and moral luminaries who have shed a humanising influence upon our
planet--who have left behind them “thoughts that breathe and words
that burn”--none can claim more reverence from humanitarians than the
poet of poets--the influence of whose life and writings, considerable
even now, and gradually increasing, doubtless in a not remote future
is destined to be equal to that of the very foremost of the world’s
teachers, and of whom our sketch, necessarily limited though it is,
will be extended beyond the usual allotted space.
Percy Bysshe Shelley descended from an old and wealthy family long
settled in Sussex. At the age of 13 he was sent to Eton, where (such
was the spirit of the public and other schools at that time, and,
indeed, of long afterwards) he was subjected to severe trials of
endurance by the rough and rude manners of the ordinary schoolboy, and
the harsh and unequal violence of the schoolmaster. Of an exceptionally
refined and sensitive temperament, he was none the less determined
in resistance to injustice and oppression, and his refusal to submit
tamely to their petty tyrannies seems to have brought upon him more
than the common amount of harsh treatment. It penetrated into his
inmost soul, and inspired the opening stanzas of “The Revolt of
Islam,” in intensity of feeling seldom equalled. Some alleviation of
these sufferings of childhood he found in his own mental resources.
For his amusement he translated, we are assured, several books of
the _Natural History_ of Pliny. Of Greek writers he even then (in an
English version) read Plato, who afterwards, in his own language,
always remained one of his chief literary companions, and he applied
himself also to the study of French and of German. In natural science,
Chemistry seems to have been his especial pursuit.
In 1810, at the age of seventeen, he entered University College,
Oxford. There he studied and wrote unceasingly. With a strong
predilection for metaphysics, he devoted himself in particular to
the great masters of dialectics, Locke and Hume, and to their chief
representatives in French philosophy. Ardent and enthusiastic in
the pursuit of truth, he sought to enlarge his knowledge and ideas
from every possible quarter, and he engaged in correspondence with
distinguished persons, suggested to him by choice or chance, with
whom he discussed the most interesting philosophical questions. Like
all truly fruitful minds, the youthful inquirer was not satisfied
with the _dicta_ of mere authority, or with the _consensus_, however
general, of past ages, and he hesitated not, in matters of opinion in
which every well-instructed intelligence is capable of judging for
itself, to bring to the test of right reason the most widely-received
dogmas of Antiquity. Actuated by this spirit, rather than by any
matured convictions, and wishing to elicit sincere as well as
exhaustive argument on the deepest of all metaphysical inquiries,
in an unfortunate moment for himself, he caused to be printed an
abstract of anti-theistic speculations, drawn from David Hume and
other authorities, presented in a series of mathematically-expressed
propositions. Copies of this modest thesis of two pages were sent
either by the author, or by some other hand, to the heads of his
College. The clerical dignitaries, listening to the dictates of
outraged authority, rather than influenced by calm reflection, which
would have, perhaps, shewn them the useless injustice of so extreme a
measure, proceeded at once to expel him from the University.[233]
That in spite of this impetuous attack upon the stereotyped
presentations of Theism, Shelley had an eminently religious temperament
has been well insisted upon by a recent biographer:--
“Brimming over with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with
the conditions under which they actually think and feel. Could he
but dethrone the anarch, Custom, the ‘Millennium,’ he argued, would
immediately arrive; nor did he stop to think how different was
the fibre of his own soul from that of the unnumbered multitudes
around him. In his adoration of what he recognised as _living_,
he retained no reverence for the ossified experience of past
ages.... For he had a vital faith, and this faith made the ideals
he conceived seem possible--faith in the duty and desirability of
overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel of liberty, fraternity,
equality; faith in the divine beauty of Nature; faith in the
perfectibility of man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our
souls are atoms; faith in love, as the ruling and co-ordinating
substance of morality. The man who lived by this faith was in no
vulgar sense of the word ‘atheist.’ When he proclaimed himself to
be one he pronounced his hatred of a gloomy religion which had been
the instrument of kings and priests for the enslavement of their
fellow beings. As he told his friend Trelawney, he used the word
_Atheism_ ‘to express his abhorrence of superstition: he took it
up, as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice.’”[234]
So thorough was his contempt for mere received and routine thought,
that even Aristotle, the great idol of the mediæval schoolmen, and
still an object of extraordinary veneration in the elder University,
became for him a kind of synonym for despotic authority--
“Tomes
Of reasoned Wrong glozed on by Ignorance”--
and was, accordingly, treated with undue neglect. As for politics,
as represented in the parliament and public Press of his day, he was
indignantly impatient of the too usual trifling and unreality of public
life. He seldom read the newspapers; nor could he ever bring himself to
mix with the “rabble of the House.”
Thus, forced into antipathy to the ordinary and orthodox business of
life around him, the poet withdrew himself more and more from it into
his own thoughts, and hopes, and aspirations, which he communicated to
his familiar friends. Some of those, however, into whose society he
chanced to be thrown, were not of a sort of mind most congenial to his
own. Yet they all bear witness to his surpassing moral no less than
mental, constitution. “In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense
ever more completely developed than in Shelley,” says one of his most
intimate acquaintances; “in no being was the perception of right and
wrong more acute.”
“As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigour
of his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of
his life most conspicuous.... I have had the happiness to associate
with some of the best specimens of gentleness; but (may my candour
and preference be pardoned), I can affirm that Shelley was almost the
only example I have yet found that was never wanting, even in the most
minute particular, of the infinite and various observances of pure,
entire, and perfect gentility.” This is the voluntary testimony of a
friend who was not inclined to excess of praise.[235]
The sudden end of his career at Oxford had estranged him from his
father, who was of a temperament the very opposite to that of
the enthusiastic reformer--harsh, intolerant, and bigoted in his
prejudices; and the young Shelley’s marriage, shortly afterwards,
to Harriet Westbrook, a young girl of much beauty, but of little
cultivation of mind, and in a position of life different from his
own, incensed him still further. The marriage, happy enough in the
beginning, proved to be an ill-assorted one, and various causes
contributed to the inevitable _dénouement_. After a union of some
three years, the marriage, by mutual consent, was dissolved. Two years
later--not, it seems, in consequence of the divorce, as sometimes has
been suggested--the young wife put an end to her existence--a terrible
and tragic termination of an ill-considered attachment, which must have
caused him the deepest pangs of grief, and which seems always, and
justly, to have cast a gloomy shadow upon his future life.
Brief as his career was, we can refer only to the most interesting
events in it. Of these, his enthusiastic effort to arouse a bloodless
revolution in Ireland, such as, if effected, might have prevented the
continued miseries of that especially neglected portion of the three
kingdoms, is not the least noteworthy. With his lately-married wife and
her sister he was living at Keswick, when, by a sudden inspiration, he
resolved to cross the Channel, and engage in the work of propagating
his principles of political and social reform. This was in the early
part of 1812. In Dublin, where they established their head-quarters,
he printed an _Address to the Irish People_, which, by his own hands,
as well as by other agency, was distributed far and wide. In this
wonderfully well-considered and reasonable manifesto, the principles
laid down as necessary to success in attempting deliverance from ages
of bad laws and misgovernment, are as sound as the ardour and sincerity
of his hopeless undertaking are unmistakeable. The cosmopolitan scope
of the _Address_ appears in such passages as these:--
“Do not inquire if a man be a heretic, if he be a Quaker, a Jew,
or a Heathen, but if he be a virtuous man, if he love liberty and
truth, if he wish the happiness and peace of human kind. If a man
be ever so much ‘a believer,’ and love not these things, he is a
heartless hypocrite and a knave.... It is not a merit to tolerate,
but it is a crime to be intolerant.... Be calm, mild, deliberate,
patient.... Think, and talk, and discuss.... Be free and be happy,
but _first be wise and good_.... Habits of sobriety, regularity,
and thought must be entered into and firmly resolved upon.”
Truer in his perception of the radical causes and cure of national
evils than most party politicians, he urged the essential need of
ethical and social change, without which mere political change of
parties, or increase in material wealth of some sections in the
community, must be valueless in any true estimate of a nation’s
prosperity. Shelley also issued, in pamphlet form, _Proposals for an
Association_--a plan for the formation of a vast society of Irish
Catholics, to enforce their “emancipation”--a measure which was
not brought about until twenty years later after long and vehement
opposition.
Two months were devoted to this generous but futile work; the people of
Ireland did not move, and the young reformer returned to England, but
without abandoning his _propaganda_ of the principles of liberty and
justice. While residing in Somersetshire he published a paper entitled
a _Declaration of Rights_, to circulate which recourse was had to
ingenious methods. Four years later, in 1817, he published _A Proposal
for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_. “He saw that
the House of Commons did not represent the country; and acting upon his
principle that Government is the servant of the Governed, he sought
means for ascertaining the real will of the nation with regard to its
Parliament, and for bringing the collective opinions of the population
to bear upon its rulers. The plan proposed was that a large network of
committees should be formed, and that by their means every individual
man should be canvassed. We find here the same method of advancing
reform by peaceable associations as in Ireland.” At the same time, in
presence of the incalculable amount of ignorance, destitution, and
consequent venality of the great mass of the community--the necessary
outcome of long ages of bad and selfish legislation--Universal
Suffrage for the present appeared to him to be not a safe experiment.
Evidence of controversial power, is his “grave and lofty” Letter to
Lord Ellenborough, who had recently sentenced to imprisonment the
printers of the _Age of Reason_, “an eloquent argument in favour of
toleration and the freedom of the intellect, carrying the matter beyond
the instance of legal tyranny, which occasioned its composition, and
treating it with philosophical if impassioned, seriousness.”[236]
Before his visit to Ireland, he had been engaged (as he tells his
correspondent, William Godwin) in writing _An Inquiry into the Causes
of the Failure of the French Revolution to Benefit Mankind_. We have
to lament that this Essay seems never to have been completed, since it
is hardly doubtful that it would have been of unusual interest. Such
was the force and activity of Shelley’s intellect, as displayed in the
regions of practical philosophy, at the age of twenty, and before he
had given to the world his first productions in poetry.
_Queen Mab_, written in part two years before, was finished and printed
in 1813. Although it may have some of the defects of immaturity of
genius, it has the charm of a genuine poetic inspiration. Intense
hatred of selfish injustice and untruth in all their shapes, equally
intense sympathy with all suffering, sublime faith in the ultimate
triumph of Good, clothed in the language of entrancing eloquence and
sublimity, are the characteristics of this unique poem. The author’s
depreciation of his earliest poetic attempt in after years, in a letter
addressed to the _Examiner_, only a month before his death, strikes us
as scarcely sincere, and as having been a sort of necessary sacrifice
on the altar of Expediency.
In this exquisitely beautiful prophecy of a “Golden Age” to be, the
fairy Queen Mab, the unembodied being who acts as his instructress and
guide through the Universe, displays to his affrighted vision, in one
vast panorama, the horrors of the Past and the Present. She afterwards,
in a glorious apocalypse, relieves his despair by revealing to him the
“new heavens and the new earth,” which eventually will displace the
present evil constitution of things on our planet. On the redeemed and
regenerated Globe:--
“Ambiguous Man! he that can know
More misery, and can dream more joy than all:
Whose keen sensations thrill within his heart,
To mingle with a loftier instinct there,
Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,
Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each:
Who stands amid the ever-varying world
The burden or the glory of the Earth--
He chief perceives the change: his being notes
The gradual renovation, and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind.
* * * * *
Here now the human being stands, adorning
This loveliest Earth with taintless body and mind.
Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,
Which gently in his truthful bosom wake
All kindly passions and all pure desires.
Him (still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing,
Which from the exhaustless store of human weal
Draws on the virtuous mind), the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age:
And Man, once fleeting o’er the transient scene,
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon Earth. _No longer now
He slays the Lamb who looks him in the face_,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging Nature’s broken law,
Kindled all putrid humours in his frame--
All evil passions and all vain belief--
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
No longer now the wingèd habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of Man.
* * * * *
All things are void of terror. Man has lost
His terrible prerogative, and stands
An equal amidst equals. Happiness
And Science dawn, though late, upon the Earth.
Peace cheers the mind, Health renovates the frame.
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst each, unfettered, o’er the Earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there;
Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends
Its force to the omnipotence of Mind,
Which from its dark mine drags the gem of Truth
To decorate its paradise of Peace.”
In rapt vision the prophet-poet apostrophises the “New Earth”:
“O happy Earth! reality of Heaven,
To which those restless souls, that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe, aspire.
* * * * *
Of purest spirits, thou pure dwelling-place,
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come.
O happy Earth! reality of Heaven.
Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams;
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness,
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss.
* * * * *
and the souls
That, by the paths of an aspiring change,
Have reached thy haven of perpetual Peace,
There rest from the eternity of toil,
That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.”
From the Essay, in the form of a note, which he subjoined to the
passage we have quoted, we extract the principal arguments:--
“Man, and the other animals whom he has afflicted with his malady
or depraved by his dominion, are _alone diseased_. The Bison,
the wild Hog, the Wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and
invariably die either from external violence or from mature old
age. But the domestic Hog, the Sheep, the Cow, the Dog, are subject
to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corruptors
of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries.
The super-eminence of man is, like Satan’s, the super-eminence of
pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease,
and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by
enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the
level of his fellow-animals. But the steps that have been taken
are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one
question: How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation be
reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life?
How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system
which is now interwoven with the fibre of our being? I believe
that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would, in
a great measure, capacitate us for the solution of this important
question.
“It is true that mental and bodily derangements are attributable,
in part, to other deviations from rectitude and nature than those
which concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting
the connexion of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of
unsatisfied celibacy, unenjoyed prostitution, and the premature
arrival of puberty, necessarily spring. The putrid atmosphere of
crowded cities, the exhalations of chemical processes, the muffling
of our bodies in superfluous apparel, the absurd treatment of
infants--all these, and innumerable other causes, contribute their
mite to the mass of human evil.
“Comparative Anatomy teaches us that man resembles the frugivorous
animals in everything, the carnivorous in nothing. He has neither
claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth
to tear the living fibre. A mandarin of the first class, with
nails two inches long, would probably find them alone inefficient
to hold even a hare. After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull
must be degraded into the “ox,” and the ram into the “wether,” by
an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may
offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is only by
softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it
is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the
sight of its bloody juice and raw horror does not excite loathing
and disgust.
“Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive
experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a
living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals,
slake his thirst with the streaming blood. When fresh from this
deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instinct of
nature that would rise in judgment against it and say, ‘Nature
formed me for such work as this.’ Then, and then only would he be
consistent.
“Man resembles no carnivorous animal. There is no exception, unless
man be one, to the rule of herbivorous animals having cellulated
colons.
“The orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order
and in the number of his teeth. The orang-outang is the most
anthropomorphous of the ape tribe, all of whom are strictly
frugivorous. There is no other species of animals, which live
on different food, in which this analogy exists.[237] In many
frugivorous animals the canine teeth are more pointed and distinct
than those of man. The resemblance also of the human stomach to
that of the orang-outang is greater than to that of any other
animal.
“The structure of the human frame, then, is that of one fitted to
a pure vegetable diet in every essential particular. It is true
that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have
been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons
of weak minds as to be scarcely overcome. But this is far from
bringing any argument in its favour. A Lamb, who was fed for some
time on flesh by a ship’s crew, refused her natural diet at the end
of the voyage. There are numerous instances of Horses, Sheep, Oxen,
and even Wood-Pigeons having been taught to live upon flesh until
they have loathed their natural aliment. Young children evidently
prefer pastry, oranges, apples, and other fruit, to the flesh of
animals, until, by the gradual depravation of the digestive organs,
the free use of vegetables has, for a time, produced serious
inconveniences--_for a time_, I say, since there never was an
instance wherein a change from spirituous liquors and animal food
to vegetables and pure water has failed ultimately to invigorate
the body by rendering its juices bland and consentaneous, and to
restore to the mind that cheerfulness and elasticity which not
one in fifty possesses on the present system. A love of strong
liquors also is with difficulty taught infants. Almost every one
remembers the wry faces which the first glass of port produced.
Unsophisticated instinct is invariably unerring, but to decide on
the fitness of animal food from the _perverted_ appetites which its
continued adoption produces, is to make the criminal a judge of his
own cause. It is even worse, for it is appealing to the infatuated
drunkard in a question of the salubrity of brandy.
“Except in children, there remain no traces of that instinct which
determines, in all other animals, what aliment is _natural_ or
otherwise; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning
adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge
considerations drawn from comparative anatomy to prove that we are
_naturally_ frugivorous.
“Crime is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of
disease shall be discovered, the root from which all vice and
misery have so long overshadowed the Globe will be bare to the
axe. All the exertions of man, from that moment, may be considered
as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sane mind in
a sane body resolves upon real crime.... The system of a simple
diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of
legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of
the human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged.
It _strikes at the root of all evil_, and is an experiment which
may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small
societies, families, and even individuals. In no cases has a return
to vegetable diet produced the slightest injury; in most it has
been attended with changes undeniably beneficial. Should ever a
physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuaded that he
might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural
habits as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to
sensation....