ideal world possessed for Shelley. Other poets have
illustrated thought by sensuous imagery. To Shelley, thought alone was
the essential thing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for him
what a Centaur or a Pegasus were for common fancy. He sees in
_Prometheus Unbound_ a spirit who
Speeded hither on the sigh
Of one who gave an enemy
His plank, then plunged aside to die.
Another spirit rides on a sage's "dream with plumes of flame"; and a
third tells how a poet
Will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume,
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
How naturally from Shelley's imagination flowed the lines about Keats:--
All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound
Lamented Adonais.
This was no rhetoric, no affectation of fancy. Shelley saw the immortal
shapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortal
Keats, because for him an idea or a passion was incomparably more real
and more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whose
existence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not a
distant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever ready
to retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his daily
habitation. He lived in it, and guided himself by its intellectual
compass among the perils and wonders of life, as naturally as other men
feel their way by touch. This ardent, sensitive, emotional nature, with
all its gift of lyrical speech and passionate feeling, was in fact the
ideal man of the Godwinian conception, who lives by reason and obeys
principles. Three men in modern times have achieved a certain fame by
their rigid obedience to "rational" conceptions of conduct--Thomas Day,
who wrote _Sandford and Merton_, Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. But the
erratic, fanciful Shelley was as much the enthusiastic slave of reason,
as any of these three; and he seemed erratic only because to be
perfectly rational is in this world the wildest form of eccentricity. He
came upon _Political Justice_ while he was still a school-boy at Eton;
and his diaries show that there hardly passed a year of his life in
which he omitted to re-read it. Its phraseology colours his prose; his
mind was built upon it, as Milton's was upon the Bible. We hardly
require his own confession to assure us of the debt. "The name of
Godwin," he wrote in 1812, "has been used to excite in me feelings of
reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a
luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the
earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently
desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have
delighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering then, these
feelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with
which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your
name in the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the
glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so.
You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of
human kind."
The enthusiastic youth was to learn that his master's preoccupation was
with concerns more sordid and more pressing than the welfare of human
kind; but if close personal intercourse brought some disillusionment
regarding Godwin's private character, it only deepened his intellectual
influence, and confirmed Shelley's lifelong adhesion to his system. No
contemporary thinker ever contested Godwin's empire over Shelley's
mind; and if in later years Plato claimed an ever-growing share in his
thoughts, we must remember that in several of his fundamental tenets
Godwin was a Platonist without knowing it. It is only in his purely
personal utterances, in the lyrics which rendered a mood or an
impression, or in such fancies as the _Witch of Atlas_, that Shelley can
escape from the obsession of _Political Justice_. The voice of Godwin
does not disturb us in _The Skylark_, and it is silenced by the violent
passions of _The Cenci_. But in all the more formal and graver
utterances of Shelley's genius, from _Queen Mab_ to _Hellas_, it
supplies the theme and Shelley writes the variations. _Queen Mab_,
indeed, is nothing but a fervent lad's attempt to state in verse the
burden of Godwin's prose. Some passages in it (notably the lines about
commerce) are a mere paraphrase or summary of pages from _The Enquirer_
or _Political Justice_. In the _Revolt of Islam_, and still more in
_Prometheus Unbound_, Shelley's imagination is becoming its own master.
The variations are more important, more subtle, more beautiful than the
theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for
fancy to embroider. It is only in _Hellas_ that Shelley's power of
narrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his
passion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a
masterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If the
transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned.
It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his own
native powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or preaches all
Godwin's characteristic doctrines, perfectibility, non-resistance,
anarchism, communism, the power of reason and the superiority of
persuasion over force, universal benevolence, and the ascription of
moral evil to the desolating influence of "positive institution."
The general agreement is so obvious that one need hardly illustrate it.
What is more curious is the habit which Shelley acquired of reproducing
even the minor opinions or illustrations which had struck him in his
continual reading of Godwin. When Mammon advises Swellfoot the Tyrant to
refresh himself with
A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook
Such as is served at the Great King's second table.
The price and pains which its ingredients cost
Might have maintained some dozen families
A winter or two--not more.
he is simply making an ironical paraphrase from Godwin. The fine scene
in Canto XI. of the _Revolt of Islam_, in which Laon, confronting the
tyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who was
about to stab him, is a too brief rendering of Godwin's reflections on
the story of Marius and the Executioner (see p. 128).
And one more daring, raised his steel anew
To pierce the stranger: "What hast thou to do
With me, poor wretch?"--calm, solemn and severe
That voice unstrung his sinews, and he threw
His dagger on the ground, and pale with fear,
Sate silently.
The pages of Shelley are littered with such reminiscences.
Matthew Arnold said of Shelley that he was "a beautiful and ineffectual
angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." One is tempted to
retort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and to
people a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But the
metaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The world
into which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was not
a void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to common
mortals are usual, normal, inevitable--oppressions and wars, follies and
crimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury.
If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage and
terror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Shelley, Matthew Arnold
held, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomed
to the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind of
sanity to Shelley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to an
angel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a country
clergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, _The
Wonderful Visit_. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our follies
and our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists have
loved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit as
insight in _L'Ingenu_--the American savage who landed in France, and
made the amazing discovery of civilisation. Shelley had not dropped from
the clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to be
discovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiable
indignation.
One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devoted
to the beauty of virtue; but one quality Shelley lacked which is
commonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathy
which can make its own the motives and desires of other men.
Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common
men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of
observation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he rather
exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that
its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything
that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and
universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinian
phraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament.
So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love
and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the
world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental,
anti-human. If he had grown up a mediaeval Christian, he would have found
no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the
formula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural,
incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in
the doctrine that "positive institutions" have poisoned and distorted
the natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in _Queen Mab_ of all
the oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away to
absolve nature:
Nature!--No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society....
Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good.
It is a stimulating doctrine, for if humanity had only to rid itself of
kings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief and
eventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. There
is, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoological
fact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is there
anything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives to
institutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share in
the making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are the
creation of the servility and superstition of the mass of men. The
eighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal.
Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flock
has sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in the
lore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns to
bear upon the slender fabric of Shelley's dream. _Queen Mab_ was a
boy's precocious effort, and in later verses Shelley put the case for
his view of evil in a more persuasive form. He is now less concerned to
declare that it is unnatural, than to insist that it flows from defects
in men which are not inherent or irremovable. The view is stated with
pessimistic malice by a Fury in _Prometheus Unbound_ after a vision of
slaughter.
FURY.
Blood thou can'st see, and fire; and can'st hear groans.
Worse things unheard, unseen, remain behind.
PROMETHEUS.
Worse?
FURY.
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear,
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want--worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt; they know not what they do.
Shelley so separated the good and evil in the world, that he was
presently vexed as acutely as any theist with the problem of accounting
for evil. Paine felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. He
traced all the wrongs of society to the egoism of priests and kings;
and, since he did not assume the fundamental goodness of human nature,
it troubled none of his theories to accept the crude primitive fact of
self-interest. What Shelley would really have said in answer to a
question about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaic
mood, it is hard to guess, and the speculation does not interest us.
Shelley's prose opinions were of no importance. What we do trace in his
poetry is a tendency, half conscious, uttering itself only in figures
and parables, to read the riddle of the universe as a struggle between
two hostile principles. In the world of prose he called himself an
atheist. He rejoiced in the name, and used it primarily as a challenge
to intolerance. "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion," he said
once to his friend Trelawny, "a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a
threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my
abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight takes up a
gauntlet in defiance of injustice."
Shelley was an atheist because Christians used the name of God to
sanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. His
mythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. His
creed was an ardent dualism, in which a God and an anti-God contend and
make history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse the
names and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the
incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other
reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had
taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate Gods in his Pantheon are
always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and
the Jupiter of his _Prometheus_ is morally a temporarily omnipotent
devil. Like Godwin he felt that the God of orthodoxy was a "tyrant," and
he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He had
made.
The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is stated
with a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in _Queen Mab_. The
first Canto of the _Revolt of Islam_ puts the position of dualism
without reserve:
Know, then, that from the depths of ages old
Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold,
Ruling the world with a divided lot,
Immortal, all-pervading, manifold,
Twin Genii, equal Gods--when life and thought
Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.
The good principle was the Morning Star (as though to remind us of
Lucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. The
anti-God, whom men worship blindly as God, holds sway over our world.
Terror, madness, crime, and pain are his creation, and Asia in
_Prometheus_ cries aloud--
Utter his name: a world pining in pain
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
In the sublime mythology of _Prometheus_ the war of God and anti-God is
seen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rend
the heart of the merciful Titan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murders
and crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical cruelties
in the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they are
also the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven with
the tragedy on earth; we suffer from the malignity of the World's Ruler,
and triumph by the endurance of Man's Saviour.
Nothing could be more absurd than to call Shelley a Pantheist. Pantheism
is the creed of conservatism and resignation. Shelley felt the world as
struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast
canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of
what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human
heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process
as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain.
Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of
good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a
tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with
mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life
(see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend
Thing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which
overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the
golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in
the clerical error of some mediaeval copyist, fumbling with the scholia
of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to
Shelley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional
theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound.
Shelley can describe It only as Godwin describes his principle by a
series of negatives.
I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living spirit.
It is the eternal =X= which the human spirit always assumes when it is at
a loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not,
our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-note
that promised triumph. Shelley, turning amid his singing to the
supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his
God very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had
done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe
with a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a
nigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's
mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral
it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.
If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed
in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view
of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwin
hated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in the
argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic
form. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from their
shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in
the preface to _Prometheus_ to assure us that, if England were divided
into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great
and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not
through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he
writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected
intellectualism of the Godwinian psychology. "Revenge and retaliation,"
he remarks in the preface to _The Cenci_ "are pernicious _mistakes_."
But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout as
Shelley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the
rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force
and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these
abstractions. Godwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardent
affectionate love for his kind. Godwin's cold precept that it was the
duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress
of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in
select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue
forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.
One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early
escapades of the married boy--the visit to Dublin at the height of the
agitation for Catholic emancipation, the printing of his Address to the
Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his
balcony at passers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic
noblemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid
transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an
association for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish
amusement of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of
pamphlets sealed up in bottles. Shelley at this age perpetrated "rags"
upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows'
rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which Godwin,
complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Shelley that he is
much too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicarious
maturity by reading history, and refers him to _Political Justice
passim_ for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt to
improve mankind by forming political associations.
It is questionable how far the world has to thank Godwin for dissuading
ardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. It
is just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophet
had been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands in
an almost superstitious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, there
might have arisen under educated leaders some movement less class-bound
than Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and more
intelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by Godwin's quietism,
literature gained. It was Godwin's mission in life to save poets from
Botany Bay; he rescued Shelley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge.
It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creature
around him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity,
while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Shelley
followed in action the principles of universal benevolence. Godwin
omitted the beasts; but Shelley, practising vegetarianism and buying
crayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the "boast" of
the poet in _Alastor_:--
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred--
We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, and
meet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given his
boots to a poor woman.
Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Shelley is
Leigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poor
woman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Shelley carries her in his arms
to the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. The
householder slams it in his face, with an "impostors swarm everywhere,"
and a "Sir, your conduct is extraordinary."
"Sir," cried Shelley, "I am sorry to say that _your_ conduct is not
extraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the
patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in
this country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. You
will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into,
burnt over your head."
It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite
content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen)
decided that the Shelley who carried this poor stranger into shelter,
fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need,
was unfit to bring up his own children.
If Shelley allowed himself to be persuaded by Godwin to abandon his
missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by
Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves
half-consciously from the Godwinian notion that mankind are to be
reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the
first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose," he
writes in the preface to _Prometheus_, "has been ... to familiarise ...
poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware
that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and
endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the
highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust,
although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." It was for want
of virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after the
Terror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all the
horrors of oppression and reaction which Shelley described, the comfort
of all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slow
progress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyred
patriots--these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at the
end of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of
_Prometheus Unbound_:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy--that was for
Shelley the whole duty of man.
In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Shelley's view of
progress differed at once from Godwin's conception, and from the notion
of a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day consider
historical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfection,
to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw the
process of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet as
the deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument
(as Godwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. The
missionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shall
start up," he prophesies in _Queen Mab_. The _Revolt of Islam_, so
puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its
mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race
of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic
of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that
elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after
Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their
countrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children,
brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a free
past. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are the
winged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter the
thrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It is
enough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coasts
around it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving,
eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden with
slaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. She
paints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to the
central article of revolutionary faith:
This need not be; ye might arise and will
That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory.
That love which none may bind be free to fill
The world like light; and evil faith, grown hoary
With crime, be quenched and die.
"Ye might arise and will"--it was the inevitable corollary of the facile
analysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to
kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty
preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army
preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same
mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the
history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as
instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men
are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," but
rather because to render its effects permanent, it must proceed to
regiment the converts in organised associations, which speedily develop
all the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow.
The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage of
Godwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the second
generation bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent verses
are those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in the
national revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be a
slave?" Not less characteristic is the Godwinian abhorrence of violence,
and the Godwinian trust in the magic of courageous passivity. Laon finds
the revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors,
and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal.
O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill
And pain still keener pain for ever breed.
He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaves
who are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of the
beauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length upon
the victorious liberators, they stand passive to be hewn down, as
Shelley, in the _Masque of Anarchy_, written after Peterloo, advised
the English reformers to do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is something
in the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathes
the childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shelley dreamed of "a
nation made free by love." With a strange mystical insight, he stepped
beyond the range of the Godwinian ethics, when he conceived of his
humane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrifice
for the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, because
he loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings at
last by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laon
walks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heaped
for him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a last
affirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty of
comradeship.
Thrice Shelley essayed to paint the state of perfection which mankind
might attain, when once it should "arise and will." The first of the
three pictures is the most literally Godwinian. It is the boyish sketch
of _Queen Mab_, with pantisocracy faithfully touched in, and Godwin's
speculations on the improvement of the human frame suggested in a few
pregnant lines. One does not feel that Shelley's mind is even yet its
own master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the third
act of _Prometheus Unbound_. He is still repeating a lesson, and it
calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of
perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of
the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to
sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in
eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth.
There sings Shelley. The picture itself is a faithful illustration
etched with a skilful needle to adorn the last chapter of _Political
Justice_. Evil is once more and always something factitious and
unessential. The Spirit of the Earth sees the "ugly human shapes and
visages" which men had worn in the old bad days float away through the
air like chaff on the wind. They were no more than masks. Thrones are
kingless, and forthwith men walk in upright equality, neither fawning
nor trembling. Republican sincerity informs their speech:
None talked that common false cold hollow talk
Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.
Women are "changed to all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once
they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons,"
and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber the
ground like the unnoticed ruins of a barbaric past.
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless.
The story ends there, and if we do not so much as wait for the assurance
that man passionless, tribeless, and nationless lived happily ever
afterwards, it is because we are unable to feel even this faint interest
in his destiny. There is something amiss with an ideal which is
constrained to express itself in negatives. What should be the climax of
a triumphant argument becomes its refutation. To reduce ourselves to
this abstract quintessential man might be euthanasia. It would not be
paradise.
The third of Shelley's visions of perfection is the climax of _Hellas_.
One feels in attempting to make about _Hellas_ any statement in bald
prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind
experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics
have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page
wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The
insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your
brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a
channel of sense, has a power which defies the analytic understanding.
_Hellas_, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolute
music. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey a
definite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymes
will carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and the
picture hold your imagination.
And yet Shelley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhere
is his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact,
yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. He
conceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for the
liberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Shelley's circle at
Pisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him as
crude facts in the newspaper. The historians of classical Greece were
his continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of ideal
forms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, as
actual as the newspapers. _Hellas_ is the vision of a mind which touches
fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an
immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one
glowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the golden
consummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as the
Age of Pericles. For Shelley, this denial of time had become a conscious
doctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later years
influences as intimate as Godwin. Again and again in his later poems, he
turns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from death
and decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with a
serene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearance
of mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in _Hellas_:
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight.
The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almost
conversational simplicity;
Death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in _Adonais_:
'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
and again:
The One remains, the many change and pass.
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
In all the musical and visionary glory of _Hellas_ we seem to hear a
subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a
dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a
prayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of the
Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed
its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the
secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the _Dies irae_.
And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own
history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity.
That nightmare haunts Shelley in _Hellas_:
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of a
symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his
lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most
spontaneous stanzas in our language:
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far.
He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of
Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:
O write no more the tale of Troy
If earth Death's scroll must be,
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free.
He has turned from the empty abstraction of the Godwinian vision of
perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his
imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had driven
history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole,
complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon
the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer
tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future;
but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it.
That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:
Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind.
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in their guilty mind,
And conscience feeds them with despair.
Some end there must be to the _perpetuum mobile_ of wrong and revenge.
And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion.
He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of
evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?
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.
Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold man
who would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Shelley is not
sure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. For
a moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For one
fleeting instant--how ironical the vision seems to us--he conceives that
she may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt than
this in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see the
Golden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is a
pattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase by
familiarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republic
exists firmly founded in the human mind itself:
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.
Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the New
Athens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" shine in no common
day, beside no earthly sea:
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautiful
words, we know not why, as the chords that make the "full close" in
music content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Where
any mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves and
defies, there is the ideal Republic.
* * * * *
We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Shelley's chorus. The eloquent
old man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the new
time, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day of
tyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on his
grave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolished
war. A generation passed, and the winged victory is now a struggling
hope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled with
the rumour of massacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the diviner
climes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to its
predestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought in
indictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away the
past with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned and
the past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed the
mother, and marvelled that the child should die.
The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere assurance that
sooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is in
itself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are to
regain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution is
itself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated with
that thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the future
seems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau's
myth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that our
ideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or Godwin or William
Morris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Long
before the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have been
unfolded before the imagination of mankind.
What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding of
ideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in institutions,
and still more the developing sense of comradeship and sympathy which
links us in relations of justice and love with every creature that
feels. We are old enough to pass lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxes
that intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth that
outworn institutions fetter and dwarf the mind of man. It is also a
truth that institutions have moulded and formed that mind. To condemn
the past is in the same breath to blast the future. The true basis for
that piety towards our venerable inheritance which Burke preached, is
that it has made for us the possibility of advance.
But our strivings would be languid, our march would be slow, were it not
for the revolutionary leaven which Godwin's generation set fermenting.
They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw that
by a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions and
customs which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us not
so much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of the
belief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innate
character which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is a
tonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that among
the forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of the
understanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. From much
that is iconoclastic and destructive in their ideal we may turn away
unconvinced. There remain its ardent statement of the duty of humanity,
which shames our practice after a century of progress, and its faith in
the efficacy of unregimented opinion to supersede brute force. They
taught a lesson which posterity has but half learned. We shall be the
richer for returning to them, as much by what we reject as by what we
embrace.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL
LECKY. _History of England in the 18th Century._
LESLIE STEPHEN.--_History of English Thought in the 18th Century._
OLIVER ELTON..--_A Survey of English Literature._
EDWARD DOWDEN--_The French Revolution and English Literature._
The most vivid impression of the period from the standpoint of Godwin's
Circle is conveyed in the _Memoirs_ of Thomas Holcroft edited by
Hazlitt, and in Hazlitt's portraits of Godwin, Malthus and Mackintosh in
_The Spirit of the Age_ (Everyman's Library).
Of the opposite way of thinking the one immortal record is Burke's
_Reflections on the French Revolution_. Lord Morley's _Burke_ (English
Men of Letters) should be read, and the eloquent exposition by Lord Hugh
Cecil (_Conservatism_) in this (H.U.L.) series.
The main works of the French revolutionary thinkers have been issued in
Dent's series of French classics. For study and pleasure consult Lord
Morley's books on Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot.
The details given in the first chapter concerning the London
Corresponding Society are based on its pamphlets in the British Museum.
THOMAS PAINE
Paine's writings are published in cheap editions by the Rationalist
Press, and may be had bound in one volume. The same press issues a cheap
edition of the admirable _Life_ by Dr. Moncure D. Conway.
WILLIAM GODWIN
Godwin's works are now procurable only in old libraries, with the
exception of _Caleb Williams_. _Political Justice_ should be read in the
second edition (1796), which is maturer than the first and more lively
than the third. A modern summary of it by Mr. Salt, with the full text
of the last section "On Property," was published by Swan, Sonnenschein &
Co. This selection emphasises his communism, but hardly does full
justice to the novelty of his anarchist opinions. Full biographical data
are to be found in _William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries_, by
Mr. Kegan Paul, which contains a readable collection of letters. There
is a painstaking and elaborate study in French by Raymond Gourg (Felix
Alcan, 1908) and a stimulating little essay in German from the anarchist
standpoint (_William Godwin, der Theoretiker des Kommunistischen
Anarchismus._ Von Pierre Ramus. Leipzig. Dietrich).
For a modern statement of Anarchist Communism read Kropotkin's _The
Conquest of Bread_ (Chapman and Hall).
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
_The Rights of Woman_ has been reissued in Everyman's Library. The
volume of _Selections_ in the Regent Library (Herbert and Daniel) was
well edited by Miss Jebb, and may be recommended, for Mary
Wollstonecraft rather gains than loses by compression. For her life Mr.
Kegan Paul's _William Godwin_ should be consulted. The edition of the
_Rights_, published by T. Fisher Unwin, contains an admirable critical
study of Mrs. Fawcett. There is no general history of the so-called
"feminist" movement, and in English books the French pioneers are
ignored. Mr. Lyon Blease has some good historical chapters in _The
Emancipation of English Women_.
SHELLEY
Shelley literature is a library in itself. The standard edition is
Forman's; the standard biography is the tolerant, human, gossipy _Life_
by Professor Dowden. The general reader can use no better edition than
Mrs. Shelley's. Of critical essays the most notable are Matthew Arnold's
oddly unsympathetic essay, and Sir Leslie Stephen's informing but
hostile study on _Godwin and Shelley_ ("Hours in a Library"). Professor
Santayana may be mentioned among the few critics who have realised that
Shelley thought before he sang (_Winds of Doctrine_). Incomparably the
best of all the critical essays is the little monograph by Francis
Thompson (Burns and Oates).
_POSTSCRIPT_, 1942
Since this book was written two indispensable aids to the study of
Godwin and his Circle have been published. (1) An adequate modern life
of Godwin is now available: _The Life of William Godwin_ by Ford K.
Brown (J. M. Dent & Sons). The work could hardly have been better done.
(2) Mr. Elbridge Colby has given us in two volumes a modern edition of
_The Life of Thomas Holcroft_ (Constable & Co.) by himself with
Hazlitt's continuation. Mr. Colby's scholarly notes and introduction add
greatly to its value.
A modern edition of Godwin's _Political Justice_ (Knopf, Political
Science Classics) is now available, but cannot be recommended. The
editor has abbreviated it by capricious omissions.
_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers_ by Carl L.
Becker (Oxford University Press, also Yale) is a most readable study of
the political thought of the period. See also Professor H. J. Laski's
_The Rise of European Liberalism_ (Allen & Unwin) and _Voltaire_ by H.
N. Brailsford in this series.
INDEX
_Age of Reason_, 75
Arnold, Matthew, 184, 220
Arnot, 174
Baldwin, Edward, 172
Barbauld, Mrs., 192
Blake, Wm., 35, 66
Bright, John, 115
Burke, 15-26, 63
Burney, Fanny, 18
_Caleb Williams_, 143
Calvinism, 79
Chesterfield, Lord, 195
Clairmont, Mrs. (afterwards Godwin), 169-70
Clairmont, Jane, 169
Coleridge, S. T., 51-55, 86, 156, 173
Condorcet, 22, 23, 27, 92, 109, 110, 197
Convention, English, 44
---- Scottish, 41-43
Cooper, Thomas, 83, 84
Corresponding Society (see London)
Dundas, 40, 44
_Enquirer, The_, 145
_Essays_ (on Religion) by Wm. Godwin, 180
Fenelon, 130
_Fleetwood_, 176
Gatton, Borough of, 25
Gerrald, Joseph, 43, 88, 89
Gillray, 155
Godwin, William: as historian 22;
letter on trial of twelve Reformers, 46;
experience during Revolution, 49-51;
influence on Coleridge and Southey, 51-55;
relation to Paine, 64, 65, 71;
relation to Holcroft, 84-88;
early life, 78;
_Political Justice_, 89-141;
Marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, 149;
_Caleb Williams_, 143;
controversies, 155;
estimate of his work, 163;
second marriage and later life, 163;
later works, 172;
relations with Shelley, 174;
death, 178;
religious views, 179;
intellectual influence on Shelley, 216 _seq._
Godwin, William (junior), 170
Godwin, Mrs. (_see_ Wollstonecraft and Clairmont)
Hardy, Thomas, 33, 37, 39, 41, 44
Hazlitt, 9, 78, 152, 159, 168, 173
Helvetius, 31, 39, 96, 99, 100, 102, 105, 120, 166, 171, 179, 187
Herve, 119
Holbach, Baron d', 31, 196
Holcroft, Thomas, quoted, 31;
early life of, 35, 36;
trial of, 44, 45, 48;
association with Paine, 65;
Influence on Godwin, 84-88
Imlay, Fanny, 148, 169
Imlay, Gilbert, 148
Jones, Sir Wm., 37
Kames, Lord, 193
Kant, 11
Lafayette, 62, 64
Lamb, Charles, 173
Leibnitz, 11, 95
London Corresponding Society, 33-48, 66
Lovell, R., 53
Lytton, Bulwer, 174
Mably, 87
Mackintosh, Sir James, 16, 157
Malthus, 29, 158
Margarot, 42
Marius, 128, 220
Milton, 192, 212
Montesquieu, 31, 90, 97
Muir, 42
Napoleon, 154
Paine, Thomas, 16, 34, 39, 56;
biographical sketch, 57-68;
political views 69-75;
religious views, 75-77
Palmer, 42
Pantisocracy, 51-55
Parr, Rev. Dr., 157
Patrickson, 174
Pitt, 40, 44, 66, 91
Plato, Platonism, 102, 104, 126, 131, 197, 218, 234, 243
Plutarch, 182
_Political Justice_, 89-141
Price, Rev. Dr., 10-15, 248
Priestley, 11, 39, 81, 171
_Rights of Man_, Paine's, 63, 69
_Rights of Woman--a Vindication of the_, 148 _seq._
Ritson, 35, 170
Roosevelt, Theodore, 75
Rousseau, 21, 101, 191, 194
Sandemanians, 79
_Sepulchres, Godwin's Essay on_, 22
Shelley, 9, 104, 168;
personal relations with Godwin, 174;
intellectual outlook, 212;
debt to Godwin, 216;
his mythology, 225;
his view of human perfectibility, 230
Shelley, Mary, nee Godwin, 144, 153, 169, 176, 180
Sheridan, 82
Sinclair, 42
Skirving, 42
Socrates, Socratic (_see_ Plato)
Southey, 51-55, 151
_St. Leon_, 160, 172
Stanhope, Earl, 12
Swift, 131, 193
Tolstoy, 120, 138
Tooke, Horne, 34, 43, 44, 46
Turgot, 28
_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (_see Rights_)
Voltaire, 95, 221
Wedgwood, 170
Weissmann, 98
Wells, H. G., 221
Westbrook, Harriet, 175
Windham, 48
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 16;
early life, 147;
marriage and death, 149-154;
her personality, 202;
her originality, 199;
summary of "Rights," 204;
relation to French Revolution, 186-199;
reflection in Shelley, 238
Wordsworth, 8, 51, 157
Transcriber's Note:
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
Passages in bold font are indicated by =bold=.
The following misprint has been corrected:
"magnaminity" corrected to "magnanimity" (page 124)
"subjecttion" corrected to "subjection" (page 187)
"Gilray" corrected to "Gillray" (page 255)
All other spelling and punctuation is presented as in the original.
Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
presented in the original text.