XI.—Aspects of Shelley

The last and greatest art—the art to blot?

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray’s than all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite. The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.

Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed—perhaps only a pot, indeed—rather than a garden. He produced in it one perfect bloom—theOde to Evening. The rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attitude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He is always careful not to confess. HisOde to Feardoes not admit us to any of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:

O thou whose spirit most possessed,The sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast!By all that from thy prophet brokeIn thy divine emotions spoke:Hither again thy fury deal,Teach me but once, like him, to feel;His cypress wreath my meed decree,And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

O thou whose spirit most possessed,

The sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast!

By all that from thy prophet broke

In thy divine emotions spoke:

Hither again thy fury deal,

Teach me but once, like him, to feel;

His cypress wreath my meed decree,

And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio’s terrible speech about death inMeasure for Measureto see the difference between pretence and passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in theOde to Eveningis that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man’s experiences but his own when he described how the

Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,Or where the beetle windsHis small but sullen horn.

Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,

With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,

Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn.

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less wasted. But theOde to Eveningjustifies both his pains and his indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of Thomas Warton that “all his odes … had the marks of repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets.” As for his indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him “too indolent even for the Army,” and advised him to enter the Church—a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by “a tobacconist in Fleet Street.” For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson writePulvis et Umbra?

Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of Indolence a happy place. “Low spirits,” he wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, “are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me.” The end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on the drowning of Horace Walpole’s cat) that his indolent melancholy was not without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole’s friend, and (while his father had a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness into which he could always retire. “I do not remember,” Mr. Gosse has said of Gray, “that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed.” This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as the saying is. He published theElegy in a Country Churchyardin 1751 only because the editors of theMagazine of Magazineshad got hold of a copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began theElegyas far back as 1746—Mason says it was begun in August, 1742—and did not finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as Mr. Yeats and “A.E.” brought about a poetic revival in our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew Arnold, who have denied that theElegyis the greatest of Gray’s poems. This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle.The Bardis a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But theElegyis more than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his most famous lines:

Some village Cato (——) with dauntless breastThe little tyrant of his fields withstood;Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest;Some Cæsar guiltless of his country’s blood.

Some village Cato (——) with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest;

Some Cæsar guiltless of his country’s blood.

Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we find in the final shape of this verse?

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breastThe little tyrant of his fields withstood;Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not a mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as near to one as one’s breath and one’s country. Not that theElegywould have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged deeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. But then does notHamletowe a great part of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as a “shrimp of an author,” and expressed the fear that his works might be mistaken for those of “a pismire or a flea.” But to make a mystery of the indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectly once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who said of him to Boswell, “Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.” Luckily, Gray’s reserve tempted him into his own heart and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in him only a “mechanical poet.” To most of us he seems the first natural poet in modern literature.

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Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is easy enough to attack him or defend him—to damn him as an infidel or to praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one’s sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories as a child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct. Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes. “Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said, “He cannot speak.” “But surely,” exclaimed Shelley, “he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible.” The woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: “It is not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age.” Shelley walked away with his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: “How provokingly close are these new-born babes!” One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. But in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the vulgar say, “a little above himself.” In any event it almost invariably appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley’s life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents. He was habitually “a bit above himself.” In the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions were quite as comically extraordinary.

Godwin is related to have said that “Shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked.” I doubt if there is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the word “wicked” to Shelley. It is said that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of £1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet’s sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting Shelley’s exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind. “Harriet,” says Mr. Ingpen inShelley in England, “foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes.” We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to “live up to him” any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, “it was love, not matrimony,” for which Shelley yearned. “Marriage,” Shelley had once written, echoing Godwin, “is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.” Having lived for years in a theory of “anti-matrimonialism,” he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself—a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock: “Everyone who knows me,” he said, “must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.” “It always appeared to me,” said Peacock, “that you were very fond of Harriet.” Shelley replied: “But you did not know how I hated her sister.” And so Harriet’s marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelley did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. “I write,” his letter runs—

to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me—all else are unfeeling, or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined.

He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter):

With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately yours, S.

This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either base or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be called innocence.

The most interesting of the “new facts and letters” in Mr. Ingpen’s book relate to Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with Harriet, and to his father’s attitude on both these occasions. Shelley’s father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort to understand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability. He objected to Shelley’s studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him a member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant “at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke.” How unpromising as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in 1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a satire on the Regentà proposof a Carlton House fête, but “amused himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to Carlton House after the fête.” Shelley’s methods of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes. His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet,An Address to the Irish People, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville Street, and threw copies to the passers-by. “I stand,” he wrote at the time, “at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a manwho looks likely; I throw a book to him.” Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener—“the Brown Demon,” as Shelley called her when he came to hate her—she said:

I’m sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated.

Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in hisAddresswhen he described the Act of Union as “the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.” Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple’s reckless daring. “Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!” he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the extent of Godwin’s influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the Irish people.

Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys’ family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley “appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama.” But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor’s words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. “It was mentioned to me yesterday,” he wrote to Shelley’s father in November, 1815, “that Mr. P.B. Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare’s plays, under the figured name of Cooks.” “The character of Shakespeare’s plays” sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical “tableaux vivants” of some sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this—the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad—is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever “an actor in Shakespearean drama.” At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of Shelley’s life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one’s own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley—a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley’s letters as well as for the biography—referring to Shelley again and again as “Bysshe.” Shelley’s family, it may be admitted, called him “Bysshe.” But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wroteThe SkylarkandPanandThe West Wind. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock’s account of this characteristic illusion:

He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant’s, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning.

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to readPrometheusagain in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. In an introduction to Medwin’sLife of Percy Bysshe Shelleyhe begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. “Last century,” he declares, “produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin’s distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether theByron Conversationsand theLife of Shelleyshould be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry.” Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the “perfect idiot” he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who “saw Shelley plain” in Browning’s lyric. None the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of English literature.

Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin’s father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying: “I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.” During his life at University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.

His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids—more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.

The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as a boy:

He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning from The clouds—fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.

And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is revealed in his reflection:

What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply!

Shelley’s many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop “under the assumed name of a woman.” It must have been in a somewhat similar mood that “one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill’s chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed name, proposing to preach to his congregation.”

Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in his childhood of novels likeZofloya the Moor—a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote—excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley’s own work—his forgotten novels,Zastrossi, andSt. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian—but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the story of the “stranger in a military cloak,” who, seeing him in a post-office at Pisa, said, “What! Are you that d—d atheist, Shelley?” and felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley’s story of his being attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the Serpentine, “counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water.” He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note—one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he “must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost £50.”

Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the “stag eyes,” so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race. “His figure,” Hogg tells us, “was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature.” And, in Medwin’s book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait—in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, “Mary, have I dined?” More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, “after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung’ Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd.” Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau’s. He was always longing to give himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet’s sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem abizarredefence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns—a universe in which

Like a thousand dawns on a single nightThe splendours rise and spread.

Like a thousand dawns on a single night

The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelley who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath’s disadvantageous bulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David’s, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation. His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in literature like Shelley’s. It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned

… to hope till Hope createsFrom its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

… to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of God.

In the great morning of the world,The Spirit of God with might unfurledThe flag of Freedom over Chaos.

In the great morning of the world,

The Spirit of God with might unfurled

The flag of Freedom over Chaos.

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure. InHellashe puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of a finer future to-day.

Obdurate spirit!Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.Pride is thy error and thy punishment.Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worldsAre more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-dropsBefore the Power that wields and kindles them.True greatness asks not space.

Obdurate spirit!

Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.

Pride is thy error and thy punishment.

Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds

Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops

Before the Power that wields and kindles them.

True greatness asks not space.

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley’s politics from his poetry. But Shelley’s politics are part of his poetry. They are the politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House of Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own time who believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations. Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear of being great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism was love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England. Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.

He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface toHellasin a paragraph which the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran:

Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent them will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.

It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body of Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song.

For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until our own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as the spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and invite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty into a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a spirit—

Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wroughtTo sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

His politics are implicit inThe CloudandThe SkylarkandThe West Wind, no less than inThe Mask of Anarchy. His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation.

It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. On the other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like Ariel’s and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like theHymn of PanandThe Indian Serenade.The Cloudis the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as it were, musically.

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.

There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing.

There is no other music but Shelley’s which seems to me likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this reason I hope that Professor Herford’s fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to Shelley again. Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with Mr. Hutchinson’s cheap and perfect “Oxford Edition” of Shelley. But the scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor Herford’s edition a new pleasure in old verse.

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Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed the “ablative” the “quale-quare-quidditive case.” Coleridge was thus born not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. He was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius. He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same stature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writers who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final phrase, “an archangel a little damaged.” This was said at a time when the archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then Lamb wrote: “His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory.” Most of Coleridge’s great contemporaries were aware of that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his mind, but even of his physical characteristics—his voice and his hair—as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ’s Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the “casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between thespeechand thegarbof the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus … or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of theinspired charity-boy!”

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries.ChristabelandKubla Kahnwe could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author’s name. For the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says: “I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.” His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a complete edition of his poems, under the titleSibylline Leaves, he omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience “a very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare.” His two finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. Chesterton’s poem, he “went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head,” and in the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an amusing account of the way in whichBiographia Literariacame to be written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface—to be “done in two, or at farthest three days”—to a collection of some “scattered and manuscript poems.” Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was now busy on a preface to anAutobiographia Literaria, sketches of my literary Life and Opinions. This in turn developed into “a full account (raisonné) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth’s poems and theory,” with a “disquisition on the powers of Association … and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination.” This ran to such a length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found himself unable to fill the second. “Then, as the volume obstinately remained too small, he tossed inSatyrane, an epistolary account of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817.” It is one of the ironies of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the “shaping imagination,” should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists.

Even so,Biographia Literariais a disappointing book. It is the porch, but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments—it was done in the age of Racine and in the age of Pope—but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the “inner light.” Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist’s attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that “inner light” and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the “inner light” has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature.Biographia Literariadoes this in its most admirable parts by interesting us in Coleridge’s own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge’s remarks on the irritability of minor poets—“men of undoubted talents, but not of genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire toappearmen of genius”—should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail,” conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time. Coleridge may have exaggerated the “manly hilarity” and “evenness and sweetness of temper” of men of genius. But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. “Experience informs us,” as Coleridge says, “that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.” As for Coleridge’s great service to Wordsworth’s fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from all that was false in Wordsworth’s reaction both in theory and in practice against “poetic diction.” Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. The valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but that it consisted of “translations of prose thoughts into poetic language.” Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that “the language from Pope’s translation of Homer to Darwin’sTemple of Naturemay, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose.” Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn hisOde, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, “two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry.” The truth is, Wordsworth created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself. Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three groups—language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound critic. “Language,” he declared, “is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.”

He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the phrase, “literary man,” abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises in sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares:

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