nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,
without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or
social tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he
instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and
turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to
writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical
experiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but
not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if
they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out
of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly
endowed for the world into which it had descended. It rejected
ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.
Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not
completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by
experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative
instincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few
men, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without
intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed
with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:
and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final
and only possible system of philosophy.
Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of these
nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and
cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished
child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,
but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The
cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what
little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but
uninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own
natural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he
hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of
understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in
idea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it
was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he
had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was
united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the
pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its
appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but
when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was
inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
for liberty and justice.
The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the
same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and
continual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so
clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to
the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and
horror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think,
the chief elements of his genius.
Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has
for its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the
actual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul
of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution
fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral
life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they
venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and
omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of
untasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other
moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where
they find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;
their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent
and sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are
fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like
liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or
plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's _Republic_. The Utopian
or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;
being well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in
fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on
earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at
least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,
to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.
Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called
idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that
hard-used word. He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,
in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a
psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the
universe. In his drama _Hellas_ he puts this view with evident
approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:
"This whole
Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.
Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be."
But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the
manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably
not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;
and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal
realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the
glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the
infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind
draws certain bright forms--the Platonic ideas--"the gathered rays
which are reality," as Shelley called them: and it is the light of
these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some
degree of reality and value, making out of them "lovely apparitions,
dim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting,
sculpture, and rapt poesy."
The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the
kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which
teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that
all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to
make the universe as good as it possibly could be. In this form,
idealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of
things as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that
be, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as
hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the
philosophy was that flattered them. For his moral feeling was based on
suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a
visioned good. His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once
elevated and sincere. It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and
by indignation. He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his
ethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of
the reality forced upon him instead. Hence that extraordinary moral
fervour which is the soul of his poetry. His imagination is no playful
undirected kaleidoscope; the images, often so tenuous and
metaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white
heat, embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration. If
we think that the _Cloud_ or the _West Wind_ or the _Witch of the
Atlas_ are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of _bataille des
fleurs_ in which we are pelted by a shower of images--we have not
understood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed
passion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion
of words. This is a point at which Francis Thompson's understanding of
Shelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray. The universe,
Thompson tells us, was Shelley's box of toys. "He gets between the
feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature,
and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to
see how she will look nicest in his song." This last is not, I think,
Shelley's motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.
He undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer
to the heart's desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some
more Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that
infinite beauty which is the need--the profound, aching, imperative
need--of the human soul. This recreative impulse of the poet's is not
wilful, as Thompson calls it: it is moral. Like the _Sensitive Plant_
"It loves even like Love,--its deep heart is full;
It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his
song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is
soon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs
from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,
but in the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,
he can exclaim:
"The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!
Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,
Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!"
To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement
sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,
to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror
of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he
could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of
distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,
or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the _Cenci_, he might urge
that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better
historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
to be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his
_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_. But to exaggerate good is to
vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
on the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the
want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
the wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in
intention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,
soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in
their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
past and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing
aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.
So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
the belief in perfectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and
an _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
offers. So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be
difficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle
him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
everything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of
righting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in
unstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought
to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,
end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all
scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,
or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to
existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,
it will seem too horrible to be true.
Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and
consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice
lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment
of martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of
victory. The _a priori_ spirit will therefore be always a prophet of
victory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world
at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the
desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to
the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise."
In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest
poems--in _Hellas_, in _Adonais_--he was perhaps a little inclined to
remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the
Christian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth
really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
described in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too
festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
cardinal point of his system." This cosmic extension of the conversion
of men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by
St. Augustine; and in the _Prometheus_ Shelley has allowed his fancy,
half in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm
contagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the
moon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.
Shelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution
of nature. It was hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting
rainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible
for him to entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,
it was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its
depths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of
backgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of
illusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such
a thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is
only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as
yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they
touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each
successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,
or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a
gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once
out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid
or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
of moral excellence."
That is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the
_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the
grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
heroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a
true symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.
Otherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his
poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;
he would have been a worldling in art and in morals. The clear fire,
the sustained breath, the fervent accent of his poetry are due to his
faith in his philosophy. As Mrs. Shelley expressed it, he "had no care
for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind,
and develop some high and abstruse truth." Had his poetry not dealt
with what was supreme in his own eyes, and dearest to his heart, it
could never have been the exquisite and entrancing poetry that it is.
It would not have had an adequate subject-matter, as, in spite of
Matthew Arnold, I think it had; for nothing can be empty that contains
such a soul. An angel cannot be ineffectual if the standard of
efficiency is moral; he is what all other things bring about, when
they are effectual. And a void that is alive with the beating of
luminous wings, and of a luminous heart, is quite sufficiently
peopled. Shelley's mind was angelic not merely in its purity and
fervour, but also in its moral authority, in its prophetic strain.
What was conscience in his generation was life in him.
The mind of man is not merely a sensorium. His intelligence is not
merely an instrument for adaptation. There is a germ within, a nucleus
of force and organisation, which can be unfolded, under favourable
circumstances, into a perfection inwardly determined. Man's
constitution is a fountain from which to draw an infinity of gushing
music, not representing anything external, yet not unmeaning on that
account, since it represents the capacities and passions latent in him
from the beginning. These potentialities, however, are no oracles of
truth. Being innate they are arbitrary; being _a priori_ they are
subjective; but they are good principles for fiction, for poetry, for
morals, for religion. They are principles for the true expression of
man, but not for the true description of the universe. When they are
taken for the latter, fiction becomes deception, poetry illusion,
morals fanaticism, and religion bad science. The orgy of delusion into
which we are then plunged comes from supposing the _a priori_ to be
capable of controlling the actual, and the innate to be a standard for
the true. That rich and definite endowment which might have made the
distinction of the poet, then makes the narrowness of the philosopher.
So Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of which he does not suspect the
possible cruelty, would impose his ideal of love and equality upon all
creatures; he would make enthusiasts of clowns and doves of vultures.
In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar
reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
enough within to make a second stellar universe.
An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question."
It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his
good is no less good than yours. Convince people of this--and who can
resist such perfect logic?--and _presto_ all property in things has
disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How
happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than
in our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love--and we
have just seen that love is a logical necessity--offers an easy and
final solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot
imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not
produce love. He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and
since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire
is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in
the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy
seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an
abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.