EPILOGUE.
After some deliberation I decided to give this little work on Shelley
the narrative rather than the essay form, impelled thereto by one
commanding reason. Shelley's life and his poetry are indissolubly
connected. He acted what he thought and felt, with a directness rare
among his brethren of the poet's craft; while his verse, with the
exception of "The Cenci", expressed little but the animating thoughts
and aspirations of his life. That life, moreover, was "a miracle of
thirty years," so crowded with striking incident and varied experience
that, as he said himself, he had already lived longer than his father,
and ought to be reckoned with the men of ninety. Through all
vicissitudes he preserved his youth inviolate, and died, like one whom
the gods love, or like a hero of Hellenic story, young, despite grey
hairs and suffering. His life has, therefore, to be told, in order that
his life-work may be rightly valued: for, great as that was, he, the
man, was somehow greater; and noble as it truly is, the memory of him is
nobler.
To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man passionate for
truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right as he discerned it. The
anomaly which made his practical career a failure, lay just here. The
right he followed was too often the antithesis of ordinary morality: in
his desire to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the
mark of prudence. The blending in him of a pure and earnest purpose with
moral and social theories that could not but have proved pernicious to
mankind at large, produced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his
actions no less than in his verse. We cannot, therefore, wonder that
society, while he lived, felt the necessity of asserting itself against
him. But now that he has passed into the company of the great dead, and
time has softened down the asperities of popular judgment, we are able
to learn the real lesson of his life and writings. That is not to be
sought in any of his doctrines, but rather in his fearless bearing, his
resolute loyalty to an unselfish and in the simplest sense benevolent
ideal. It is this which constitutes his supreme importance for us
English at the present time. Ours is an age in which ideals are rare,
and we belong to a race in which men who follow them so single-heartedly
are not common.
As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English literature--a
quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity, which severe
critics of other nations think we lack. Byron's daring is in a different
region: his elemental worldliness and pungent satire do not liberate our
energies, or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas. Wordsworth,
the very antithesis to Shelley in his reverent accord with institutions,
suits our meditative mood, sustains us with a sound philosophy, and
braces us by healthy contact with the Nature he so dearly loved. But in
Wordsworth there is none of Shelley's magnetism. $What remains of
permanent value in Coleridge's poetry--such work as "Christabel", the
"Ancient Mariner", or "Kubla Khan"--is a product of pure artistic fancy,
tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he
was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a
mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire
which burns in Shelley's verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation
of his favourite tenets. In none of Shelley's greatest contemporaries
was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and whether we consider his minor
songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge
that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our
language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not
only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best
translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist
and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do;
and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts
forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its
myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.
While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in
swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shelley, as an artist, had
faults from which the men with whom I have compared him were more free.
The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness,
incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective
realities. Even his warmest admirers, if they are sincere critics, will
concede that his verse, taken altogether, is marked by inequality. In
his eager self-abandonment to inspiration, he produced much that is
unsatisfying simply because it is not ripe. There was no defect of power
in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be pronounced in
estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature. Not only
was the poet young; but the fruit of his young mind had been plucked
before it had been duly mellowed by reflection. Again, he did not care
enough for common things to present them with artistic fulness. He was
intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with the roundness that
we find in Goethe's work. He flew at the grand, the spacious, the
sublime; and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he
had imagined. A certain want of faith in his own powers, fostered by the
extraordinary discouragement under which he had to write, prevented him
from finishing what he began, or from giving that ultimate form of
perfection to his longer works which we admire in shorter pieces like
the "Ode to the West Wind". When a poem was ready, he had it hastily
printed, and passed on to fresh creative efforts. If anything occurred
to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside. Some of these
defects, if we may use this word at all to indicate our sense that
Shelley might by care have been made equal to his highest self, were in
a great measure the correlative of his chief quality--the ideality, of
which I have already spoken. He composed with all his faculties, mental,
emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat of
intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest and most
passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his
ever-quick imagination. The result is that his finest work has more the
stamp of something natural and elemental--the wind, the sea, the depth
of air--than of a mere artistic product. Plato would have said: the
Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and, when he wrote, he was no
longer in his own control. There was, moreover, ever-present in his
nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world
can show, which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his
thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on
which he lived. He never willingly composed except under the impulse to
body forth a vision of the love and light and life which was the spirit
of the power he worshipped. This persistent upward striving, this
earnestness, this passionate intensity, this piety of soul and purity of
inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality to his poems. But it
cannot be expected that the colder perfections of Academic art should
always be found in them. They have something of the waywardness and
negligence of nature, something of the asymmetreia we admire in the
earlier creations of Greek architecture. That Shelley, acute critic and
profound student as he was, could conform himself to rule and show
himself an artist in the stricter sense, is, however, abundantly proved
by "The Cenci" and by "Adonais". The reason why he did not always
observe this method will be understood by those who have studied his
"Defence of Poetry", and learned to sympathize with his impassioned
theory of art.
Working on this small scale, it is difficult to do barest justice to
Shelley's life or poetry. The materials for the former are almost
overwhelmingly copious and strangely discordant. Those who ought to meet
in love over his grave, have spent their time in quarrelling about him,
and baffling the most eager seeker for the truth. (See Lady Shelley v.
Hogg; Trelawny v. the Shelley family; Peacock v. Lady Shelley; Garnett
v. Peacock; Garnett v. Trelawny; McCarthy v. Hogg, etc., etc.) Through
the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is impossible to
discern the whole personality of the man. By careful comparison and
refined manipulation of the biographical treasures at our disposal, a
fair portrait of Shelley might still be set before the reader with the
accuracy of a finished picture. That labour of exquisite art and of
devoted love still remains to be accomplished, though in the meantime
Mr. W.M. Rossetti's Memoir is a most valuable instalment. Shelley in his
lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection,
impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock,
Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the conviction that he was
the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever
met. The same conviction is forced upon his biographer. During his four
last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper,
wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth
were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his
character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without
losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience
into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of twenty-nine,
he stood upon the height of his most glorious achievement, ready to
unfold his wings for a yet sublimer flight. At that moment, when life at
last seemed about to offer him rest, unimpeded activity, and happiness,
death robbed the world of his maturity. Posterity has but the product of
his cruder years, the assurance that he had already outlived them into
something nobler, and the tragedy of his untimely end.
If a final word were needed to utter the unutterable sense of waste
excited in us by Shelley's premature absorption into the mystery of the
unknown, we might find it in the last lines of his own "Alastor":--
Art and eloquence,
And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.
It is a woe "too deep for tears," when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Percy Bysshe Shelley, by John Addington Symonds