When I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in a
mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and more
interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I never found
anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that whatever of
philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and that one should
begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting nothing as the
make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can recollect my
thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has
shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from
the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from
historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers. Since
then I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now
certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that
the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is
still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know. I have
re-read _Prometheus Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would
have studied as a sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more
certain place than I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I
remember going to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which
I felt more than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin's
_Political Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude
revolutionist, and believed that the overturning of kings and priests
would regenerate mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons
ceased to prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to
show that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker, who
mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless one
compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe the
liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief that lay
behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full of subtlety,
for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he should be a
metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his 'huntings after the
obscure' with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_, which so many
for three generations have thought _Political Justice_ put into rhyme, 'It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are far
from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays on the
Nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what is obscure
in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observation and remarks alone
remain. He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to be
instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.' From these scattered
fragments and observations, and from many passages read in their light,
one soon comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the
liberty of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty,
and that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the
regeneration many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come
in its perfection till the hours bore 'Time to his grave in eternity.' In
_A Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station by
the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the other in
the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the Intellectual
Beauty. 'Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in
which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch of the world
legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises and unites both
these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is,
and discovers those laws according to which present things are to be
ordained, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are
the germs of the flowers and the fruit of latest time.' 'Language, colour,
form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments
and materials of poetry.' Poetry is 'the creation of actions according to
the unchangeable process of human nature as existing in the mind of the
creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.' 'Poets have been
challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and merchants.... It is
admitted that the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but
it is alleged that that of reason is the more useful.... Whilst the
mechanist abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them
be sure that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those
first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they
have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want.... The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer,...
such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of
the calculating faculty.' The speaker of these things might almost be
Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other
evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the Witch of
Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when she moves
over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the priests cast
aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock his own
sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat their swords
to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and friends are
united; while the power, which in _Laon and Cythna_, awakens the mind of
the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the tyrannies of the
world, is first seen, as the star of love or beauty. And at the end of
_The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to 'the spirit of beauty' to overturn
the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its 'harmonizing
ardours.' He calls the spirit of beauty liberty, because despotism, and
perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys,' all
authority, pluck virtue from her path towards beauty, and because it leads
us by that love whose service is perfect freedom. It leads all things by
love, for he cries again and again that love is the perception of beauty
in thought and things, and it orders all things by love, for it is love
that impels the soul to its expressions in thought and in action, by
making us 'seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we
experience within ourselves.' 'We are born into the world, and there is
something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
thirsts after its likeness.' We have 'a soul within our soul that
describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and
evil dare not overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors,
that we may possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the
progress of the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us
resist evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, 'with folded arms,' and 'not because active resistance is
not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce greater
advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them like advice
in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries, 'is love,' and
can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who followed Christ,
give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.
He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this beauty,
this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the hearts of
men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had found his
deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words to utter it,
for I do not think men change much in their deepest thought, he is less
anxious to change men's beliefs, as I think, than to cry out against that
serpent more subtle than any beast of the field, 'the cause and the effect
of tyranny.' He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have
'pure desire and universal love,' are happy in the midst of tyranny, and
he foresees a day when 'the spirit of nature,' the spirit of beauty of his
later poems, who has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human
heart,' shall have made men so virtuous that 'kingly glare will lose its
power to dazzle and silently pass by,' and as it seems even commerce, 'the
venal interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth
should purchase not,' come as silently to an end.
He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that 'power unappealable.'
Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is powerless, and can
only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our
thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray'; but
Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions
have replied--
'Where is the beauty, love and truth we seek
But in our minds? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?'
while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its
sources in 'the secret strength of things,' 'which governs thought and to
the infinite heavens is a law.' He even thought that men might be immortal
were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for
all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time
marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the 'Red Comet,' the image
of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its war with the star of
beauty, brought not only 'Fear, Hatred, Fraud, and Tyranny,' but 'Death,
Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.'
When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon,
when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible nature will put on
perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to _Queen Mab_, that
'there is no great extravagance in presuming ... that there should be a
perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human
species,' and thinks it 'certain that wisdom is not compatible with
disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth,
health in the true and comprehensive sense of the word is out of the reach
of civilized man.' In _Prometheus Unbound_ he sees, as in the ecstasy of a
saint, the ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of
danger
'by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,'
and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time
being borne 'to his tomb in eternity.'
This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part in
a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to
souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying Lionel hears
the song of the nightingale, and cries--
'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.'
And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as of a
mistress. 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white
radiance of eternity.' 'Die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou
wouldst seek;' and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture of
prophecy, for 'the fire for which all thirst' beams upon him, 'consuming
the last clouds of cold mortality.' When he is dead he will still
influence the living, for though Adonais has fled 'to the burning
fountains whence he came,' and 'is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,' and has 'awaked from
the dream of life,' he has not gone from 'the young dawn,' or the 'caverns
in the forests,' or 'the faint flowers and the fountains.' He has been
'made one with nature,' and his voice is 'heard in all her music,' and his
presence is felt wherever 'that power may move which has withdrawn his
being to its own,' and he bears 'his part' when it is compelling mortal
things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows men's minds at their
supreme moments, for
'when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.'
'Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit when
we appear to die,' Mrs. Shelley has written, 'a mystic ideality tinged
these speculations in Shelley's mind; certain stanzas in the poem of _The
Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea,
not that we die into another state, when this state is no longer, from
some reason, unapparent as well as apparent, accordant with our being--but
that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fade from before our
imperfect organs; they remain in their "love, beauty, and delight," in a
world congenial to them, and we, clogged by "error, ignorance, and
strife," see them not till we are fitted by purification and improvement
to their higher state.' Not merely happy souls, but all beautiful places
and movements and gestures and events, when we think they have ceased to
be, have become portions of the eternal.
'In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
This garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours are changed, not they.
For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.'
He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not know
whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil remain for
ever, 'thinking the thought and doing the deed,' though not, it may be,
self-conscious; or only thought that 'love and beauty and delight' remain
for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes 'all knowledge of the past,'
and the good and evil 'events of old and wondrous times,' was no more
doubtless than a part of the machinery of the poem, but all the
machineries of poetry are parts of the convictions of antiquity, and
readily become again convictions in minds that dwell upon them in a spirit
of intense idealism.
Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of mediæval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley's ignorance of their
more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of rootless
phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do in the visions
of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in Ireland, and the
forms of these changes display, in an especial sense, the glowing forms of
his mind when freed from all impulse not out of itself or out of
supersensual power. These are 'gleams of a remoter world which visit us in
sleep,' spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of all the
senses, sounds 'folded in cells of crystal silence,' 'visions swift and
sweet and quaint,' which lie waiting their moment 'each in his thin sheath
like a chrysalis,' 'odours' among 'ever-blooming eden trees', 'liquors'
that can give 'happy sleep,' or can make tears 'all wonder and delight';
'The golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams'; 'the
phantoms' which become the forms of the arts when 'the mind, arising
bright from the embrace of beauty,' 'casts on them the gathered rays which
are reality'; the 'guardians' who move in 'the atmosphere of human
thought' as 'the birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,' or
man's thought itself through all things; and who join the throng of the
happy hours when Time is passing away--
'As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep.'
It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all the
affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint songs, by
eddies of echoes that draw 'all spirits on that secret way,' by the 'dying
odours' of flowers and by 'the sunlight of the sphered dew,' beyond the
gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon, eternity, that 'the painted
veil' 'called life' may be 'torn aside.'
There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus--
'As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
The aërial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round;
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.'
Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_, coming
from the procession that follows the car of life, as 'hope' changes to
'desire,' shadows 'numerous as the dead leaves blown in autumn evening
from a poplar tree'; and resembling those they come from, until, if I
understand an obscure phrase aright, they are 'wrapt' round 'all the busy
phantoms that live there as the sun shapes the clouds.' Some to sit
'chattering like apes,' and some like 'old anatomies' 'hatching their bare
broods under the shade of dæmons' wings,' laughing 'to reassume the
delegated powers' they had given to the tyrants of the earth, and some
'like small gnats and flies' to throng 'about the brow of lawyers,
statesmen, priest and theorist,' and some 'like discoloured shapes of
snow' to fall 'on fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,' to be 'melted by
the youthful glow which they extinguish,' and many to 'fling shadows of
shadows yet unlike themselves,' shadows that are shaped into new forms by
that 'creative ray' in which all move like motes.
These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than metaphors
or picturesque phrases to one who believed the 'thoughts which are called
real or external objects' differed but in regularity of recurrence from
'hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,' and lessened this
difference by telling how he had dreamed 'three several times, between
intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream,' and who had seen
images with the mind's eye that left his nerves shaken for days together.
Shadows that were as when there
'hovers
A flock of vampire bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian vale,'
could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being to
one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had fainted
at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who had tried
to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams' account, because he
believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had sought refuge
there.
It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age of
faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the saints
have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had heard the
commandment, 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.' I have
re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time for many years, in the
woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills, and sometimes I have looked
towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country people say the last battle of
the world shall be fought till the third day, when a priest shall lift a
chalice, and the thousand years of peace begin. And I think this
mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of
those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand,
with Blake, that the holy spirit is 'an intellectual fountain,' and that
the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.