SHELLEY

By Sydney Waterlow

 Published London: T. C. & E. C. Jack 67 Long Acre, W. C. , and Edinburgh New York: Dodge Publishing Co. 1913. 

Contents

 I. SHELLEY AND HIS AGE II. PRINCIPAL WRITINGS III. THE POET OF REBELLION, OF NATURE, AND OF LOVE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Chapter I. Shelley and His Age

In the case of most great writers our interest in them as persons isderived from out interest in them as writers; we are not very curiousabout them except for reasons that have something to do with theirart. With Shelley it is different. During his life he aroused fears andhatreds, loves and adorations, that were quite irrelevant to literature;and even now, when he has become a classic, he still causes excitementas a man. His lovers are as vehement as ever. For them he is the "bannerof freedom, " which, "Torn but flying, Streams like a thunder-cloud against the wind. "

He has suffered that worst indignity of canonisation as a being saintlyand superhuman, not subject to the morality of ordinary mortals. Hehas been bedaubed with pathos. Nevertheless it is possible still torecognise in him one of the most engaging personalities that ever lived. What is the secret of this charm? He had many characteristics thatbelong to the most tiresome natures; he even had the qualities of theman as to whom one wonders whether partial insanity may not be hisbest excuse--inconstancy expressing itself in hysterical revulsions offeeling, complete lack of balance, proneness to act recklessly to thehurt of others. Yet he was loved and respected by contemporaries oftastes very different from his own, who were good judges and intolerantof bores--by Byron, who was apt to care little for any one, least ofall for poets, except himself; by Peacock, who poured laughter on allenthusiasms; and by Hogg, who, though slightly eccentric, was a Toryeccentric. The fact is that, with all his defects, he had two qualitieswhich, combined, are so attractive that there is scarcely anything theywill not redeem--perfect sincerity without a thought of self, and vividemotional force. All his faults as well as his virtues were, moreover, derived from a certain strong feeling, coloured in a peculiar waywhich will be explained in what follows--a sort of ardour of universalbenevolence. One of his letters ends with these words: "Affectionatelove to and from all. This ought to be not only the vale of a letter, but a superscription over the gate of life"--words which, expressing notmerely Shelley's opinion of what ought to be, but what he actually felt, reveal the ultimate reason why he is still loved, and the reason, too, why he has so often been idealised. For this universal benevolence isa thing which appeals to men almost with the force of divinity, stillcarrying, even when mutilated and obscured by frailties, some suggestionof St. Francis or of Christ. 

The object of these pages is not to idealise either his life, hischaracter, or his works. The three are inseparably connected, and tounderstand one we must understand all. The reason is that Shelley is oneof the most subjective of writers. It would be hard to name a poet whohas kept his art more free from all taint of representation of the real, making it nor an instrument for creating something life-like, but a moreand more intimate echo or emanation of his own spirit. In studying hiswritings we shall see how they flow from his dominating emotion of lovefor his fellow-men; and the drama of his life, displayed against thebackground of the time, will in turn throw light on that emotion. His benevolence took many forms--none perfect, some admirable, someridiculous. It was too universal. He never had a clear enough perceptionof the real qualities of real men and women; hence his loves forindividuals, as capricious as they were violent, always seem to lacksomething which is perhaps the most valuable element in human affection. If in this way we can analyse his temperament successfully, the processshould help us to a more critical understanding, and so to a fullerenjoyment, of the poems. 

This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of the RomanticMovement in English literature, appeared in an age which, following onthe series of successful wars that had established British power allover the world, was one of the gloomiest in our history. If in some waysthe England of 1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others itlagged far behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us froma nation of peasants and traders into a nation of manufacturers, hadbegun; but its chief fruits as yet were increased materialism andgreed, and politically the period was one of blackest reaction. Aloneof European peoples we had been untouched by the tide of Napoleon'sconquests, which, when it receded from the Continent, at least leftbehind a framework of enlightened institutions, while our success in theNapoleonic wars only confirmed the ruling aristocratic families in theirgrip of the nation which they had governed since the reign of Anne. This despotism crushed the humble and stimulated the high-spirited toviolence, and is the reason why three such poets as Byron, Landor, andShelley, though by birth and fortune members of the ruling class, werepioneers as much of political as of spiritual rebellion. Unable tobreathe the atmosphere of England, they were driven to live in exile. 

It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. Aforeign critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. Iv. Of his 'Main Currents ofNineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that Englandwas then pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her nativeenergy was diverted to oppression, in morals and religion it took theform of hypocrisy and persecution. Abroad she was supporting the HolyAlliance, throwing her weight into the scale against all movements forfreedom. At home there was exhaustion after war; workmen were thrown outof employment, and taxation pressed heavily on high rents and the highprice of corn, was made cruel by fear; for the French Revolution hadsent a wave of panic through the country, not to ebb until about 1830. Suspicion of republican principles--which, it seemed, led straight tothe Terror--frightened many good men, who would otherwise have beenreformers, into supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism. The elder generation of poets had been republicans in their youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it was "bliss to be alive" inthat dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even planned to found a communisticsociety in the New World. Now all three were rallied to the defence oforder and property, to Church and Throne and Constitution. From theirseclusion in the Lakes, Southey and Wordsworth praised the royal familyand celebrated England as the home of freedom; while Thomson wrote"Rule, Britannia, " as if Britons, though they never, never would beslaves to a foreigner, were to a home-grown tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than that of Napoleon. England had stamped out theIrish rebellion of 1798 in blood, had forced Ireland by fraud into theUnion of 1800, and was strangling her industry and commerce. Catholicscould neither vote nor hold office. At a time when the population of theUnited Kingdom was some thirty millions, the Parliamentary franchise waspossessed by no more than a million persons, and most of the seatsin the House of Commons were the private property of rich men. Representative government did not exist; whoever agitated for somemeasure of it was deported to Australia or forced to fly to America. Glasgow and Manchester weavers starved and rioted. The press was gaggedand the Habeas Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second rebellionin Ireland, when Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young hands in Erin'sgore, " was suppressed with unusual ferocity. In England in 1812 faminedrove bands of poor people to wander and pillage. Under the criminallaw, still of medieval cruelty, death was the punishment for the theftof a loaf or a sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--onthe one hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vastChurch-and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who had"a stake in the country. " The strain was not to be relieved until theReform Act of 1832 set the wheels in motion again; they then movedpainfully indeed, but still they moved. Meanwhile Parliament was thestronghold of selfish interests; the Church was the jackal of thegentry; George III, who lost the American colonies and maintained negroslavery, was on the throne, until he went mad and was succeeded by hisprofligate son. 

Shelley said of himself that he was

 "A nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, "

and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his life andin his verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex family that was loyallyWhig and moved in the orbit of the Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and thetalk about emancipation which he would hear at home may partly explainhis amazing invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen yearsold, with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the repealof the Union Act--subjects on which he was quite ignorant. He addressedmeetings, wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets "consisting ofthe benevolent and tolerant deductions of philosophy reduced into thesimplest language. " Later on, when he had left England for ever, hestill followed eagerly the details of the struggle for freedom at home, and in 1819 composed a group of poems designed to stir the masses fromtheir lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was in office, withSidmouth as Home Secretary and Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary, a pairwhom he thus pillories:

 "As a shark and dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic Isle, For the negro ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills the while--

 Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one. "

The most effective of these bitter poems is 'The Masque of Anarchy', called forth by the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester on August 16, 1819, when hussars had charged a peaceable meeting held in supportof Parliamentary reform, killing six people and wounding some seventyothers. Shelley's frenzy of indignation poured itself out in theterrific stanzas, written in simplest language so as to be understood bythe people, which tell how

 "I met a murder on the way-- He had a mask like Castlereagh-- Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him. "

The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in 1819'--

 "An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, --mud from a muddy spring. "

and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay insinister humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by thegrunting of pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the quarrel betweenthe Prince Regent and his wife. When the Princess of Wales (Caroline ofBrunswick-Wolfenbuttel), after having left her husband and perambulatedEurope with a paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession asGeorge IV, to claim her position as Queen, the royal differences becamean affair of high national importance. The divorce case which followedwas like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of the distempers of the age. Shelley felt that sort of disgust which makes a man rave and curse underthe attacks of some loathsome disease; if he laughs, it is the laugh offrenzy. In the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which wassent home, published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men ofEngland as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted hog's-wash astheir tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will allow them. At the end, when the pigs, rollicking after the triumphant Princess, hunt down theiroppressors, we cannot help feeling a little sorry that he does not glidefrom the insistent note of piggishness into some gentler mood: their isa rasping quality in his humour, even though it is always on the side ofright. He wrote one good satire though. This is 'Peter Bell the Third'(1819), an attack on Wordsworth, partly literary for the dulness ofhis writing since he had been sunk in clerical respectability, partlypolitical for his renegade flunkyism. 

In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern Europe began to lift inthe south. After Napoleon's downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-16)had parcelled Europe out on the principle of disregarding nationalaspirations and restoring the legitimate rulers. This system, which could not last, was first shaken by revolutions that set upconstitutional governments in Spain and Naples. Shelley hailed thesestreaks of dawn with joy, and uttered his enthusiasm in two odes--the'Ode to Liberty' and the 'Ode to Naples'--the most splendid of thosecries of hope and prophecy with which a long line of English poets hasencouraged the insurrection of the nations. Such cries, however, have novisible effect on the course of events. Byron's jingles could change theface of the world, while all Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations leftno mark on history. And so it was, not with his republican ardoursalone, but with all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced hiscontemporaries outside his immediate circle; the public only noticed himto execrate the atheist, the fiend, and the monster. He felt that "hisname was writ on water, " and languished for want of recognition. Hislife, a lightning-flash across the storm-cloud of the age, was a briefbut crowded record of mistakes and disasters, the classical example ofthe rule that genius is an infinite capacity for getting into trouble. 

Though poets must "learn in suffering what they teach in song, " there isoften a vein of comedy in their lives. If we could transport ourselvesto Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a certain afternoon inthe early spring of 1811, we should behold a scene apparently swayedentirely by the Comic Muse. The member for Shoreham, Mr. TimothyShelley, a handsome, consequential gentleman of middle age, whopiques himself on his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests todinner--his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. J. Hogg, who have justbeen sent down from Oxford for a scandalous affair of an aestheticalsquib. When the young men arrive at five o'clock, Mr. Shelley receivesHogg, an observant and cool-headed person, with graciousness, and anhour is spent in conversation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, "in anodd, unconnected manner, scolding, crying, swearing, and then weepingagain. " After dinner, his son being out of the room, he expresses hissurprise to Hogg at finding him such a sensible fellow, and asks himwhat is to be done with the scapegoat. "Let him be married to a girl whowill sober him. " The wine moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley becomesmaudlin and tearful again. He is a model magistrate, the terror and theidol of poachers; he is highly respected in the House of Commons, andthe Speaker could not get through the session without him. Then hedrifts to religion. God exists, no one can deny it; in fact, he has theproof in his pocket. Out comes a piece of paper, and arguments are readaloud, which his son recognises as Palley's. "Yes, they are Palley'sarguments, but he had them from me; almost everything in Palley's bookhe had taken from me. " The boy of nineteen, who listens fuming to thisfolly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In appearance he is noordinary being. A shock of dark brown hair makes his small round headlook larger than it really is; from beneath a pale, freckled forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a stag's, beam an earnestness whicheasily flashes into enthusiasm; the nose is small and turn-up, thebeardless lips girlish and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops, and has anair of feminine fragility, though his bones and joints are large. Handsand feet, exquisitely shaped, are expressive of high breeding. Hisexpensive, handsome clothes are disordered and dusty, and bulging withbooks. When he speaks, it is in a strident peacock voice, and there isan abrupt clumsiness in his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, wherehe is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture. Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, areevident in every tone; it is clear that he is an aristocrat, but it isalso clear that he is a saint. 

The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been impossible ina well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe Shelley could not havefitted easily into any system. Born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, onAugust 4, 1792, simultaneously with the French Revolution, he had morethan a drop of wildness in his blood. The long pedigree of the Shelleyfamily is full of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather, SirBysshe, an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been marriedtwice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at EtonShelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of authority, he had gonehis own way, spending pocket-money on revolutionary literature, tryingto raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical experiments. As often happensto queer boys, his school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him withblows and cries of "Mad Shelley. " But the holidays were happy. Theremust have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his sistersstories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Great Tortoise thatlived in Warnham Pond, " frightened them with electric shocks, and taughthis baby brother to say devil. There is something of high-spirited funeven in the raptures and despairs of his first love for his cousin, Harriet Grove. He tried to convert her to republican atheism, untilthe family, becoming alarmed, interfered, and Harriet was disposed ofotherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!" exclaims Shelley. He spentnights "pacing the churchyard, " and slept with a loaded pistol andpoison beside him. 

He went in to residence at University College, Oxford, in the Michaelmasterm of 1810. The world must always bless the chance which sent ThomasJefferson Hogg a freshman to the same college at the same time, and madehim Shelley's friend. The chapters in which Hogg describes their live atOxford are the best part of his biography. In these lively pages we see, with all the force of reality, Shelley working by fits in a litter ofbooks and retorts and "galvanic troughs, " and discoursing on the vastpossibilities of science for making mankind happy; how chemistry willturn deserts into cornfields, and even the air and water will year fireand food; how Africa will be explored by balloons, of which the shadows, passing over the jungles, will emancipate the slaves. In the midst hewould rush out to a lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that itwas all about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held endless talk of metaphysics, pre-existence, and the scepticalphilosophy, on winter walks across country, and all night beside thefire, until Shelley would curl up on the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy because he was left to himself. With all his thoughts andimpulses, ill-controlled indeed, but directed to the acquisition ofknowledge for the benefit of the world, such a student would nowadays bea marked man, applauded and restrained. But the Oxford of that day wasa home of "chartered laziness. " An academic circle absorbed in intriguesfor preferment, and enlivened only by drunkenness and immorality, couldoffer nothing but what was repugnant to Shelley. He remained a solitaryuntil the hand of authority fell and expelled him. 

He had always had a habit of writing to strangers on the subjects nexthis heart. Once he approached Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwardsMrs. Hemans), who had not been encouraging. Now half in earnest, andhalf with an impish desire for dialectical scores, he printed a pamphleton 'The Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet concisely provingthat no reason for the existence of God can be valid, and sent it tovarious personages, including bishops, asking for a refutation. It fellinto the hands of the college authorities. Summoned before the councilto say whether he was the author, Shelley very properly refused toanswer, and was peremptorily expelled, together with Hogg, who hadintervened in his behalf. 

The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a house where a wall-paperwith a vine-trellis pattern caught Shelley's fancy. Mr. Timothy Shelleyappeared on the scene, and, his feelings as a Christian and a fatherdeeply outraged, did the worst thing he could possibly have done--hemade forgiveness conditional on his son's giving up his friend. The nextstep was to cut off supplies and to forbid Field Place to him, lest heshould corrupt his sisters' minds. Soon Hogg had to go to York towork in a conveyancer's office, and Shelley was left alone in London, depressed, a martyr, and determined to save others from similarpersecution. In this mood he formed a connection destined to end intragedy. His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among thegirls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of acoffee-house keeper. Shelley became intimate with the Westbrooks, andset about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a neatfigure, and a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce hisdoctrines. The child seems to have been innocent enough, but her eldersister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to entanglethe future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by encouragingHarriet to believe herself the victim of tyranny at school. Still, itwas six months before he took the final step. How he could save Harrietfrom scholastic and domestic bigotry was a grave question. In the firstplace, hatred of "matrimonialism" was one of his principles, yet itseemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of illicit union;in the second place, he was at this time passionately interested inanother woman, a certain Miss Hitchener, a Sussex school mistress ofrepublican and deistic principles, whom he idealised as an angel, onlyto discover soon, with equal falsity, that she was a demon. At lastHarriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection. They fled bythe northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg to join them, andcontracted a Scottish marriage at Edinburgh on August 28, 1811. 

The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelleylived with Harriet must seem insane to a rational mind. Life was onecomfortless picnic. When Shelley wanted food, he would dart into a shopand buy a loaf or a handful of raisins. Always accompanied by Eliza, they changed their dwelling-place more than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt, Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburghagain, and Windsor, successively received this fantastic household. Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, andeach formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensivebeneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley embarked onthe construction of an embankment to reclaim a drowned tract of land;'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; andfrom Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he openedcorrespondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personalrelations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropicschemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notionof adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. ElizaWestbrook, at first a woman of estimable qualities, quickly became "ablind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, whohad been induced to give up her school and come to live with them "forever, " was discovered to be a "brown demon, " and had to be pensionedoff. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted apart, and he foundconsolation in a sentimental attachment to a Mrs. Boinville and herdaughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who read Italian poetry with himand sang to guitars. Harriet had borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but sheherself was a child, who soon wearied of philosophy and of being taughtLatin; naturally she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a settlement. Eggedon by her sister, she spent on plate and a carriage the money thatShelley would have squandered on humanity at large. Money difficultiesand negotiations with his father were the background of all this period. On March 24, 1814, he married Harriet in church, to settle any possiblequestion as to the legitimacy of his children; but they parted soonafter. Attempts were made at reconciliation, which might have succeededhad not Shelley during this summer drifted into a serious and relativelypermanent passion. He made financial provision for his wife, who gavebirth to a second child, a boy, on November 30, 1814; but, as the monthspassed, and Shelley was irrevocably bound to another, she lost heart forlife in the dreariness of her father's house. An Irish officer took herfor his mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was found drowned in theSerpentine. Twenty days later Shelley married his second wife. 

This marriage was the result of his correspondence with William Godwin, which had ripened into intimacy, based on community of principles, withthe Godwin household. The philosopher, a short, stout old man, presided, with his big bald head, his leaden complexion, and his air of adissenting minister, over a heterogeneous family at 41 Skinner Street, Holborn, supported in scrambling poverty by the energy of the secondMrs. Godwin, who carried on a business of publishing children's books. In letters of the time we see Mrs. Godwin as a fat little woman ina black velvet dress, bad-tempered and untruthful. "She is a verydisgusting woman, and wears green spectacles, " said Charles Lamb. Besides a small son of the Godwins, the family contained four othermembers--Clara Mary Jane Clairmont and Charles Clairmont (Mrs. Godwin'schildren by a previous marriage), Fanny Godwin (as she was called), andMary Godwin. These last two were the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of 'The Rights of Women', the great feminist, who had beenGodwin's first wife. Fanny's father was a scamp called Imlay, and Marywas Godwin's child. 

Mary disliked her stepmother, and would wander on fine days to readbeside her mother's grave in Old St. Pancras Churchyard. This girl ofseventeen had a strong if rather narrow mind; she was imperious, ardent, and firm-willed. She is said to have been very pale, with golden hairand a large forehead, redeemed from commonplace by hazel eyes which hada piercing look. When sitting, she appeared to be of more than averageheight; when she stood, you saw that she had her father's stumpy legs. Intellectually, and by the solidity of her character, she was betterfitted to be Shelley's mate than any other woman he ever came across. It was natural that she should be interested in this bright creature, fallen as from another world into their dingy, squabbling family. Ifit was inevitable that her interest, touched with pity (for he was indespair over the collapse of his life with Harriet), should quickly warmto love, we must insist that the rapture with which he leaped to meether had some foundation in reality. That she was gifted is manifest inher writings--chiefly, no doubt, in 'Frankenstein', composed when shehad Shelley to fire her imagination; but her other novels are competent, and her letters are the work of a vigorous intellect. She had herlimitations. She was not quite so free from conventionality as either heor she believed; but on the whole they were neither deceiving themselvesnor one another when they plighted faith by Mary Wollstonecraft's grave. With their principles, it was nothing that marriage was impossible. Without the knowledge of the elder Godwins, they made arrangements toelope, and on July 28, 1814, crossed from Dover to Calais in an openboat, taking Jane Clairmont with them on the spur of the moment. Janealso had been unhappy in Skinner Street. She was about Mary's age, apert, olive-complexioned girl, with a strong taste for life. She changedher name to Claire because it sounded more romantic. 

Mrs. Godwin pursued the fugitives to Calais, but in vain. Shelleywas now launched on a new life with a new bride, and--a freakishtouch--accompanied as before by his bride's sister. The more his lifechanged, the more it was the same thing--the same plunging withoutforethought, the same disregard for all that is conventionally deemednecessary. His courage is often praised, and rightly, though weought not to forget that ignorance, and even obtuseness, were largeingredients in it. As far as they had any plan, it was to reachSwitzerland and settle on the banks of some lake, amid sublime mountainscenery, "for ever. " In fact, the tour lasted but six weeks. Theirdifficulties began in Paris, where only an accident enabled Shelley toraise funds. Then they moved slowly across war-wasted France, Mary andClaire, in black silk dresses, riding by turns on a mule, and Shelleywalking. Childish happiness glows in their journals. From Troyes Shelleywrote to the abandoned Harriet, in perfect good faith, pressing herto join them in Switzerland. There were sprained ankles, dirty inns, perfidious and disobliging drivers--the ordinary misadventures ofthe road, magnified a thousand times by their helplessness, and alltransfigured in the purple light of youth and the intoxication ofliterature. At last they reached the Lake of Lucerne, settled atBrunnen, and began feverishly to read and write. Shelley worked at anovel called 'The Assassins', and we hear of him "sitting on a rude pierby the lake" and reading aloud the siege of Jerusalem from Tacitus. Soonthey discovered that they had only just enough money left to take themhome. Camp was struck in haste, and they travelled down the Rhine. When their boat was detained at Marsluys, all three sat writing in thecabin--Shelley his novel, Mary a story called 'Hate', and Claire astory called 'The Idiot'--until they were tossed across to England, andreached London after borrowing passage-money from the captain. 

The winter was spent in poverty, dodging creditors through thelabyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was caused byShelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, hisreadiness to believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him theprey of every impostor. Knowing that he was heir to a large fortune, hewould subsidise any project or any grievance, only provided it were wildenough. Godwin especially was a running sore both now and later on; thephilosopher was at the beginning of that shabby 'degringolade' which wasto end in the ruin of his self-respect. In spite of his anti-matrimonialprinciples, he was indignant at his disciple's elopement with hisdaughter, and, in spite of his philosophy, he was not above abusing andsponging in the same breath. The worst of these difficulties, however, came to an end when Shelley's grandfather died on January 6, 1815, andhe was able, after long negotiations, to make an arrangement with hisfather, by which his debts were paid and he received an income of 1000pounds a year in consideration of his abandoning his interest in part ofthe estate. 

And now, the financial muddle partly smoothed out, his genius began tobloom in the congenial air of Mary's companionship. The summer of 1815spent in rambles in various parts of the country, saw the creationof Alastor. Early in 1816 Mary gave birth to her first child, a boy, William, and in the spring, accompanied by the baby and Claire, theymade a second expedition to Switzerland. A little in advance anotherpoet left England for ever. George Gordon, Lord Byron, loaded with fameand lacerated by chagrin, was beginning to bear through Europe that"pageant of his bleeding heart" of which the first steps are celebratedin 'Childe Harold'. Unknown to Shelley and Mary, there was alreadya link between them and the luxurious "pilgrim of eternity" rollingtowards Geneva in his travelling-carriage, with physician and suite:Claire had visited Byron in the hope that he might help her toemployment at Drury Lane Theatre, and, instead of going on the stage, had become his mistress. Thus united, but strangely dissimilar, the twoparties converged on the Lake of Geneva, where the poets met for thefirst time. Shelley, though jarred by Byron's worldliness and pride, wasimpressed by his creative power, and the days they spent sailing on thelake, and wandering in a region haunted by the spirit of Rousseau, were fruitful. The 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and the 'Lines on MontBlanc' were conceived this summer. In September the Shelleys were backin England. 

But England, though he had good friends like Peacock and the LeighHunts, was full of private and public troubles, and was not to holdhim long. The country was agitated by riots due to unemployment. TheGovernment, frightened and vindictive, was multiplying trials fortreason and blasphemous libel, and Shelley feared he might be put in thepillory himself. Mary's sister Fanny, to whom he was attached, killedherself in October; Harriet's suicide followed in December; and in thesame winter the Westbrooks began to prepare their case for the Chancerysuit, which ended in the permanent removal of Harriet's children fromhis custody, on the grounds that his immoral conduct and opinionsunfitted him to be their guardian. His health, too, seems to have beenbad, though it is hard to know precisely how bad. He was liable tohallucinations of all kinds; the line between imagination and reality, which ordinary people draw quite definitely, seems scarcely to haveexisted for him. There are many stories as to which it is disputedhow far, if at all, reality is mixed with dream, as in the case of themurderous assault he believed to have been made on him one night of windand rain in Wales; of the veiled lady who offered to join her lifeto his; of the Englishman who, hearing him ask for letters in thepost-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damnedatheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go halffrantic with delusions--as that his father and uncle were plotting toshut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatchedfrom him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh andblood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal disease, he wouldoften make his certainty of early death the pretext for abandoning someill-considered scheme; but there is probably much exaggeration in thespasms and the consumptive symptoms which figure so excitedly in hisletters. Hogg relates how he once plagued himself and his friends bybelieving that he had elephantiasis, and says that he was really veryhealthy The truth seems to be that his constitution was naturallystrong, though weakened from time to time by neurotic conditions, in which mental pain brought on much physical pain, and by irregularinfrequent, and scanty meals. 

In February 1817 he settled at Marlow with Mary and Claire. Claire, asa result of her intrigue with Byron--of which the fruit was a daughter, Allegra, born in January--was now a permanent charge on his affectionategenerosity. It seemed that their wanderings were at last over. At Marlowhe busied himself with politics and philanthropy, and wrote 'The Revoltof Islam'. But, partly because the climate was unsuitable, partly fromoverwork in visiting and helping the poor, his health was thought tobe seriously endangered. In March 1818, together with the five soulsdependent on him--Claire and her baby, Mary and her two babies (asecond, Clara, had been born about six months before)--he left England, never to return. 

Mary disliked hot weather, but it always put Shelley in spirits, and hisbest work was done beneath the sultry blue of Italian skies, floating ina boat on the Serchio or the Arno, baking in a glazed cage on the roofof a Tuscan villa, or lying among the ruins of the Coliseum or in thepine-woods near Pisa. Their Italian wanderings are too intricate to betraced in detail here. It was a chequered time, darkened by disasterand cheered by friendships. Both their children died, Clara at Venice in1818, and William at home in 1819. It is impossible not to be amazed atthe heedlessness--the long journeys in a rough foreign land, the absenceof ordinary provision against ailments--which seems to have caused thedeath of these beloved little beings. The birth in 1819 of another son, Percy (who survived to become Sir Percy Shelley), brought some comfort. Claire's troubles, again, were a constant anxiety. Shelley worked hardto persuade Byron either to let her have Allegra or to look after hisdaughter properly himself; but he was obdurate, and the child died in aconvent near Venice in 1822. Shelley's association with Byron, of whom, in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has drawn a picture with the darkerfeatures left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned. No doubt Byron's splenetic cynicism, even his parade of debauchery, was largely an assumption for the benefit of the world; but beneaththe frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of his intimate conversation, beneath his careful cultivation of the graces of a Regency buck, he wasfundamentally selfish and treacherous. Provided no serious demands weremade upon him, he enjoyed the society of Shelley and his circle, and thetwo were much together, both at Venice and in the Palazzo Lanfranchiat Pisa, where, with a menagerie of animals and retainers, Byron hadinstalled himself in those surroundings of Oriental ostentation which itamused him to affect. 

A more unalloyed friendship was that with the amiable Gisborne family, settled at Leghorn; its serene cheerfulness is reflected in Shelley'scharming rhymed 'Letter to Maria Gisborne'. And early in 1821 they werejoined by a young couple who proved very congenial. Ned Williams was ahalf-pay lieutenant of dragoons, with literary and artistic tastes, andhis wife, Jane, had a sweet, engaging manner, and a good singing voice. Then there was the exciting discovery of the Countess Emilia Viviani, imprisoned in a convent by a jealous step-mother. All three ofthem--Mary, Claire, and Shelley--at once fell in love with the duskybeauty. Impassioned letters passed between her and Shelley, in which hewas her "dear brother" and she his "dearest sister"; but she was soonfound to be a very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as theinstrument chosen by chance to inspire 'Epipsychidion'. Finally thereappeared, in January 1822, the truest-hearted and the most lovableof all Shelley's friends. Edward John Trelawny, a cadet of aCornish family, "with his knight-errant aspect, dark, handsome, andmoustachioed, " was the true buccaneer of romance, but of honest Englishgrain, and without a trace of pose. The devotion with which, though heonly knew Shelley for a few months, he fed in memory on their friendshipto the last day of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else can, theforce of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man lived until 1881, an almost solitary survivor from the Byronic age, and his life containedmatter enough to swamp recollection of half-a-dozen poets. It seemsthat, after serving in the navy and deserting from an East Indiaman atBombay, he passed, in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredibleexperiences narrated in his 'Adventures of a Younger Son'; and all thisbefore he was twenty-one, for in 1813 he was in England and married. Then he disappeared, bored by civilisation; nothing is known of himuntil 1820, when he turns up in Switzerland in pursuit of sport andadventure. After Shelley's death he went to Greece with Byron, joinedthe rebel chief Odysseus, married his sister Tersitza, and was nearlykilled in defending a cave on Mount Parnassus. Through the subsequentyears, which included wanderings in America, and a narrow escape fromdrowning in trying to swim Niagara, he kept pressing Shelley's widow tomarry him. Perhaps because he was piqued by Mary's refusal, he has lefta rather unflattering portrait of her. He was indignant at her desireto suppress parts of 'Queen Mab'; but he might have admired the honestywith which she retained 'Epipsychidion', although that poem describesher as a "cold chaste moon. " The old sea-captain in Sir John Millais'picture, "The North-West Passage, " now in the Tate Gallery in London, isa portrait of Trelawny in old age. 

To return to the Shelleys. It was decided that the summer of 1822 shouldbe spent with the Williamses, and after some search a house just capableof holding both families was found near Lerici, on the east side of theBay of Spezzia. It was a lonely, wind-swept place, with its feet inthe waves. The natives were half-savage; there was no furniture, and nofacility for getting provisions. The omens opened badly. At the momentof moving in, news of Allegra's death came; Shelley was shaken and sawvisions, and Mary disliked the place at first sight. Still, there wasthe sea washing their terrace, and Shelley loved the sea (there isscarcely one of his poems in which a boat does not figure, though itis usually made of moonstone); and, while Williams fancied himself as anavigator, Trelawny was really at home on the water. A certain CaptainRoberts was commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, where Byron alsowas fitting out a yacht, the 'Bolivar'. When the 'Ariel'--for so theycalled her--arrived, the friends were delighted with her speed andhandiness. She was a thirty-footer, without a deck, ketch-rigged. (1)Shelley's health was good, and this June, passed in bathing, sailing, reading, and hearing Jane sing simple melodies to her guitar in themoonlight, was a gleam of happiness before the end. It was not so happyfor Mary, who was ill and oppressed with housekeeping for two families, and over whose relations with Shelley a film of querulous jealousy hadcrept. 

 (1 Professor Dowden, 'Life of Shelley', vol. Ii. , p. 501, says "schooner-rigged. " This is a landsman's mistake. )

Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters, was comingout from England with his wife; on July 1st Shelley and Williamssailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them into theground-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa. His business despatched, Shelleyreturned from Pisa to Leghorn, with Hunt's copy of Keats's 'Hyperion'in his pocket to read on the voyage home. Though the weather lookedthreatening, he put to sea again on July 8th, with Williams and anEnglish sailor-boy. Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht, butwas turned back by the authorities because he had no port-clearance. Theair was sultry and still, with a storm brewing, and he went down to hiscabin and slept. When he awoke, it was to see fishing-boats running intoharbour under bare poles amid the hubbub of a thunder-squall. In thatsquall the 'Ariel' disappeared. It is doubtful whether the unseaworthycraft was merely swamped, or whether, as there is some reason tosuppose, an Italian felucca ran her down with intent to rob theEnglishmen. In any case, the calamity is the crowning example of thatcombination of bad management and bad luck which dogged Shelley allhis life. It was madness to trust an open boat, manned only by theinexperienced Williams and a boy (for Shelley was worse than useless), to the chances of a Mediterranean storm. And destiny turns on trifles;if the 'Bolivar' had been allowed to sail, Trelawny might have savedthem. 

He sent out search-parties, and on July 19th sealed the despairingwomen's certainty of disaster by the news that the bodies had beenwashed ashore. Shelley's was identified by a copy of Sophocles in onecoat-pocket and the Keats in another. What Trelawny then did was anaction of that perfect fitness to which only the rarest natures areprompted: he charged himself with the business of burning the bodies. This required some organisation. There were official formalities tofulfil, and the materials had to be assembled--the fuel, the improvisedfurnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre. In his artless 'Records' he describes the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body was given to the flames on a day of intense heat, whenthe islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the background themarble-flecked Apennines gleamed. Byron looked on until he could standit no longer, and swam off to his yacht. The heart was the last part tobe consumed. By Trelawny's care the ashes were buried in the Protestantcemetery at Rome. 

It is often sought to deepen our sense of this tragedy by speculatingon what Shelley would have done if he had lived. But, if such a questionmust be asked, there are reasons for thinking that he might not haveadded much to his reputation. It may indeed be an accident that his lasttwo years were less fertile in first-rate work than the years 1819 and1820, and that his last unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life', is evenmore incoherent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider the natureof his talent, the fact is perhaps significant. His song was entirely anaffair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles inmiddle life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource. Somemen suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose theirold selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may befairly sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as hegrew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions;for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiarrigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstablecharacters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated--it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indicationthat the material on which it worked would have changed. 

Chapter II. Principal Writings

The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a verypeculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he never dreamedmerely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate hisdreams into acts. The practical side of him was so strong that hemight have been a great statesman or reformer, had not his imagination, stimulated by a torrential fluency of language, overborne his will. He was like a boat (the comparison would have pleased him) built forstrength and speed, but immensely oversparred. His life was a sceneof incessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters, diaries, andpamphlets, his translations from Greek, Spanish, German, and Italian, and remembering that he died at thirty, and was, besides, feverishlyactive in a multitude of affairs, we fancy that his pen can scarcelyever have been out of his hand. And not only was he perpetually writing;he read gluttonously. He would thread the London traffic, nourishing hisunworldly mind from an open book held in one hand, and his ascetic bodyfrom a hunch of bread held in the other. This fury for literature seizedhim early. But the quality of his early work was astonishingly bad. Anauthor while still a schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, writtenfor the most part when he was seventeen years old, called 'Zastrozzi', the mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants, iseloquent of its nature. This was soon followed by another like it, 'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are adaptations fromthe German (2) or not, these books are merely bad imitations of thebad school then in vogue, the flesh-creeping school of skeletons andclanking chains, of convulsions and ecstasies, which Miss Austen, thoughno one knew it, had killed with laughter years before. (3) "Verezziscarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked andmotionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined themselves inhis long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations ofhorror"--that is the kind of stuff in which the imagination of theyoung Shelley rioted. And evidently it is not consciously imagined; lifereally presented itself to him as a romance of this kind, with himselfas hero--a hero who is a hopeless lover, blighted by premature decay, or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to alleternity. This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental verse andprose, much of it more or less surreptitiously published, which theresearches of specialists have brought to light, and which need not bedwelt upon here. 

 (2 So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says that he did not begin learning German until 1815. )

 (3 'Northanger Abbey', satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, was written before 1798, but was not published until 1818. )

But very soon another influence began to mingle with this feeblyextravagant vein, an influence which purified and strengthened, thoughit never quite obliterated it. At school he absorbed, along with theofficial tincture of classical education, a violent private dose of thephilosophy of the French Revolution; he discovered that all thatwas needed to abolish all the evil done under the sun was to destroybigotry, intolerance, and persecution as represented by religious andmonarchical institutions. At first this influence combined with hismisguided literary passions only to heighten the whole absurdity, aswhen he exclaims, in a letter about his first disappointed love, "Iswear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me--neverwill I forgive Intolerance!" The character of the romance is changedindeed; it has become an epic of human regeneration, and its emotionsare dedicated to the service of mankind; but still it is a romance. Theresults, however, are momentous; for the hero, being a man of action, isno longer content to write and pay for the printing: in his capacity ofliberator he has to step into the arena, and, above all, he has to thinkout a philosophy. 

An early manifestation of this impulse was the Irish enterprise alreadymentioned. Public affairs always stirred him, but, as time went on, itwas more and more to verse and less to practical intervention, and after1817 he abandoned argument altogether for song. But one pamphlet, 'AProposal for putting Reform to the Vote' (1817), is characteristic ofthe way in which he was always labouring to do something, not merelyto ventilate existing evils, but to promote some practical scheme forabolishing them. Let a national referendum, he says, be held on thequestion of reform, and let it be agreed that the result shall bebinding on Parliament; he himself will contribute 100 pounds a year(one-tenth of his income) to the expenses of organisation. He is infavour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolish aristocracyand monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the hands of menrendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery; and he proposes that thepayment of a small sum in direct taxes should be the qualification forthe parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, was not in the sphereof practical politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how farShelley was from being a vulgar theory-ridden crank to whom the yearsbring no wisdom. 

Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that "intolerance" was the causeof all evil, and, in the same flash, that it could be destroyed byclear and simple reasoning. Apply the acid of enlightened argument, andreligious beliefs will melt away, and with them the whole rotten fabricwhich they support--crowns and churches, lust and cruelty, war andcrime, the inequality of women to men, and the inequality of one man toanother. With Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon itat once. The first thing, since religion is at the bottom of all forceand fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason for believingin Christianity. This was easy enough, and a number of impatientargumentative pamphlets were dashed off. One of these, 'The Necessityof Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, whileChristian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there wereout-works which might also be usefully attacked:--there were alcoholand meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; therewere despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there wasmarriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, producesunnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), anover-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. Thespirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to theconfines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of theearth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upontheir thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew, " is introduced; theconsummation on earth of the age of reason is described. In the end thefairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find

 "Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love, And the bright beaming stars That through the casement shone. "

Though many poets have begun their careers with something better thanthis, 'Queen Mab' will always be read, because it gives us, in embryo, the whole of Shelley at a stroke. The melody of the verse is thin andloose, but it soars from the ground and spins itself into a seriesof etherial visions. And these visions, though they look utterlydisconnected from reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionateinterest in science. In this respect the sole difference between 'QueenMab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that, in theprose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their disquisitions onphysiology and astronomy, determinism and utilitarianism, the scientificskeleton is explicit. These notes are a queer medley. We may laugh attheir crudity--their certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyedby argument, the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose isto recognise that here is something more than the ordinary dogmatism ofyouthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous language, vividness ofimagination, and, above all, much conscientious reasoning and a passionfor hard facts. His wife was not far wrong when she praised him for a"logical exactness of reason. " The arguments he uses are, indeed, allsecond-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively somethingwhich is for ever hidden from the mass of mankind--the differencebetween an argument and a confused stirring of prejudices. Then, again, he was not content with abstract generalities: he was always trying toenforce his views by facts industriously collected from such books ofmedicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and history as hecould get hold of. For instance, he does not preach abstinence fromflesh on pure a priori grounds, but because "the orang-outang perfectlyresembles man both in the order and number of his teeth. " We catchhere what is perhaps the fundamental paradox of his character--thecombination of a curious rational hardness with the wildest and mostromantic idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by amind no stranger to thought and research. 

We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic achievement, and it willbe well before going further to underline the connection, which persistsall through his work and is already so striking in 'Queen Mab', betweenhis poetry and his philosophical and religious ideas. 

Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet. But his philosophy was muchmore definite than Coleridge's; it gave substance to his character andedge to his intellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be distinguishedfrom the emotion generating his verse. There is, however, no trace oforiginality in his speculative writing, and we need not regret that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet, he decidedagainst philosophy. Before finally settling to poetry, he at one timeprojected a complete and systematic account of the operations of thehuman mind. It was to be divided into sections--childhood, youth, and soon. One of the first things to be done was to ascertain the real natureof dreams, and accordingly, with characteristic passion for a foundationof fact, he turned to the only facts accessible to him, and tried todescribe exactly his own experiences in dreaming. The result showedthat, along with the scientific impulse, there was working in him a morepowerful antagonistic force. He got no further than telling how once, when walking with Hogg near Oxford, he suddenly turned the corner of alane, and a scene presented itself which, though commonplace, was yetmysteriously connected with the obscurer parts of his nature. A windmillstood in a plashy meadow; behind it was a long low hill, and "a greycovering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was theseason of the year when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant andstunted ash. " The manuscript concludes: "I suddenly remembered to haveseen that exact scene in some dream of long--Here I was obliged to leaveoff, overcome with thrilling horror. " And, apart from such overwhelmingsurges of emotion from the depths of sub-consciousness, he does not seemever to have taken that sort of interest in the problems of the universewhich is distinctive of the philosopher; in so far as he speculatedon the nature and destiny of the world or the soul, it was not fromcuriosity about the truth, but rather because correct views on thesematters seemed to him especially in early years, an infallible method ofregenerating society. As his expectation of heaven on earth became lessconfident, so the speculative impulse waned. Not long before his deathhe told Trelawny that he was not inquisitive about the system of theuniverse, that his mind was tranquil on these high questions. He seems, for instance, to have oscillated vaguely between belief and disbelief inpersonal life after death, and on the whole to have concluded that therewas no evidence for it. 

At the same time, it is essential to a just appreciation of him, eitheras man or poet, to see how all his opinions and feelings were shapedby philosophy, and by the influence of one particular doctrine. Thisdoctrine was Platonism. He first went through a stage of devotion towhat he calls "the sceptical philosophy, " when his writings were fullof schoolboy echoes of Locke and Hume. At this time he avowed himselfa materialist. Then he succumbed to Bishop Berkeley, who convinced himthat the nature of everything that exists is spiritual. We find himsaying, with charming pompousness, "I confess that I am one of thosewho are unable to refuse their assent to the conclusions of thosephilosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived. "This "intellectual system, " he rightly sees, leads to the view thatnothing whatever exists except a single mind; and that is the view whichhe found, or thought that he found, in the dialogues of Plato, and whichgave to his whole being a bent it was never to lose. He liked to callhimself an atheist; and, if pantheism is atheism, an atheist no doubt hewas. But, whatever the correct label, he was eminently religious. Inthe notes to 'Queen Mab' he announces his belief in "a pervading Spiritco-eternal with the universe, " and religion meant for him a "perceptionof the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe"--aperception which, in his case, was accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus grasped the notion that the whole universe is one spirit, he absorbed from Plato a theory which accorded perfectly with hispredisposition--the theory that all the good and beautiful things thatwe love on earth are partial manifestations of an absolute beauty orgoodness, which exists eternal and unchanging, and from which everythingthat becomes and perishes in time derives such reality as it has. Henceour human life is good only in so far as we participate in the eternalreality; and the communion is effected whenever we adore beauty, whetherin nature, or in passionate love, or in the inspiration of poetry. Weshall have to say something presently about the effects of this Platonicidealism on Shelley's conception of love; here we need only notice thatit inspired him to translate Plato's 'Symposium', a dialogue occupiedalmost entirely with theories about love. He was not, however, wellequipped for this task. His version, or rather adaptation (for much isomitted and much is paraphrased), is fluent, but he had not enough Greekto reproduce the finer shades of the original, or, indeed, to avoidgross mistakes. 

A poet who is also a Platonist is likely to exalt his office; it ishis not merely to amuse or to please, but to lead mankind nearer to theeternal ideal--Shelley called it Intellectual Beauty--which is theonly abiding reality. This is the real theme of his 'Defence of Poetry'(1821), the best piece of prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love Peacock, scholar, novelist, and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one of Shelley's most admired friends, had published a wittily perverseand paradoxical article, not without much good sense, on 'The Four Agesof Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine poetry is only possible inhalf-civilised times, such as the Homeric or Elizabethan ages, which, after the interval of a learned period, like that of Pope in England, are inevitably succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mindwas, of course, the movement represented by Wordsworth, Southey, andColeridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he describes asa "modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism. " He must havegreatly enjoyed writing such a paragraph as this: "A poet in our timesis a semi-barbarian in a civilised community. ... The march of hisintellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the lightdiffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is thedarkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours. " These gayshafts had at any rate the merit of stinging Shelley to action. 'TheDefence of Poetry' was his reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, andart generally, as an adventitious seasoning of life--ornamental perhaps, but rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelleyundermines the whole position by asserting that poetry--a name whichincludes for him all serious art--is the very stuff out of which allthat is valuable and real in life is made. "A poem is the very imageof life expressed in its eternal truth. " "The great secret of moralsis love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification ofourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely andcomprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of manyothers; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. Thegreat instrument of moral good is the imagination. " And it is on theimagination that poetry works, strengthening it as exercises strengthena limb. Historically, he argues, good poetry always coexists with goodmorals; for instance, when social life decays, drama decays. Peacock hadsaid that reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful than poets. The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the worldworse, while it is poets and "poetical philosophers" who produce "trueutility, " or pleasure in the highest sense. Without poetry, the progressof science and of the mechanical arts results in mental and moralindigestion, merely exasperating the inequality of mankind. "Poetry andthe principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, arethe God and mammon of the world. " While the emotions penetrated bypoetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. "Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waterswhich flow from death through life. " It makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew. "Poets are the hierophants of anunapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows whichfuturity casts upon the present; the words which express what theyunderstand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not whatthey inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are theunacknowledged legislators of the world. "

Other poets besides Shelley have seen

 "Through all that earthly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness, "

and others have felt that the freedom from self, which is attainedin the vision, is supremely good. What is peculiar to him, anddistinguishes him from the poets of religious mysticism, is that hereflected rationally on his vision, brought it more or less into harmonywith a philosophical system, and, in embracing it, always had inview the improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must itbe imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of theeighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first impulse ofthe Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to become the theoryof the nineteenth century, that the object of poetry is to inculcatecorrect principles of morals and religion. Poetry, with its power ofpleasing, was the jam which should make us swallow the powder unawares. This conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought notto do what can be done better by prose, and also because, for him, the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably one. The poet is toimprove us, not by insinuating a moral, but by communicating to otherssomething of that ecstasy with which he himself burns in contemplatingeternal truth and beauty and goodness. 

Hitherto all the writings mentioned have been, except 'The Defence ofPoetry', those of a young and enthusiastic revolutionary, which mighthave some interest in their proper historical and biographical setting, but otherwise would only be read as curiosities. We have seen thatbeneath Shelley's twofold drift towards practical politics andspeculative philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it ischaracteristic of him that he always tended to regard the writingof verse as a 'pis aller'. In 1819, when he was actually working on'Prometheus', he wrote to Peacock, "I consider poetry very subordinateto moral and political science, " adding that he only wrote it becausehis feeble health made it hopeless to attempt anything more useful. Weneed not take this too seriously; he was often wrong about the reasonsfor his own actions. From whatever motive, write poetry he did. We willnow consider some of the more voluminous, if not the most valuable, results. 

'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, ' (4) is a long poem, written in1815, which seems to shadow forth the emotional history of a young andbeautiful poet. As a child he drank deep of the beauties of nature andthe sublimest creations of the intellect, until, "When early youth had past, he left His cold fireside and alienated home, To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. "

He wandered through many wildernesses, and visited the ruins of Egyptand the East, where an Arab maiden fell in love with him and tended him. But he passes on, "through Arabie, and Persia, and the wild Carmanianwaste, " and, arrived at the vale of Cashmire, lies down to sleep ina dell. Here he has a vision. A "veiled maid" sits by him, and, aftersinging first of knowledge and truth and virtue, then of love, embraceshim. When he awakes, all the beauty of the world that enchanted andsatisfied him before has faded:

 "The Spirit of Sweet Human Love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts, "

and he rushes on, wildly pursuing the beautiful shape, like an eagleenfolded by a serpent and feeling the poison in his breast. His limbsgrow lean, his hair thin and pale. Does death contain the secret of hishappiness? At last he pauses "on the lone Chorasmian shore, " and sees afrail shallop in which he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night theboat flies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus, whereit is engulfed in a cavern. Following the twists of the cavern, after anarrow escape from a maelstrom, he floats into a calm pool, and lands. Elaborate descriptions of forest and mountain scenery bring us, as themoon sets, to the death of the worn-out poet--

 "The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful, The child of grace and genius! Heartless things Are done and said i' the world, and many worms And beasts and men live on... But thou art fled. "

 (4 "Alastor" is a Greek word meaning "the victim of an Avenging Spirit. ")

In 'Alastor' he melted with pity over what he felt to be his owndestiny; in 'The Revolt of Islam' (1817) he was "a trumpet that sings tobattle. " This, the longest of Shelley's poems (there are 4176 lines ofit, exclusive of certain lyrical passages), is a versified novel witha more or less coherent plot, though the mechanism is cumbrous, and anyone who expects from the title a story of some actual rebellion againstthe Turks will be disappointed. Its theme, typified by an introductoryvision of an eagle and serpent battling in mid-sky, is the cosmicstruggle between evil and good, or, what for Shelley is the same thing, between the forces of established authority and of man's aspiration forliberty, the eagle standing for the powerful oppressor, and the snakefor the oppressed. 

 "When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble The Snake and Eagle meet--the world's foundations tremble. "

This piece of symbolism became a sort of fixed language with him; "theSnake" was a name by which it amused him to be known among his friends. The clash of the two opposites is crudely and narrowly conceived, withno suggestion yet of some more tremendous force behind both, such aslater on was to give depth to his view of the world conflict. The lovesand the virtues of Laon and Cythna, the gifted beings who overthrow thetyrant and perish tragically in a counter-revolution, are too brightagainst a background that is too black; but even so they were a goodopportunity for displaying the various phases through which humanitarianpassion may run--the first whispers of hope, the devotion of thepioneer, the joy of freedom and love, in triumph exultation tempered byclemency, in defeat despair ennobled by firmness. And although in thisextraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found himself, thetechnical power displayed is great. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the long breaking wave of that measure with sureness andease, imparting to it a rapidity of onset that is all his own. But thereare small blemishes such as, even when allowance is made for haste ofcomposition (it was written in a single summer), a naturally delicateear would never have passed; he apologises in the preface for onealexandrine (the long last line which should exceed the rest by a foot)left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there are some eightplaces where obviously redundant syllables have crept in. A more seriousdefect is the persistence, still unassimilated, of the element of theromantic-horrible. When Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnawscorpses, we feel that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightlyridiculous, magnificent though his writing has become. It is hard, again, not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of youngeleutherarchs have only to sound for the crouching slave to recover hismanhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn pale. The poet knows, as hewrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission is "to apprehend minuteand remote distinctions of feeling, " and "to communicate the conceptionswhich result from considering either the moral or the material universeas a whole. " He does not see that he has failed of both aims, partlybecause 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, andmountain shimmer through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as awhole; and he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in apicture of all the good impulses of the human heart, that should be sofruitful, poisoned by the pressure of religious and political authority. It was natural that the method which he chose should be that of theromantic narrative--we have noticed how he began by trying to writenovels--nor is that method essentially unfitted to represent theconflict between good and evil, with the whole universe for a stage;instances of great novels that are epics in this sense will occur toevery one. But realism is required, and Shelley was constitutionallyincapable of realism The personages of the story, Laon and the Hermit, the Tyrant and Cythna, are pale projections of Shelley himself; of Dr. Lind, an enlightened old gentleman with whom he made friends at Eton;of His Majesty's Government; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife'sillustrious mother. They are neither of the world nor out of it, andconsequently, in so far as they are localised and incarnate and theiractions woven into a tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a failure. In hisnext great poem he was to pursue precisely the same aims, but withmore success, because he had now hit upon a figure of more appropriatevagueness and sublimity. The scheme of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) isdrawn from the immortal creations of Greek tragedy. 

He had experimented with Tasso and had thought of Job; but therebellious Titan, Prometheus, the benefactor of mankind whom Aeschylushad represented as chained by Zeus to Caucasus, with a vulture gnawinghis liver, offered a perfect embodiment of Shelley's favourite subject, "the image, " to borrow the words of his wife, "of one warring with theEvil Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who are deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity;a victim full of fortitude and hope and the Spirit of triumph, emanatingfrom a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. " In the Greek play, Zeus is an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older and milderdynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited in his punishment by the nymphsof ocean, knows a secret on which the rule of Zeus depends. Shelley tookover these features, and grafted on them his own peculiar confidence inthe ultimate perfection of mankind. His Prometheus knows that Jupiter(the Evil Principle) will some day be overthrown, though he does notknow when, and that he himself will then be released; and this eventis shown as actually taking place. It may be doubted whether thistreatment, while it allows the poet to describe what the world will belike when freed from evil, does not diminish the impressiveness ofthe suffering Titan; for if Prometheus knows that a term is set to hispunishment, his defiance of the oppressor is easier, and, so far, less sublime. However that may be, his opening cries of pain have muchromantic beauty:

 "The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. "

Mercury, Jupiter's messenger, is sent to offer him freedom if he willrepent and submit to the tyrant. On his refusal, the Furies are letloose to torture him, and his agony takes the form of a vision of allthe suffering of the world. The agony passes, and Mother Earth calls upspirits to soothe him with images of delight; but he declares "most vainall hope but love, " and thinks of Asia, his wife in happier days. Thesecond act is full of the dreams of Asia. With Panthea, one of the oceannymphs that watch over Prometheus, she makes her way to the cave ofDemogorgon, "that terrific gloom, " who seems meant to typify the PrimalPower of the World. Hence they are snatched away by the Spirit of theHour at which Jove will fall, and the coming of change pulsates throughthe excitement of those matchless songs that begin:

 "Life of life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them. "

In the third act the tyrant is triumphing in heaven, when the car of theHour arrives; Demogorgon descends from it, and hurls him to the abyss. Prometheus, set free by Hercules, is united again to Asia. And now, withthe tyranny of wrongful power, "The loathsome mark has fallen, the mall remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise. "

The fourth act is an epilogue in which, to quote Mrs. Shelley again, "the poet gives further scope to his imagination.... Maternal Earth, themighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth, the guideof our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and weakercompanion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss fromthe annihilation of evil in the superior sphere. " We are in a strangemetaphysical region, an interstellar space of incredibly rarefied fireand light, the true home of Shelley's spirit, where the circlingspheres sing to one another in wave upon wave of lyrical rapture, asinexpressible in prose as music, and culminating in the cry:

 "To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. "

On the whole, Prometheus has been over-praised, perhaps because thebeauty of the interspersed songs has dazzled the critics. Not onlyare the personages too transparently allegorical, but the allegory isinsipid; especially tactless is the treatment of the marriage betweenPrometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, and Asia, the Spirit of Nature, asa romantic love affair. When, in the last of his more important poems, Shelley returned to the struggle between the good and evil principles, it was in a different Spirit. The short drama of 'Hellas' (1821) was "amere improvise, " the boiling over of his sympathy with the Greeks, whowere in revolt against the Turks. He wove into it, with all possibleheightening of poetic imagery, the chief events of the period ofrevolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that itdiffers from the Prometheus in having historical facts as ostensiblesubject. Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in featsof arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms, though suggestive of something that transcends any human warfare, areyet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane. " But this is notthe only merit of "Hellas;' its poetry is purer than that of the earlierwork, because Shelley no longer takes sides so violently. He haslost the cruder optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back forconsolation upon something that moves us more than any prospect ofa heaven realised on earth by abolishing kings and priests. When thechorus of captive Greek women, who provide the lyrical setting, singround the couch of the sleeping sultan, we are aware of an ineffablehope at the heart of their strain of melancholy pity; and so again whentheir burthen becomes the transience of all things human. The sultan, too, feels that Islam is doomed, and, as messenger after messengerannounces the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself asthe growing perception that all this blood and all these tears are butphantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity. This again isthe purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who evokesfor him a vision of Mahmud II capturing Constantinople. The sultan ispuzzled:

 "What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest Of dazzling mist within my brain";

but 'we' know that the substance behind the mist is Shelley's"immaterial philosophy, " the doctrine that nothing is real except theone eternal Mind. Ever louder and more confident sounds this note, untilit drowns even the cries of victory when the tide of battle turns infavour of the Turks. The chorus, lamenting antiphonally the destructionof liberty, are interrupted by repeated howls of savage triumph:"Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape'" But these discords aregradually resolved, through exquisitely complicated cadences, into thegolden and equable flow of the concluding song:

 "The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. "

Breezy confidence has given place to a poignant mood of disillusionment. 

 "Oh, cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!"

Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civilisation shall never berestored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the creations of itsartists are immortal, while the fabric of the world

 "Is but a vision;--all that it inherits Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams. "

It is curious that for three of his more considerable works Shelleyshould have chosen the form of drama, since the last thing one would sayof him is that he had the dramatic talent. 'Prometheus' and 'Hellas', however, are dramas only in name; there is no thought in them of scenicrepresentation. 'The Cenci' (1819), on the other hand, is a real play;in writing it he had the stage in view, and even a particular actress, Miss O'Neil. It thus stands alone among his works, unless we put besideit the fragment of a projected play about Charles I (1822), a themewhich, with its crowd of historical figures, was ill-suited to hispowers. And not only is 'The Cenci' a play; it is the most successfulattempt since the seventeenth century at a kind of writing, tragedy inthe grand style, over which all our poets, from Addison to Swinburne, have more or less come to grief. Its subject is the fate of BeatriceCenci, the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was executedwith her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father. Thewicked father, more intensely wicked for his grey hairs and his immenseability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope impunity for a longsuccession of crimes, hated his children, and drove them to frenzy byhis relentless cruelty. When to insults and oppression he added thehorrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed, and Beatrice, faced with shame more intolerable than death, preferredparricide. Here was a subject made to Shelley's hand--a naturally pureand gentle soul soiled, driven to violence, and finally extinguished, byunnameable wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, is on theside of the persecutor. Haunted by the grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni'spicture of Beatrice, so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo hername--though it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')--hewas tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once intothe portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen inearthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, theaction unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease withwhich he wrote--it cost him relatively the least time and pains of allhis works--it would be rash to infer that he could have constructed anequally good tragedy on any other subject than the injured Beatrice andthe combination, which Count Francesco Cenci is, of paternal power withthe extreme limit of human iniquity. 

With the exception of 'The Cenci', everything Shelley publishedwas almost entirely unnoticed at the time. This play, being moreintelligible than the rest, attracted both notice and praise, though itwas also much blamed for what would now be called its unpleasantness. Many people, among them his wife, regretted that, having proved hisability to handle the concrete, he still should devote himself to idealand unpopular abstractions, such as 'The Witch of Atlas' (1821), afantastical piece in rime royal, which seems particularly to haveprovoked Mrs. Shelley. A "lady Witch" lived in a cave on Mount Atlas, and her games in a magic boat, her dances in the upper regions of space, and the pranks which she played among men, are described in verse of arichness that bewilders because it leads to nothing. The poet juggleswith flowers and gems, stars and spirits, lovers and meteors; weare constantly expecting him to break into some design, and are asconstantly disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar kind; it isnot the same, for instance, as that produced by Blake's propheticbooks, where we are conscious of a great spirit fumbling after theinexpressible. Shelley is not a true mystic. He is seldom puzzled, andhe never seems to have any difficulty in expressing exactly what hefeels; his images are perfectly definite. Our uneasiness arises fromthe fact that, with so much clear definition, such great activity inreproducing the subtlest impressions which Nature makes upon him, his work should have so little artistic purpose or form. Stroke isaccumulated on stroke, each a triumph of imaginative beauty; but as theydo not cohere to any discoverable end, the total impression is apt to beone of effort running to waste. 

This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is felt even in 'Adonais'(1821), his elegy on the death of Keats. John Keats was a very differentperson from Shelley. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he had been anapothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at allfrom any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chiefglories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devotedentirely to art, and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappylove-affair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed passion and the'Quarterly Review's' contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumptionwhich killed him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy as alast chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse him backto health, and offered him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, anddied at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not intimate with Keats, and had been slow to recognise his genius; but it was enough that he wasa poet, in sympathy with the Radicals, an exile, and the victim ofthe Tory reviewers. There is not ill Adonais that note of personalbereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlierstanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and ahost of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of miston an autumnal stream"--

 "Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies, Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies. "

At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that he wants to say, butas he proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather round Adonais'bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself as "aphantom among men, " who

 "Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts along that rugged way Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. "

The Quarterly Reviewer is next chastised, and at last Shelley has foundhis cue. The strain rises from thoughts of mortality to the consolationsof the eternal:

 "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife. "

Keats is made "one with Nature"; he is a parce of that power

 "Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. "

It is once more the same conviction, the offspring of his philosophyand of his suffering, that we noticed in Hellas, only here the pathos ismore acute. So strong is the sense of his own misery, the premonition ofhis own death, that we scarcely know, nor does it matter, whether itis in the person of Keats or of himself that he is lamenting theimpermanence of earthly good. His spirit was hastening to escape from"the last clouds of cold mortality"; his bark is driven

 "Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given. "

A year later he was drowned. 

While the beauty of Adonais is easily appreciated, 'Epipsychidion', written in the same year, must strike many readers as mere moonshineand madness. In 'Alastor', the poet, at the opening of his career, hadpursued in vain through the wilderness of the world a vision of idealloveliness; it would now seem that this vision is at last embodied in"the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia Viviani, " to whom 'Epipsychidion'is addressed. Shelley begins by exhausting, in the effort to express herperfection, all the metaphors that rapture can suggest. He calls herhis adored nightingale, a spirit-winged heart, a seraph of heaven, sweetbenediction in the eternal curse, moon beyond the clouds, star abovethe storm, "thou Wonder and thou Beauty and thou Terror! Thou Harmonyof Nature's art!" She is a sweet lamp, a "well of sealed and secrethappiness, " a star, a tone, a light, a solitude, a refuge, a delight, alute, a buried treasure, a cradle, a violet-shaded grave, an antelope, a moon shining through a mist of dew. But all his "world of fancies" isunequal to express her; he breaks off in despair. A calmer passage ofgreat interest then explains his philosophy of love:

 "That best philosophy, whose taste Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom As glorious as a fiery martyrdom, "

and tells how he "never was attached to that great sect, " which requiresthat everyone should bind himself for life to one mistress or friend;for the secret of true love is that it is increased, not diminished, bydivision; like imagination, it fills the universe; the parts exceed thewhole, and this is the great characteristic distinguishing all thingsgood from all things evil. We then have a shadowy record of love'sdealings with him. In childhood he clasped the vision in every naturalsight and sound, in verse, and in philosophy. Then it fled, this "soulout of my soul. " He goes into the wintry forest of life, where "onewhose voice was venomed melody" entraps and poisons his youth. The idealis sought in vain in many mortal shapes, until the moon rises on him, "the cold chaste Moon, " smiling on his soul, which lies in a death-liketrance, a frozen ocean. At last the long-sought vision comes into thewintry forest; it is Emily, like the sun, bringing light and odour andnew life. Henceforth he is a world ruled by and rejoicing in these twinspheres. "As to real flesh and blood, " he said in a letter to LeighHunt, "you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as wellgo to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthlyfrom me. " Yet it is certain that the figures behind the shifting web ofmetaphors are partly real--that the poisonous enchantress is his firstwife, and the moon that saved him from despair his second wife. The lastpart of the poem hymns the bliss of union with the ideal. Emily must flywith him; "a ship is floating in the harbour now, " and there is "an isleunder Ionian skies, " the fairest of all Shelley's imaginary landscapes, where their two souls may become one. Then, at the supreme moment, thesong trembles and stops:

 "Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-- I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. "

We have now taken some view of the chief of Shelley's longer poems. Most of these were published during his life. They brought him littleapplause and much execration, but if he had written nothing else hisfame would still be secure. They are, however, less than half of theverse that he actually wrote. Besides many completed poems, it remainedfor his wife to decipher, from scraps of paper, scribbled over, interlined, and erased, a host of fragments, all valuable, and many ofthem gems of purest ray. We must now attempt a general estimate of thiswhole output. 

Chapter III The Poet of Rebellion, of Nature, and of Love

It may seem strange that so much space has been occupied in the lasttwo chapters by philosophical and political topics, and this althoughShelley is the most purely lyrical of English poets. The fact is thatin nearly all English poets there is a strong moral and philosophicalstrain, particularly in those of the period 1770-1830. They are deeplyinterested in political, scientific, and religious speculations inaesthetic questions only superficially, if at all Shelley, with thetap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusuallyprominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the stateof our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted thatEnglish artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralisewhich has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has given themsurprising strength. 

Like the other poets of the Romantic Movement Shelley expended hisemotion on three main objects--politics, nature, and love. In each ofthese subjects he struck a note peculiar to himself, but his singularityis perhaps greatest in the sphere of politics. It may be summed up inthe observation that no English imaginative writer of the first rankhas been equally inspired by those doctrines that helped to producethe French Revolution. That all men are born free and equal; that bya contract entered into in primitive times they surrendered as much oftheir rights as was necessary to the well-being of the community, thatdespotic governments and established religions, being violations of theoriginal contract, are encroachments on those rights and the causesof all evil; that inequalities of rank and power can be abolished byreasoning, and that then, since men are naturally good, the goldenage will return--these are positions which the English mind, withits dislike of the 'a priori', will not readily accept. The EnglishUtilitarians, who exerted a great influence on the course of affairs, and the classical school of economists that derived from them, didindeed hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory wasthat, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposedby authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation ofordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. Buttheir theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by AdamSmith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence ofthe English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end ofthe eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increaseof wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely frommaking a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalismwas not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying theconnections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes outin the distaste he felt for history--and his conception of the idealat which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In boththese respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human natureproceeding from ignorance of himself. 

And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all good men mustsympathise with the sincerity of his passion to remould this sorryscheme of things "nearer to the heart's desire, " few will find themodel, as it appears in his poems, very exhilarating. It is chieflyexpressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty--man will be "tribeless and nationless. " Though theearth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the generaleffect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they arehectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers ofbliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes forthe rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all itsadmixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates whenhe shrilly summons us to adore his New Jerusalem. Reflecting on thenarrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant andfanatical sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. Andwe perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his narrowness comes fromignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. Whenhe visited Southey there were hot buttered buns for tea, and he so muchoffended Mrs. Southey by calling them coarse, disgusting food that shedetermined to make him try them. He ate first one, then another, and ended by clearing off two plates of the unclean thing. Activelyconscious of nothing in himself but aspirations towards perfection, he never saw that, like everyone else, he was a cockpit of ordinaryconflicting instincts; or, if this tumult of lower movements did emergeinto consciousness, he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it hadno connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities as a reformer. Similarly the world at large, full as it was of nightmare oppressionsof wrong, fell for him into two sharply opposed spheres of light anddarkness on one side the radiant armies of right, on the other theperverse opposition of devils. 

With this hysterically over-simplified view of life, fostered by lack ofself-knowledge, was connected a corresponding mistake as to the meansby which his ends could be reached. One of the first observations whichgenerous spirits often make is that the unsatisfactory state of societyis due to some very small kink or flaw in the dispositions of themajority of people. This perception, which it does not need muchexperience to reach, is the source of the common error of youth thateverything can be put right by some simple remedy. If only some tinychange could be made in men's attitude towards one another and towardsthe universe, what a flood of evil could be dammed; the slightnessof the cause is as striking as the immensity of the effect. Those whoridicule the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is perfectlytrue, though of course they are right in denouncing the inferenceso often drawn--and here lay Shelley's fundamental fallacy--that therequired tiny change depends on an effort of the will, and that thewill only does not make the effort because feeling is pervertedand intelligence dimmed by convention traditions, prejudices, andsuperstitions. It is certain, for one thing, that will only plays asmall part in our nature, and that by themselves acts of willcannot make the world perfect. Most men are helped to this lessonby observation of themselves; they see that their high resolves areineffective because their characters are mixed. Shelley never learntthis. He saw, indeed, that his efforts were futile even mischievous;but, being certain, and rightly, of the nobility of his aims, he couldnever see that he had acted wrongly, that he ought to have calculatedthe results of his actions more reasonably. Ever thwarted, and nevernearer the happiness he desired for himself and others, he did not, likeordinary men attain a juster notion of the relation between good andill in himself and in the world; he lapsed into a plaintive bewilderedmelancholy, translating the inexplicable conflict of right and wronginto the transcendental view that

 "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. "

But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is best in his poetryis this expression of frustrated hope. He has indeed, when he is movedsimply by public passion, some wonderful trumpet-notes; what hate andindignation can do, he sometimes does. And his rapturous dreams offreedom can stir the intellect, if not the blood. But it must beremarked that poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm isliable to one fatal weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric. To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flownabstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner. They appearnow as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of one another; the taskof unravelling their genealogy would be as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely the singer of revolution, the intensity andsincerity of his feeling would still have made him a better poet thanByron; but he would not have been a great poet, partly because of theinherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because of his strained andfalse view of "the moral universe" and of himself. His song, in treatingof men as citizens, as governors and governed, could never have touchedsuch a height as Burns' "A man's a man for a' that. "

Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign tyrants. The Romantic Movement was not merely a new way of consideringhuman beings in their public capacity; it meant also a new kind ofsensitiveness to their environment. If we turn, say, from Pope's 'TheRape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's 'The Prelude', it is as if we havepassed from a saloon crowded with a bewigged and painted company, wittily conversing in an atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, intothe freshness of a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the openair, the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our feelingswith wonder and delight, so a corresponding change may occur in ouremotions towards one another; in this setting of a universe with whichwe feel ourselves now rapturously, now calmly, united, we love with lessartifice, with greater impetuosity and self-abandonment. "Thomson andCowper, " says Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills which so manyingenious gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them, and the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of anew world. " The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in their trees andhills, but when they also looked in the same spirit on their ownhearts, that operation added yet another world to poetry. In Shelley theabsorption of the self in nature is carried to its furthest point. Ifthe passion to which nature moved him is less deeply meditated thanin Wordsworth and Coleridge, its exuberance is wilder; and in his bestlyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which puts him amongthe world's two or three greatest writers of love-poems. 

Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and love that every oneknows and likes best. And, in fact, many of them seem to satisfy what isperhaps the ultimate test of true poetry: they sometimes have thepower, which makes poetry akin to music, of suggesting by means of wordssomething which cannot possibly be expressed in words. Obviously thetest is impossible to use with any objective certainty, but, for areason which will appear, it seems capable of a fairly straightforwardapplication to Shelley's work. 

First we may observe that, just as the sight of some real scene--notnecessarily a sunset or a glacier, but a ploughed field or astreet-corner--may call up emotions which "lie too deep for tears" andcannot be put into words, this same effect can be produced by unstudieddescriptions. Wordsworth often produces it:

 "I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils. "

Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind of effect is beyondShelley's reach, though he has many pictures which are both detailedand emotional. Consider, for instance, these lines from 'The Invitation'(1822). He calls to Jane Williams to come away "to the wild woods andthe plains, "

 "Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea;-- Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue moon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun. "

This has a wonderful lightness and radiance. And here is a passage ofcareful description from 'Evening: Ponte a Mare, Pisa':

 "The sun is set; the swallows are asleep; The bats are flitting fast in the gray air; The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep, And evening's breath, wandering here and there Over the quivering surface of the stream, Walkes not one ripple from its summer dream. 

 There is no dew on the dry grass to-night, Nor damp within the shadow of the trees; The wind is intermitting, dry and light; And in the inconstant motion of the breeze The dust and straws are driven up and down, And whirled about the pavement of the town. "

Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense that he saw detailsclearly--unlike Byron, who had for nature but a vague and a preoccupiedeye--and evidently, too, his observation is steeped in strong feeling, and is expressed in most melodious language. Yet we get the impressionthat he neither saw nor felt anything beyond exactly what he hasexpressed; there is no suggestion, as there should be in great poetry, of something beyond all expression. And, curiously enough, this seemsto be true even of those fanciful poems so especially characteristic ofhim, such as 'The Cloud' and 'Arethusa', where he has dashed togetheron his palette the most startling colours in nature, and composed out ofthem an extravagantly imaginative whole:

 "The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead, As on the jag of a mountain crag Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depths of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest, As still as a brooding dove. "

Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and lightning? We hold ourbreath; it is superhuman, miraculous; but he never falters, so vehementis the impulse of his delight. It is only afterwards that we askourselves whether there is anything beyond the mere delight; andrealising that, though we have been rapt far above the earth, we havehad no disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slightflatness of disappointment. 

But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which ecstasyis shot through with that strain of melancholy which we havealready noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so much to exultimpersonally in the force that chariots the decaying leaves, spreads theseeds abroad, wakes the Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves theAtlantic, as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and failure:

 "Oh life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. "

Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing from misty morningthrough blue noon to twilight, brings, as he looks over "the wavelessplain of Lombardy, " a short respite:

 "Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery; Or the Mariner, worn and wan, Ne'er thus could voyage on. "

The contrast between the peaceful loveliness of nature and his ownmisery is a piteous puzzle. On the beach near Naples

 "The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might. "

But

 "Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned-- Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround-- Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;-- To me that cup has been dealt in another measure";

so that

 "I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care. "

The aching weariness that throbs in the music of these verses is notmere sentimental self-pity; it is the cry of a soul that has knownmoments of bliss when it has been absorbed in the sea of beauty thatsurrounds it, only the moments pass, and the reunion, ever sought, seemsever more hopeless. Over and over again Shelley's song gives us both thefugitive glimpses and the mystery of frustration. 

 "I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal 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 clasp'd 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. "

Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in these sad'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is one poem--perhapshis greatest poem--which may suggest the answer. In the 'SensitivePlant' (1820) a garden is first described on which are lavished all hispowers of weaving an imaginary landscape out of flowers and light andodour. All the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty exceptthe Sensitive Plant, "For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful. "

Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this Eden. " "ALady, the wonder of her kind, " tended the flowers from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died!"The last part of the poem, a pendant to the first, is full of thehorrors of corruption and decay when the power of good has vanished andthe power of evil is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow, "And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, And snapped them off with his rigid griff. 

 When winter had gone and spring came back The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. "

Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we mayconsole ourselves by believing that

 "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. 

 That 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. "

The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with hisphilosophical ideas. It is the creed of the student of Berkeley, ofPlato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging is the one spiritwhich interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty anddelight, " and this spirit--the vision which Alastor pursued in vain, the"Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'--is what is alwayssuggested by his poetry at its highest moments. The suggestion, inits fulness, is of course ineffable; only in the case of Shelley someapproach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped inphilosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expressionare predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with itsinsistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of anunsatisfied and disappointed soul. 

His philosophy of love is but a special case of this all-embracingdoctrine. We saw how in 'Epipsychidion' he rejected monogamic principleson the ground that true love is increased, not diminished, by division, and we can now understand why he calls this theory an "eternal law. "For, in this life of illusion, it is in passionate love that we mostnearly attain to communion with the eternal reality. Hence the more ofit the better. The more we divide and spread our love, the more nearlywill the fragments of goodness and beauty that are in each of us findtheir true fruition. This doctrine may be inconvenient in practice, butit is far removed from vulgar sensualism, of which Shelley had not atrace. Hogg says that he was "pre-eminently a ladies' man, " meaning thathe had that childlike helplessness and sincerity which go straight tothe hearts of women. To this youth, preaching sublime mysteries, andneeding to be mothered into the bargain, they were as iron to themagnet. There was always an Eve in his Eden, and each was the "wonderof her kind"; but whoever she was--Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Turner, Mary Godwin, Emilia Viviani, or Jane Williams--she was never a Don Juan's mistress; she was anincarnation of the soul of the world, a momentary mirror of the eternal. Such an attitude towards the least controllable of passions has severaldrawbacks: it involves a certain inhumanity, and it is only possible forlong to one who remains ignorant of himself and cannot see that part ofthe force impelling him is blind attraction towards a pretty face. Italso has the result that, if the lover is a poet, his love-songs will besad. Obsessed by the idea of communion with some divine perfection, hemust needs be often cast down, not only by finding that, Ixion-like, he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said of himself and Emilia), butbecause, even when the object of his affection is worthy, completecommunion is easier to desire than to attain. Thus Shelley's love-songsare just what might be expected. If he does strain to the moment ofingress into the divine being, it is to swoon with excess of bliss, asat the end of 'Epipsychidion', or as in the 'Indian Serenade':

 "Oh lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail!"

More often he exhales pure melancholy:

 "See the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother. And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?"

Here the failure is foreseen; he knows she will not kiss him. Sometimeshis sadness is faint and restrained:

 "I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden, Thou needest not fear mine; My spirit is too deeply laden Ever to burthen thine. "

At other times it flows with the fulness of despair, as in

 "I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not, The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?"

or in

 "When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead-- When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. "

The very rapture of the skylark opens, as he listens, the wound at hisheart:

 "We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. "

Is the assertion contained in this last line universally true? Perhaps. At any rate it is true of Shelley. His saddest songs are the sweetest, and the reason is that in them, rather than in those verses where hemerely utters ecstatic delight, or calm pleasure, or bitter indignation, he conveys ineffable suggestions beyond what the bare words express. 

It remains to point out that there is one means of conveying suchsuggestions which was outside the scope of his genius. One of themethods which poetry most often uses to suggest the ineffable is bythe artful choice and arrangement of words. A word, simply by beingcunningly placed and given a certain colour, can, in the hands of a goodcraftsman, open up indescribable vistas. But Keats, when, in reply to aletter of criticism, he wrote to him, "You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore, "was giving him advice which, though admirable, it was impossible that heshould follow. Shelley was not merely not a craftsman by nature, hewas not the least interested in those matters which are covered by theclumsy name of "technique. " It is characteristic of him that, while mostgreat poets have been fertile coiners of new words, his only addition tothe language is the ugly "idealism" in the sense of "ideal object. "He seems to have strayed from the current vocabulary only in twoother cases, both infelicitous--"glode" for "glided, " and "blosmy" for"blossomy. " He did not, like Keats, look on fine phrases with the eye ofa lover. His taste was the conventional taste of the time. Thus he saidof Byron's 'Cain', "It is apocalyptic, it is a revelation not beforecommunicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better poetsthan himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael Angelo, and the onlythings about which he was enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments ofantiquity which he loved for their associations, were the paintings ofRaphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metricaleffects, those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the greatmasters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, andShelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He issupreme, indeed, in simple outbursts where there is no question of form, but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he toooften sprawls and fumbles before the inspiration comes. 

Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms vain. Wemay trace in it all kinds of 'arrieres pensees', philosophical andsociological, that an artist ought not to have, and we may even dislikeits dominating conception of a vague spirit that pervades the universe;but we must admit that when he wrote it was as if seized and swept awayby some "unseen power" that fell upon him unpremeditated. His emotionswere of that fatal violence which distinguishes so many illustrious butunhappy souls from the mass of peaceable mankind. In the early partof last century a set of illustrations to Faust by Retzch used to begreatly admired; about one of them, a picture of Faust and Margaret inthe arbour, Shelley says in a letter to a friend: "The artist makes oneenvy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, whichI only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round onlyto touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it wasfigured. " So slight were the occasions that could affect him even tovertigo. When, from whatever cause, the frenzy took him, he would writehastily, leaving gaps, not caring about the sense. Afterwards he wouldwork conscientiously over what he had written, but there was nothingleft for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of this method wasthat his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, whichis perhaps as great a quality as anything attained by the more bee-liketoil of better artists. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense, and noattempt will be made even to summarise it here. A convenient one-volumeedition of the poems is that edited by Professor Edward Dowden forMessrs. Macmillan (1896); it includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There is a good selection of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series, "compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been collectedand edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes (1876-1880). Ofthe letters there is an edition by Mr. Roger Ingpen (2 vols. , 1909). Anumber of letters to Elizabeth Hitchener were published by Mr. BertramDobell in 1909. 

For a first-hand knowledge of a poet's life and character the studentmust always go to the accounts of contemporaries. In Shelley's casethese are copious. There are T. L. Peacock, s 'Memoirs' (edited by E. F. B. Brett-Smith, 1909); Peacock's 'Nightmare Abbey' contains an amusingcaricature of Shelley in the person of Scythrops; and in at least twoof her novels Mary Shelley has left descriptions of her husband: AdrianEarl of Windsor, in 'The Last Man', is a portrait of Shelley, and'Lodore' contains an account of his estrangement from Harriet. Hiscousin Tom Medwin's 'Life' (1847) is a bad book, full of inaccuracies. But Shelley had one unique piece of good fortune: two friends wrotebooks about him that are masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's 'Life' is especiallyvaluable for the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's 'Records ofShelley, Byron, and the Author', describes him in the last year beforehis death. Hogg's 'Life' has been republished in a cheap edition byMessrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of Trelawny's 'Records'in Messrs. Routledge's "New Universal Library. " But both these books, while they give incomparably vivid pictures of the poet, are ramblingand unconventional, and should be supplemented by Professor Dowden's'Life of Shelley' (2 vols. , 1886), which will always remain the standardbiography. Of other recent lives, Mr. A. Clutton-Brock's 'Shelley: theMan and the Poet' (1910) may be recommended. 

Of the innumerable critical estimates of Shelley and his place inliterature, the most noteworthy are perhaps Matthew Arnold's Essay inhis 'Essays in Criticism', and Francis Thompson's 'Shelley' (1909). Vol. Iv. "Naturalism in England, " of Dr. George Brandes' 'Main Currents inNineteenth Century Literature' (1905), may be read with interest, thoughit is not very reliable; and Prof. Oliver Elton's 'A Survey of EnglishLiterature', 1780-1830 (1912), should be consulted. 

Whoever wishes to follow the fortunes, after the fire of their lives wasextinguished by Shelley's death, of Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, andthe rest, should read, besides Trelawny's 'Records' already mentioned, 'The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley', by Mrs. JulianMarshall (2 vols. , 1889), and '_The Letters of E. J. Trelawny_, edited byMr. H. Buxton Forman (1910).