Sir,--In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious
as to what was said by 'the herd of mankind,' if I may quote your own
phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in
his less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their
discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,
as you say, we 'pursue our serious folly as of old,' you are, one may
guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your
reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your
letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the
hands of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be 'Guilty,'
and the sentence 'Death.' Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or
frequent in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer
and steadier flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a
mixed jury and a merciful. The verdict is 'Well done,' and the sentence
Immortality of Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet
probably they will be less and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
province, and that your letters will outlive your lays. I know not
whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke
of your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied
cravats) as 'a gallery of your failures.' But the general voice does not
echo these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University
(not your own) once existed a band of men known as 'The Trinity
Sniffers.' Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of
the jurors who from time to time make themselves heard in your case.
The 'Quarterly Review', I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your
attempts as tainted by the spirit of 'The Liberal Movement in English
Literature;' and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success
that you were a Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and
the old rooms where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder,
King Alfred, once guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious
pilgrims.
But Conservatives, 't is rumoured, are still averse to your opinions,
and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble,
and, indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your
poems, like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are still
'in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young.' It is in
your lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass
an examination in the plot of "Prometheus Unbound" Talking of this
piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a
hankering after life in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited
memory from cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once
spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the
moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we
now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us 'Adonai, and 'Hellas' instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming cave-dweller he was
a brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L'homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of
your boyish efforts to add pretty girls 'to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free.'
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were 'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that
was the task of Shelley! 'To ask you for anything human,' you said, 'was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers,
one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks
on the common works of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of
things didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This
will disappoint you, who had 'a passion for reforming it.' Kings and
priests are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who
assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has
never, like 'kind Hunt,' been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge
of treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious
ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in
the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical
force, would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam,
and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised
and described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence
somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!
he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining
buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else
she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds
unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the
paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone
says) are 'our own flesh and blood,' and, as we compel them to be
vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.
Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a Bill for
extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political
happiness which we have sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to
hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for
Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in the
'Queen Mab' stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust condition
of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as
much of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of
_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This
curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of
commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe.
They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like
night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written
on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether
it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which
escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly
among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of 'old unhappy far-off
things, and _sorrows_ long ago.' Let us leave them and their squabbles
over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old
stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him 'The Real Shelley.' The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman
so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle
that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative
Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,
the Englishman who called you 'a damned Atheist' in the post-office at
Pisa. He finds that you had 'a little turned-up nose,' a feature no less
important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to
Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,
you were a 'phenomenal' liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly
insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of
self-approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, 'a bad
old man.' But enough of this inopportune brawler. For Humanity, of which
you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of
Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly--as slowly as doom came on Jupiter
in your 'Prometheus,' but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled,
perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will
read. by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse,
the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not
wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek)
make life worth enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky,
and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and
eclipse, he will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that
are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens. In
Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your
'voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and perhaps more deathless
than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human
spirit.