(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC
Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is
easy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or to
praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw
herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from
recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine
anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an
air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and
again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the
kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He
lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories as
a child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which
shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct.
Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the
theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen
Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child,
while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung
on to it by the clothes. "Will your baby tell us anything about
pre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful
look. She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said,
"He cannot speak." "But surely," exclaimed Shelley, "he can if he will,
for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but
it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of
speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible." The woman,
obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "It is not for me to
dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard
him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age." Shelley walked away with
his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "How provokingly close are these
new-born babes!" One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the
lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. But
in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a
piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the
vulgar say, "a little above himself." In any event it almost invariably
appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley's
life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents.
He was habitually "a bit above himself." In the above incident he may have
been consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions were
quite as comically extraordinary.
Godwin is related to have said that "Shelley was so beautiful, it was a
pity he was so wicked." I doubt if there is a single literate person in
the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Shelley. It is said
that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the
same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of
Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full
story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a
peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to
become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of
£1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife
and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love.
A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in
order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of
three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an
intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is
suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops
instead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she should
cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_,
"foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose
advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon
Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive
clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same
time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to
remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even
to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was
love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had
once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of
ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its
energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he
now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had
always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a
time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same
intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the
great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed
the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock:
"Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life
should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a
noble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said
Peacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Shelley replied: "But you
did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines
were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelley
did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that,
within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to
Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled,
and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. "I write," his
letter runs--
to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least
find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be
always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.
From none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or
selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville],
to whom their attention and affection is confined.
He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter):
With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately
yours, S.
This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either
base or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be
called innocence.
The most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in Mr. Ingpen's book
relate to Shelley's expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with
Harriet, and to his father's attitude on both these occasions. Shelley's
father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the
story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort to
understand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability.
He objected to Shelley's studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him
a member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk
to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly
indignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and
introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke." How unpromising
as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in
1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a
satire on the Regent _à propos_ of a Carlton House fête, but "amused
himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to
Carlton House after the fête." Shelley's methods of propaganda were on
other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes.
His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the
Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda
by pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _An Address to the Irish
People_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville
Street, and threw copies to the passers-by. "I stand," he wrote at the
time, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man _who looks
likely_; I throw a book to him." Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the
comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener--"the Brown
Demon," as Shelley called her when he came to hate her--she said:
I'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We
throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in
the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is
done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's
hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could
hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated.
Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than
the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in
his _Address_ when he described the Act of Union as "the most successful
engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland."
Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became
alarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "Shelley, you are preparing a
scene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the
extent of Godwin's influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his
Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks
on his mission to the Irish people.
Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a
compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the book
were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys'
family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge
of the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage to
Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and
that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds
that they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor
Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William
Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been
at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday,"
he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Shelley was
exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare's
plays, under the figured name of Cooks." "The character of Shakespeare's
plays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking
about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some
sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would
naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to
the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever "an actor in
Shakespearean drama." At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic
praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an
indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some
extent followed the events of Shelley's life until the end, he had filled
in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book
is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with
gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts
rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of
Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.
One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--a
student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of
Shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley again
and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him
"Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who
brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography
over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow
express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great
extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_
and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old
woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen
quotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion:
He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to
swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled
over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms,
and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from
smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by
a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation
existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this
singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of
lightning.
Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous.
After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however,
one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of
a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.
(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST
Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice.
In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ he begins by
frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of
controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Last
century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were
valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin's
distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are
valuable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Shelley_
should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two
worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." Medwin,
we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called,
would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron.
But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or
near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends,
the original of the man who "saw Shelley plain" in Browning's lyric. None
the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A
relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in
Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot
help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a
treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in
the history of English literature.
Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland,
continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth.
Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the
age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only
in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar
microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we
are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his own
father sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book on
chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton." During his life at
University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.
His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise
nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had
inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had
seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he
should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his
furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one
hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of
combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor
had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a
crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents,
for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of
truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.
The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as
a boy:
He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical
one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning
from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.
And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is
revealed in his reflection:
What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially
in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will
furnish them with a constant supply!
Shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early
to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into
controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw
one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop
"under the assumed name of a woman." It must have been in a somewhat
similar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel,
and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed
name, proposing to preach to his congregation."
Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth
itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in
his childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild,
apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination
to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study
the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley's own work--his forgotten
novels, _Zastrossi_, and _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian_--but we can see
how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of
his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the
story of the "stranger in a military cloak," who, seeing him in a
post-office at Pisa, said, "What! Are you that d--d atheist, Shelley?" and
felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley's story of his being
attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved for
three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the
most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it
was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His
imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances
by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix
up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish.
Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he
noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in
London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself
with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the
Serpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the
flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water." He found a
perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one
occasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, which
gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in
games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many
comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private life
was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As
Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had a
rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost
£50."
Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination
of that boyish figure with the "stag eyes," so enthusiastically in pursuit
of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of
the human race. "His figure," Hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, and
yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much
that he seemed of low stature." And, in Medwin's book, we even become
reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people
found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait
of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable
materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he
used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would
get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have I
dined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is
the account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in
the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair,
overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that
sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like
this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is
a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and
imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his
own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English
history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the
other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even
such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to give
himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an
expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of
being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his
heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge
him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But
it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the
marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he
so long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he
neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were
consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a
_bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley
behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done,
given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who
never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most
men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in
a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter
of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can
hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.
(3) THE POET OF HOPE
Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as
Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being
intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the
future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the
skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of
skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread.
He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly
in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose
to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among
stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day
of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelley
who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him,
however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous
bulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem
to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in
gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation.
His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns
even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in
literature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or
untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the
unselfish, has learned
... to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim
and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been bound
into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it
was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first
intention of God.
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos.
Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of
God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the
perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devoted
enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to
a treasure. In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of
Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of
a finer future to-day.
Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space.
There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics from
his poetry. But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry. They are the
politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt
his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the
result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years
later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope,
fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of
its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy
of idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a
shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House
of Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new
earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an
extravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own time
who believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet
to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations.
Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion
was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear of
being great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing to
make his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the other
hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism was
love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England.
Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of
mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have
arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.
He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph which
the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by
Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran:
Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon
the part which those who presume to represent them will have played
in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which
it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of
the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those
ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers,
called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common
enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a
mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth
are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe,
nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and
she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that
destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.
It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new
race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to
see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do
not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day
as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and
domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body
of Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song.
For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to
earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to
brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until
our own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it
seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as the
spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave,
golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and
invite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself
became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty
into a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a
spirit--
Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The West
Wind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_. His idea of the State as
well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant
imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the
strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation.
It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if
he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He would, one fancies,
have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. On the
other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is
surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals in
a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song
like Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him a
poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded
songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the
_Hymn of Pan_ and _The Indian Serenade_. _The Cloud_ is the most magical
transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language.
Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things,
as it were, musically.
My soul is an enchanted boat
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.
There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing.
There is no other music but Shelley's which seems to me likely to bring
healing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this reason I hope that
Professor Herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the
first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to
Shelley again. Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the
same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest
is shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with Mr.
Hutchinson's cheap and perfect "Oxford Edition" of Shelley. But the
scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor
Herford's edition a new pleasure in old verse.