VIIISHELLEY

Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England, as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image—“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”? Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even, have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no great poet is ineffectual. We might as well calla star ineffectual. In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the word.

He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is “the sole law which should govern the moral world” led him inLaon and Cythna(later transformed intoThe Revolt of Islam) to make the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared, “intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life.” It was introduced “merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has a tendency to promote.” Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to the improvement of his readers’ morals? He did notwish his readers to practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.

Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political, like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards achieving the earthly paradise he foretold inThe Mask of AnarchyandPrometheus Unbound.

It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define Shelley’s genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems donot seem to be quite vertebrate—to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But Shelley, like his skylark, is a “scorner of the ground,” and our feet do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are carried from landscape to landscape. InAlastor, scene succeeds scene faster than the eye can seize it.

Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape. This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.” Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot die,” is the cloud’s boast:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,The pavilion of heaven is bare,And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,Build up the blue dome of air,I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,And out of the caverns of rain,Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,I arise and unbuild it again.

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

Shelley, too, could create these beautiful and unsubstantial shapes from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis. The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy:

I sang of the dancing stars,I sang of the dædal Earth,And of Heaven—and the giant wars,And Love, and Death, and Birth—And then I changed my pipings—Singing how down the vale of MenalusI pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:All wept, as I think both ye now would,If envy or age had not frozen your blood,At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal Earth,

And of Heaven—and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth—

And then I changed my pipings—

Singing how down the vale of Menalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction that many people feel when reading his poetry—with a life that is too full of mirages and metamorphoses.

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung:

Poets are on this cold earth,As chameleons might be,Hidden from their early birthIn a cave beneath the sea.Where light is, chameleons change!Where love is not, poets do:Fame is love disguised: if fewFind either, never think it strangeThat poets range.

Poets are on this cold earth,

As chameleons might be,

Hidden from their early birth

In a cave beneath the sea.

Where light is, chameleons change!

Where love is not, poets do:

Fame is love disguised: if few

Find either, never think it strange

That poets range.

For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.

This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent—the gift by which the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place—but Shelley had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”:

So their plumes of purple grain,Starred with drops of golden rain,Gleam above the sunlight woods,As in silent multitudesOn the morning’s fitful galeThrough the broken mist they sail.

So their plumes of purple grain,

Starred with drops of golden rain,

Gleam above the sunlight woods,

As in silent multitudes

On the morning’s fitful gale

Through the broken mist they sail.

No naturalist could have been more accurate in his description than this. Shelley, indeed, claimed for himself in the preface toLaon and Cythnathat, in his imagery, he was essentially and supremely a poet of experience:

I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn.

All this was true, but Shelley was too impatient of experience to rely on it when there was a richer world of images at hand. Images—imagespassing into each other—meant more to him than experience as he wrote such lines as

My soul is an enchanted boatWhich, like a sleeping swan, doth floatUpon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

My soul is an enchanted boat

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

He said himself of the poet that

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,But feeds on the aërial kissesOf shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.

There was never another poet of whom this was so true as of himself. Even when he writes

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,

or,

I see the waves upon the shore,Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,

he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world. There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are not made of substances but of dreams—a world in which we walk over rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.

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