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5  J  EY  WATERLOWM. 


-  ■ 


Zbc  3.  C  Saul  Collection 

of 

nineteenth  denture 

EnQltsb  literature 

flMucbaseo  in  part 

tbroiuib  a  contribution  to  tbe 

library  tfunos  maoe  bv>  tbe 

department    of   EncUtsb   In 

Tilmrersits  College. 


* 


HELLEY 


By  SYDNEY  WATERLOW,  M.A. 


LONDON:  T.  C.  &  E.  C.  JACK 
67  LONG  ACRE,  W.G.,  AND  EDINBURGH 
NEW    YORK  :     DODGE     PUBLISHING    CO. 


PR 

St3l 

Us 


CONTENTS 


CHAP.  PAGG 

I.    SHELLEY   AND   HIS   AGE              ....  7 

H.   PRINCIPAL   WRITINGS 38 

m.    THE    POET    OF   REBELLION,    OF    NATURE,    AND 

OF  LOVE 70 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE             ....  90 

INDEX 92 


SHELLEY 

CHAPTER   I 

SHELLEY   AND   HIS   AGE 

In  the  case  of  most  great  writers  our  interest  in  them 
as  persons  is  derived  from  our  interest  in  them  as 
writers  ;  we  are  not  very  curious  about  them  except 
for  reasons  that  have  something  to  do  with  their  art. 
With  Shelley  it  is  different.  During  his  life  he 
aroused  fears  and  hatreds,  loves  and  adorations,  that 
were  quite  irrelevant  to  literature  ;  and  even  now, 
when  he  has  become  a  classic,  he  still  causes  excite- 
ment as  a  man.  His  lovers  are  as  vehement  as  ever. 
For  them  he  is  the  "  banner  of  freedom,"  which, 

"  Torn  but  flying, 
Streams  like  a  thunder-cloud  against  the  wind." 

He  has  suffered  that  worst  indignity  of  canonisation 
as  a  being  saintly  and  superhuman,  not  subject  to 
the  morality  of  ordinary  mortals.  He  has  been 
bedaubed  with  pathos.  Nevertheless  it  is  possible 
still  to  recognise  in  him  one  of  the  most  engaging 
personalities  that  ever  lived.  What  is  the  secret  of 
this  charm  ?  He  had  many  characteristics  that 
belong  to  the  most  tiresome  natures  ;    he  even  had 

7 


8  SHELLEY 

the  qualities  of  the  man  as  to  whom  one  wonders 
whether  partial  insanity  may  not  be  his  best  excuse — 
inconstancy  expressing  itself  in  hysterical  revulsions 
of  feeling,  complete  lack  of  balance,  proneness  to 
act  recklessly  to  the  hurt  of  others.  Yet  he  was 
loved  and  respected  by  contemporaries  of  tastes  very 
different  from  his  own,  who  were  good  judges  and 
intolerant  of  bores — by  Byron,  who  was  apt  to  care 
little  for  any  one,  least  of  all  for  poets,  except  him- 
self ;  by  Peacock,  who  poured  laughter  on  all  en- 
thusiasms ;  and  by  Hogg,  who,  though  slightly 
eccentric,  was  a  Tory  eccentric.  The  fact  is  that, 
with  all  his  defects,  he  had  two  qualities  which,  com- 
bined, are  so  attractive  that  there  is  scarcely  any- 
thing they  will  not  redeem — perfect  sincerity  without 
a  thought  of  self,  and  vivid  emotional  force.  All 
his  faults  as  well  as  his  virtues  were,  moreover,  derived 
from  a  certain  strong  feeling,  coloured  in  a  peculiar 
way  which  will  be  explained  in  what  follows — a  sort 
of  ardour  of  universal  benevolence.  One  of  his 
letters  ends  with  these  words  :  "  Affectionate  love 
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  not  merely  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  is  a  thing  which 
appeals  to  men  almost  with  the  force  of  divinity, 
still  carrying,  even  when  mutilated  and  obscured  by 
frailties,  some  suggestion  of  St.  Francis  or  of  Christ. 


SHELLEY  AND  HIS  AGE  9 

The  object  of  these  pages  is  not  to  idealise  either 
Ms  life,  his  character,  or  his  works.  The  three  are 
inseparably  connected,  and  to  understand  one  we 
must  understand  all.  The  reason  is  that  Shelley  is 
one  of  the  most  subjective  of  writers.  It  would  be 
hard  to  name  a  poet  who  has  kept  his  art  more  free 
from  all  taint  of  representation  of  the  real,  making  it 
not  an  instrument  for  creating  something  life-like, 
but  a  more  and  more  intimate  echo  or  emanation 
of  his  own  spirit.  In  studying  his  writings  we  shall 
see  how  they  flow  from  his  dominating  emotion  of 
love  for  his  fellow-men ;  and  the  drama  of  his  life, 
displayed  against  the  background  of  the  time,  will 
in  turn  throw  light  on  that  emotion.  His  benevolence 
took  many  forms — none  perfect,  some  admirable,  some 
ridiculous.  It  was  too  universal.  He  never  had  a  clear 
enough  perception  of  the  real  qualities  of  real  men  and 
women  ;  hence  his  loves  for  individuals,  as  capricious 
as  they  were  violent,  always  seem  to  lack  something 
which  is  perhaps  the  most  valuable  element  in  human 
affection.  If  in  this  way  we  can  analyse  his  tem- 
perament successfully,  the  process  should  help  us 
to  a  more  critical  understanding,  and  so  to  a  fuller 
enjoyment,  of  the  poems. 

This  greatest  of  our  lyric  poets,  the  culmination  of 
the  Romantic  Movement  in  English  literature,  ap- 
peared in  an  age  which,  following  on  the  series  of 
successful  wars  that  had  established  British  power 
all  over  the  world,  was  one  of  the  gloomiest  in  our 
history.  If  in  some  ways  the  England  of  1800-20 
was  ahead  of  the  rest  of  Europe,  in  others  it  lagged 


10  SHELLEY 

far  behind.  The  Industrial  Revolution,  which  was 
to  turn  us  from  a  nation  of  peasants  and  traders  into 
a  nation  of  manufacturers,  had  begun  ;  but  its  chief 
fruits  as  yet  were  increased  materialism  and  greed, 
and  politically  the  period  was  one  of  blackest  re- 
action. Alone  of  European  peoples  we  had  been 
untouched  by  the  tide  of  Napoleon's  conquests, 
which,  when  it  receded  from  the  Continent,  at  least 
left  behind  a  framework  of  enlightened  institutions, 
while  our  success  in  the  Napoleonic  wars  only  con- 
firmed the  ruling  aristocratic  families  in  their  grip 
of  the  nation  which  they  had  governed  since  the 
reign  of  Anne.  This  despotism  crushed  the  humble 
and  stimulated  the  high-spirited  to  violence,  and  is 
the  reason  why  three  such  poets  as  Byron,  Landor, 
and  Shelley,  though  by  birth  and  fortune  members 
of  the  ruling  class,  wrere  pioneers  as  much  of  political 
as  of  spiritual  rebellion.  Unable  to  breathe  the 
atmosphere  of  England,  they  were  driven  to  live  in 
exile. 

It  requires  some  effort  to  reconstruct  that  atmos- 
phere to-day.  A  foreign  critic  x  has  summed  it  up 
by  saying  that  England  was  then  pre-eminently  the 
home  of  cant ;  while  in  politics  her  native  energy 
was  diverted  to  oppression,  in  morals  and  religion 
it  took  the  form  of  hypocrisy  and  persecution. 
Abroad  she  was  supporting  the  Holy  Alliance, 
throwing  her  weight  into  the  scale  against  all  move- 
ments for  freedom.     At  home  there  was  exhaustion 

1  Dr.  George  Branded,  in  vol.  iv.  of  his  Main  Currents  of 
Nineteenth  Century  Literature. 


SHELLEY  AND   HIS  AGE  11 

after  war  ;  workmen  were  thrown  out  of  employ- 
ment, and  taxation  pressed  heavily  on  the  poor. 
The  landed  class,  which  had  fattened  on  high  rents 
and  the  high  price  of  corn,  was  made  cruel  by  fear  ; 
for  the  French  Revolution  had  sent  a  wave  of  panic 
through  the  country,  not  to  ebb  until  about  1830. 
Suspicion  of  republican  principles — which,  it  seemed, 
led  straight  to  the  Terror — frightened  many  good 
men,  who  would  otherwise  have  been  reformers,  into 
supporting  the  triumph  of  coercion  and  Toryism. 
The  elder  generation  of  poets  had  been  republicans 
in  their  youth.  Wordsworth  had  said  of  the  Revolu- 
tion that  it  was  "  bliss  to  be  alive  "  in  that  dawn  ; 
Southey  and  Coleridge  had  even  planned  to  found  a 
communistic  society  in  the  New  World.  Now  all 
three  were  rallied  to  the  defence  of  order  and  pro- 
perty, to  Church  and  Throne  and  Constitution. 
From  their  seclusion  in  the  Lakes,  Southey  and 
Wordsworth  praised  the  royal  family  and  celebrated 
England  as  the  home  of  freedom  ;  while  Thomson 
wrote  "  Rule,  Britannia,"  as  if  Britons,  though  they 
never,  never  would  be  slaves  to  a  foreigner,  were 
not  slaves — or  all  of  them  who  were  not  gentlemen — 
to  a  home-grown  tyranny  more  blighting,  because 
mere  stupid,  than  that  of  Napoleon.  England  had 
stamped  out  the  Irish  rebellion  of  1798  in  blood,  had 
forced  Ireland  by  fraud  into  the  Union  of  1800,  and 
was  strangling  her  industry  and  commerce.  Catho- 
lics could  neither  vote  nor  hold  office.  At  a  time 
when  the  population  of  the  United  Kingdom  was 
some   thirty   millions,    the   Parliamentary  franchise 


12  SHELLEY 

was  possessed  by  no  more  than  a  million  persons, 
and  most  of  the  seats  in  the  House  of  Commons 
were  the  private  property  of  rich  men.  Representa- 
tive government  did  not  exist ;  whoever  agitated  for 
some  measure  of  it  was  deported  to  Australia  or 
forced  to  fly  to  America.  Glasgow  and  Manchester 
weavers  starved  and  rioted.  The  press  was  gagged 
and  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act  constantly  suspended. 
A  second  rebellion  in  Ireland,  when  Castlereagh 
"  dabbled  his  sleek  young  hands  in  Erin's  gore," 
was  suppressed  with  unusual  ferocity.  In  England 
in  1812  famine  drove  bands  of  poor  people  to  wander 
and  pillage.  "Under  the  criminal  law,  still  of  medieval 
cruelty,  death  was  the  punishment  for  the  theft  of 
a  loaf  or  a  sheep.  The  social  organism  had  come  to 
a  deadlock — on  the  one  hand  a  starved  and  angry 
populace,  on  the  other  a  vast  Church-and-King 
party,  impregnably  powerful,  made  up  of  all  who 
had  "  a  stake  in  the  country."  The  strain  was  not 
to  be  relieved  until  the  Reform  Act  of  1832  set  the 
wheels  in  motion  again  ;  they  then  moved  painfully 
indeed,  but  still  they  moved.  Meanwhile  Parliament 
was  the  stronghold  of  selfish  interests ;  the  Church 
was  the  jackal  of  the  gentry ;  George  III,  who  lost 
the  American  colonies  and  maintained  negro  slavery, 
was  on  the  throne,  until  he  went  mad  and  was 
succeeded  by  his  profligate  son. 
Shelley  said  of  himself  that  he  was 

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


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  13 

and  all  the  shades  of  this  dark  picture  are  reflected  in 
his  life  and  in  his  verse.  He  was  the  eldest  son  of 
a  Sussex  family  that  was  loyally  Whig  and  moved 
in  the  orbit  of  the  Catholic  Dukes  of  Norfolk,  and 
the  talk  about  emancipation  which  he  would  hear  at 
home  may  partly  explain  his  amazing  invasion  of 
Ireland  in  1811-12,  when  he  was  nineteen  years  old, 
with  the  object  of  procuring  Catholic  emancipation 
and  the  repeal  of  the  Union  Act — subjects  on  which 
he  was  quite  ignorant.  He  addressed  meetings, 
wasted  money,  and  distributed  two  pamphlets 
"  consisting  of  the  benevolent  and  tolerant  deduc- 
tions of  philosophy  reduced  into  the  simplest  lan- 
guage." Later  on,  when  he  had  left  England  for 
ever,  he  still  followed  eagerly  the  details  of  the 
struggle  for  freedom  at  home,  and  in  1819  composed 
a  group  of  poems  designed  to  stir  the  masses  from 
their  lethargy.  Lord  Liverpool's  administration  was 
in  office,  with  Sidmouth  as  Home  Secretary  and 
Castlereagh  as  Foreign  Secretary,  a  pair  whom  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." 


14  SHELLEY 

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 
support  of  Parliamentary  reform,  killing  six  people 
and  Mounding  some  seventy  others.  Shelley's  frenzy 
of  indignation  poured  itself  out  in  the  terrific  stanzas, 
written  in  simplest  language  so  as  to  be  understood 
by  the  people,  which  tell  how 

"  I  met  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  in  sinister  humour,  Swell  foot  the  Tyrant  (1820), 
suggested  by  the  grunting  of  pigs  at  an  Italian  fair, 
and  burlesquing  the  quarrel  between  the  Prince 
Regent  and  his  wife.  When  the  Princess  of  Wales 
(Caroline  of  Brunswick- Wolf enbiittel),  after  having 
left  her  husband  and  perambulated  Europe  with  a 
paramour,  returned,  soon  after  the  Prince's  accession 
as  George  IV,  to  claim  her  position  as  Queen,  the 
royal  differences  became  an  affair  of  high  national 
importance.  The  divorce  case  which  followed  was 
like  a  gangrenous  eruption  symptomatic  of  the  dis- 
tempers of  the  age.     Shelley  felt  that  sort  of  disgust 


SHELLEY  AND  HIS  AGE  15 

which  makes  a  man  rave  and  curse  under  the  attacks 
of  some  loathsome  disease  ;  if  he  laughs,  it  is  the 
laugh  of  frenzy.  In  the  slight  Aristophanic  drama 
of  Swellfoot,  which  was  sent  home,  published,  and  at 
once  suppressed,  he  represents  the  men  of  England 
as  starving  pigs  content  to  lap  up  such  diluted 
hog's-wash  as  their  tyrant,  the  priests,  and  the 
soldiers  will  allow  them.  At  the  end,  when  the  pigs, 
rollicking  after  the  triumphant  Princess,  hunt  down 
their  oppressors,  we  cannot  help  feeling  a  little  sorry 
that  he  does  not  glide  from  the  insistent  note  of 
piggishness  into  some  gentler  mood  :  there  is  a  rasp- 
ing quality  in  his  humour,  even  though  it  is  always 
on  the  side  of  the  right.  He  wrote  one  good  satire 
though.  This  is  Peter  Bell  the  Third  (1819),  an  attack 
on  Wordsworth,  partly  literary  for  the  dulness  of  his 
writing  since  he  had  been  sunk  in  clerical  respecta- 
bility, partly  political  for  his  renegade  flunkeyism. 

In  1820  the  pall  which  still  hung  over  northern 
Europe  began  to  lift  in  the  south.  After  Napoleon's 
downfall  the  Congress  of  Vienna  (1814-16)  had 
parcelled  Europe  out  on  the  principle  of  disregarding 
national  aspirations  and  restoring  the  legitimate 
rulers.  This  system,  which  could  not  last,  was  first 
shaken  by  revolutions  that  set  up  constitutional 
governments  in  Spain  and  Naples.  Shelley  hailed 
these  streaks  of  dawn  with  joy,  and  uttered  his 
enthusiasm  in  two  odes — the  Ode  to  Liberty  and 
the  Ode  to  Naples — the  most  splendid  of  those 
cries  of  hope  and  prophecy  with  which  a  long  line 
of   English   poets   has   encouraged  the  insurrection 


16  SHELLEY 

of  the  nations.  Such  cries,  however,  have  no  visible 
effect  on  the  course  of  events.  Byron's  jingles  could 
change  the  face  of  the  world,  while  all  Shelley's  pine 
and  lofty  aspirations  left  no  mark  on  history.  And 
so  it  was,  not  with  his  republican  ardours  alone,  but 
with  all  he  undertook.  Nothing  he  did  influenced 
his  contemporaries  outside  his  immediate  circle  ;  the 
public  only  noticed  him  to  execrate  the  atheist,  the 
fiend,  and  the  monster.  He  felt  that  "  his  name 
was  writ  on  water,"  and  languished  for  want  of 
recognition.  His  life,  a  lightning-flash  across  the 
storm-cloud  of  the  age,  was  a  brief  but  crowded  record 
of  mistakes  and  disasters,  the  classical  example  of 
the  rule  that  genius  is  an  infinite  capacity  for  getting 
into  trouble. 

Though  poets  must  "  learn  in  suffering  what  they 
teach  in  song,"  there  is  often  a  vein  of  comedy  in 
their  lives.  If  we  could  transport  ourselves  to 
Miller's  Hotel,  Westminster  Bridge,  on  a  certain 
afternoon  in  the  early  spring  of  1811,  we  should 
behold  a  scene  apparently  swayed  entirely  by  the 
Comic  Muse.  The  member  for  Shoreham,  Mr. 
Timothy  Shelley,  a  handsome,  consequential  gentle- 
man of  middle  age,  who  piques  himself  on  his 
enlightened  opinions,  is  expecting  two  guests  to 
dinner — his  eldest  son,  and  his  son's  friend,  T.  J. 
Hogg,  who  have  just  been  sent  down  from  Oxford 
for  a  scandalous  affair  of  an  atheistical  squib.  When 
the  young  men  arrive  at  five  o'clock,  Mr.  Shelley 
receives  Hogg,  an  observant  and  cool-headed  person, 
with  graciousness,    and   an   hour  is   spent    in  con- 


SHELLEY   AND    HIS    AGE  17 

versation.  Mr.  Shelley  runs  on  strangely,  "in  an 
odd,  unconnected  manner,  scolding,  crying,  swear- 
ing, and  then  weeping  again."  After  dinner,  his  son 
being  out  of  the  room,  he  expresses  his  surprise  to 
Hogg  at  finding  him  such  a  sensible  fellow,  and  asks 
him  what  is  to  be  done  with  the  scapegrace.  "  Let 
him  be  married  to  a  girl  who  will  sober  him."  The 
wine  moves  briskly  round,  and  Mr.  Shelley  becomes 
maudlin  and  tearful  again.  He  is  a  model  magis- 
trate, the  terror  and  the  idol  of  poachers  ;  he  is 
highly  respected  in  the  House  of  Commons,  and  the 
Speaker  could  not  get  through  the  session  without 
him.  Then  he  drifts  to  religion.  God  exists,  no 
one  can  deny  it ;  in  fact,  he  has  the  proof  in  his 
pocket.  Out  comes  a  piece  of  paper,  and  arguments 
are  read  aloud,  which  his  son  recognises  as  Paley's. 
"  Yes,  they  are  Palley's  arguments,  but  he  had  them 
from  me  ;  almost  everything  in  Palley's  book  he  had 
from  me."  The  boy  of  nineteen,  who  listens  fuming 
to  this  folly,  takes  it  all  with  fatal  seriousness.  In 
appearance  he  is  no  ordinary  being.  A  shock  of 
dark  brown  hair  makes  his  small  round  head  look 
larger  than  it  really  is  ;  from  beneath  a  pale,  freckled 
forehead,  deep  blue  eyes,  large  and  mild  as  a  stag's, 
beam  an  earnestness  which  easily  flashes  into  en- 
thusiasm ;  the  nose  is  small  and  turn-up,  the  beard- 
less lips  girlish  and  sensitive.  He  is  tall,  but  stoops, 
and  has  an  air  of  feminine  fragility,  though  his  bones 
and  joints  are  large.  Hands  and  feet,  exquisitely 
shaped,  are  expressive  of  high  breeding.  His  ex- 
pensive, handsome  clothes  are  disordered  and  dusty, 


18  SHELLEY 

and  bulging  with  books.  When  he  speaks,  it  is  in 
a  strident  peacock  voice,  and  there  is  an  abrupt 
clumsiness  in  his  gestures,  especially  in  drawing- 
rooms,  where  he  is  ill  at  ease,  liable  to  trip  in  the 
carpet  and  upset  furniture.  Complete  absence  of 
self -consciousness,  perfect  disinterestedness,  are  evi- 
dent in  every  tone  ;  it  is  clear  that  he  is  an  aristo- 
crat, but  it  is  also  clear  that  he  is  a  saint. 

The  catastrophe  of  expulsion  from  Oxford  would 
have  been  impossible  in  a  well-regulated  university, 
but  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  could  not  have  fitted 
easily  into  any  system.  Born  at  Field  Place,  Hors- 
ham, Sussex,  on  August  4,  1792,  simultaneously 
with  the  French  Revolution,  he  had  more  than  a 
drop  of  wildness  in  his  blood.  The  long  pedigree  of 
the  Shelley  family  is  full  of  turbulent  ancestors,  and 
the  poet's  grandfather,  Sir  Bysshe,  an  eccentric  old 
miser  who  lived  until  1815,  had  been  married  twice, 
on  both  occasions  eloping  with  an  heiress.  Already 
at  Eton  Shelley  was  a  rebel  and  a  pariah.  Con- 
temptuous of  authority,  he  had  gone  his  own  way, 
spending  pocket-money  on  revolutionary  literature, 
trying  to  raise  ghosts,  and  dabbling  in  chemical 
experiments.  As  often  happens  to  queer  boys,  his 
school-fellows  herded  against  him,  pursuing  him 
with  blows  and  cries  of  "  Mad  Shelley."  But  the 
holidays  were  happy.  There  must  have  been  plenty 
of  fun  at  Field  Place  when  he  told  his  sisters  stories 
about  the  alchemist  in  the  attic  or  ';  the  Great  Tor- 
toise that  lived  in  Warnham  Pond,"  frightened  them 
with  electric  shocks,  and  taught  his  baby  brother  to 


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  19 

say  devil.  There  is  something  of  high-spirited  fun 
even  in  the  raptures  and  despairs  of  his  first  love  for 
his  cousin,  Harriet  Grove.  He  tried  to  convert  her 
to  republican  atheism,  until  the  family,  becoming 
alarmed,  interfered,  and  Harriet  was  disposed  of 
otherwise.  "  Married  to  a  clod  of  earth  !  "  exclaims 
Shelley.  He  spent  nights  "  pacing  the  churchyard," 
and  slept  with  a  loaded  pistol  and  poison  beside  him. 
He  went  into  residence  at  University  College, 
Oxford,  in  the  Michaelmas  term  of  1810.  The  world 
must  always  bless  the  chance  which  sent  Thomas 
Jefferson  Hogg  a  freshman  to  the  same  college  at 
the  same  time,  and  made  him  Shelley's  friend.  The 
chapters  in  which  Hogg  describes  their  life  at  Oxford 
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  of  books  and  retorts  and 
"  galvanic  troughs,"  and  discoursing  on  the  vast 
possibilities  of  science  for  making  mankind  happy  ; 
how  chemistry  will  turn  deserts  into  cornfields,  and 
even  the  air  and  water  will  yield  fire  and  food  ;  how 
Africa  will  be  explored  by  balloons,  of  which  the 
shadows,  passing  over  the  jungles,  will  emancipate 
the  slaves.  In  the  midst  he  would  rush  out  to  a 
lecture  on  mineralogy,  and  come  back  sighing  that 
it  was  all  about  "  stones,  stones,  stones  "  !  The 
friends  read  Plato  together,  and  held  endless  talk 
of  metaphysics,  pre-existence,  and  the  sceptical 
philosophy,  on  winter  walks  across  country,  and  all 
night  beside  the  fire,  until  Shelley  would  curl  up 
on  the  hearthrug  and  go  to  sleep.     He  was  happy 


20  SHELLEY 

because  he  was  left  to  himself.  With  all  his  thoughts 
and  impulses,  ill-controlled  indeed,  but  directed  to 
the  acquisition  of  knowledge  for  the  benefit  of  the 
world,  such  a  student  would  nowadays  be  a  marked 
man,  applauded  and  restrained.  But  the  Oxford  of 
that  day  was  a  home  of  "  chartered  laziness."  An 
academic  circle  absorbed  in  intrigues  for  preferment, 
and  enlivened  only  by  drunkenness  and  immorality, 
could  offer  nothing  but  what  was  repugnant  to 
Shelley.  He  remained  a  solitary  until  the  hand  of 
authority  fell  and  expelled  him. 

He  had  always  had  a  habit  of  writing  to  strangers 
on  the  subjects  next  his  heart.  Once  he  approached 
Miss  Felicia  Dorothea  Browne  (afterwards  Mrs. 
Hemans),  who  had  not  been  encouraging.  Now  half 
in  earnest,  and  half  with  an  impish  desire  for  dia- 
lectical scores,  he  printed  a  pamphlet  on  The  Neces- 
sity of  Atheism,  a  single  foolscap  sheet  concisely 
proving  that  no  reason  for  the  existence  of  God  can 
be  valid,  and  sent  it  to  various  personages,  including 
bishops,  asking  for  a  refutation.  It  fell  into  the 
hands  of  the  college  authorities.  Summoned  before 
the  council  to  say  whether  he  was  the  author,  Shelley 
very  properly  refused  to  answer,  and  was  peremptorily 
expelled,  together  with  Hogg,  who  had  intervened  in 
bis  behalf. 

The  pair  went  to  London,  and  took  lodgings  in  a 
house  where  a  wall-paper  with  a  vine-trellis  pattern 
caught  Shelley's  fancy.  Mr.  Timothy  Shelley  ap- 
peared on  the  scene,  and,  his  feelings  as  a  Christian 
and  a  father  deeply  outraged,  did  the  worst  thing 


SHELLEY   AND    HIS   AGE  21 

he  could  possibly  have  done— he  made  forgiveness 
conditional  on  his  son's  giving  up  his  friend.  The 
next  step  was  to  cut  off  supplies  and  to  forbid  Field 
Place  to  him,  lest  he  should  corrupt  his  sisters' 
minds.  Soon  Hogg  had  to  go  to  York  to  work  in 
a  conveyancer's  office,  and  Shelley  was  left  alone 
in  London,  depressed,  a  martyr,  and  determined  to 
save  others  from  similar  persecution.  In  this  mood 
he  formed  a  connection  destined  to  end  in  tragedy. 
His  sisters  were  at  a  school  at  Clapham,  where  among 
the  girls  was  one  Harriet  Westbrook,  the  sixteen- 
year-old  daughter  of  a  coffee-house  keeper.  Shelley 
became  intimate  with  the  Westbrooks,  and  set  about 
saving  the  soul  of  Harriet,  who  had  a  pretty  rosy 
face,  a  neat  figure,  and  a  glib  school-girl  mind  quick 
to  catch  up  and  reproduce  his  doctrines.  The  child 
seems  to  have  been  innocent  enough,  but  her  elder 
sister,  Eliza,  a  vulgar  woman  of  thirty,  used  her  as 
a  bait  to  entangle  the  future  baronet;  she  played 
on  Shelley's  feelings  by  encouraging  Harriet  to 
believe  herself  the  victim  of  tyranny  at  school. 
Still,  it  was  six  months  before  he  took  the  final  step. 
How  he  could  save  Harriet  from  scholastic  and  dom- 
estic bigotry  was  a  grave  question.  In  the  first  place, 
hatred  of  "  matrimonialism  "  was  one  of  his  principles, 
yet  it  seemed  unfair  to  drag  a  helpless  woman 
into  the  risks  of  illicit  union ;  in  the  second  place, 
he  was  at  this  time  passionately  interested  in  another 
woman,  a  certain  Miss  Hitchener,  a  Sussex  school- 
mistress of  republican  and  deistic  principles,  whom 
he  idealised  as  an  angel,  only  to  discover  soon,  with 


22  SHELLEY 

equal  falsity,  that  she  was  a  demon.  At  last  Harriet 
was  worked  up  to  throw  herself  on  his  protection. 
They  fled  by  the  northern  mail,  dropping  at  York  a 
summons  to  Hogg  to  join  them,  and  contracted  a 
Scottish  marriage  at  Edinburgh  on  August  28,  1811. 
The  story  of  the  two  years  and  nine  months  during 
which  Shelley  lived  with  Harriet  must  seem  insane 
to  a  rational  mind.  Life  was  one  comfortless  picnic. 
When  Shelley  wanted  food,  he  would  dart  into  a 
shop  and  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,  Edinburgh  again,  and  Windsor, 
successively  received  this  fantastic  household.  Each 
fresh  house  was  the  one  where  they  were  to  abide  for 
ever,  and  each  formed  the  base  of  operations  for 
some  new  scheme  of  comprehensive  beneficence. 
Thus  at  Tremadoc,  on  the  Welsh  coast,  Shelley  em- 
barked on  the  construction  of  an  embankment  to 
reclaim  a  drowned  tract  of  land  ;  Queen  Mab  was 
written  partly  in  Devonshire  and  partly  in  Wales  ; 
and  from  Ireland,  where  he  had  gone  to  regenerate 
the  country,  he  opened  correspondence  with  William 
Godwin,  the  philosopher  and  author  of  Political 
Justice.  His  energy  in  entering  upon  ecstatic  per- 
sonal relations  was  as  great  as  that  which  he  threw 
into  philanthropic  schemes  ;  but  the  relations,  like 
the  schemes,  were  formed  with  no  notion  of  adapting 
means  to  ends,  and  were  often  dropped  as  hurriedly. 


SHELLEY   AND    HIS    AGE  23 

Eliza  Westbrook,  at  first  a  woman  of  estimable 
qualities,  quickly  became  "  a  blind  and  loathsome 
worm  that  cannot  see  to  sting  "  ;  Miss  Hitchener, 
who  had  been  induced  to  give  up  her  school  and 
come  to  live  with  them  "  for  ever,"  was  discovered 
to  be  a  "  brown  demon,"  and  had  to  be  pensioned 
off.  He  loved  his  wife  for  a  time,  but  they  drifted 
apart,  and  he  found  consolation  in  a  sentimental 
attachment  to  a  Mrs.  Boinville  and  her  daughter, 
Cornelia  Turner,  ladies  who  read  Italian  poetry  with 
him  and  sang  to  guitars.  Harriet  had  borne  him  a 
daughter,  Ianthe,  but  she  herself  was  a  child,  who 
soon  wearied  of  philosophy  and  of  being  taught 
Latin ;  naturally  she  wanted  fine  clothes,  fashion,  a 
settlement.  Egged  on  by  her  sister,  she  spent  on 
plate  and  a  carriage  the  money  that  Shelley  would 
have  squandered  on  humanity  at  large.  Money 
difficulties  and  negotiations  with  his  father  were  the 
background  of  all  this  period.  On  March  24,  1814„ 
he  married  Harriet  in  church,  to  settle  any  possible 
question  as  to  the  legitimacy  of  his  children ;  but 
they  parted  soon  after.  Attempts  were  made  at 
reconciliation,  which  might  have  succeeded  had  not 
Shelley  during  this  summer  drifted  into  a  serious 
and  relatively  permanent  passion.  He  made  financial 
provision  for  his  wife,  who  gave  birth  to  a  second 
child,  a  boy,  on  November  30,  1814 ;  but,  as  the 
months  passed,  and  Shelley  was  irrevocably  bound 
to  another,  she  lost  heart  for  life  in  the  dreariness  of 
her  father's  house.  An  Irish  officer  took  her  for  his 
mistress,  and  on  December  10,  1816,  she  was  found 


24  SHELLEY 

drowned  in  the  Serpentine.  Twenty  days  later 
Shelley  married  his  second  wife. 

This  marriage  was  the  result  of  his  correspondence 
with  William  Godwin,  which  had  ripened  into  inti- 
macy, based  on  community  of  principles,  with  the 
Godwin  household.  The  philosopher,  a  short,  stout 
old  man,  presided,  with  his  big  bald  head,  his  leaden 
complexion,  and  his  air  of  a  dissenting  minister, 
over  a  heterogeneous  family  at  41  Skinner  Street, 
Holborn,  supported  in  scrambling  poverty  by  the 
energy  of  the  second  Mrs.  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 
in  a  black  velvet  dress,  bad-tempered  and  untruthful. 
"  She  is  a  very  disgusting  woman,  and  wears  green 
spectacles,"  said  Charles  Lamb.  Besides  a  small 
son  of  the  Godwins,  the  family  contained  four  other 
members — Clara  Mary  Jane  Clairmont  and  Charles 
Clairmont  (Mrs.  Godwin's  children  by  a  previous 
marriage),  Fanny  Godwin  (as  she  was  called),  and 
Mary  Godwin.  These  last  two  were  the  daughters 
of  Mary  Wollstonecraft,  the  author  of  The  Rights  of 
Women,  the  great  feminist,  who  had  been  Godwin's 
first  wife.  Fanny's  father  was  a  scamp  called 
Imlay,  and  Mary  was  Godwin's  child. 

Mary  disliked  her  stepmother,  and  would  wander 
on  fine  days  to  read  beside  her  mother's  grave  in 
Old  St.  Pancras  Churchyard.  This  girl  of  seventeen 
had  a  strong  if  rather  narrow  mind  ;  she  was  im- 
perious, ardent,  and  firm-willed.  She  is  said  to 
have  been  very  pale,  with  golden  hair  and  a  large 


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  25 

forehead,  redeemed  from  commonplace  by  hazel  eyes 
which  had  a  piercing  look.  When  sitting,  she  ap- 
peared to  be  of  more  than  average  height ;  when  she 
stood,  you  saw  that  she  had  her  father's  stumpy 
legs.  Intellectually,  and  by  the  solidity  of  her 
character,  she  was  better  fitted  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.  If  it  was  inevitable  that 
her  interest,  touched  with  pity  (for  he  was  in  despair 
over  the  collapse  of  his  life  with  Harriet),  should 
quickly  warm  to  love,  we  must  insist  that  the  rapture 
with  which  he  leaped  to  meet  her  had  some  founda- 
tion in  reality.  That  she  was  gifted  is  manifest  in 
her  writings — chiefly,  no  doubt,  in  Frankenstein, 
composed  when  she  had  Shelley  to  fire  her  imagina- 
tion ;  but  her  other  novels  are  competent,  and  her 
letters  are  the  work  of  a  vigorous  intellect.  She  had 
her  limitations.  She  was  not  quite  so  free  from  con- 
ventionality as  either  he  or  she  believed  ;  but  on 
the  whole  they  were  neither  deceiving  themselves 
nor  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  arrange- 
ments to  elope,  and  on  July  28,  1814,  crossed  from 
Dover  to  Calais  in  an  open  boat,  taking  Jane  Clair- 
mont  with  them  on  the  spur  of  the  moment.  Jane 
also  had  been,  unhappy  in  Skinner  Street.  She  was 
about  Mary's   age,  a   pert,  olive-complexioned   girl, 


26  SHELLEY 

with  a  strong  taste  for  life.     She  changed  her  name 
to  Claire  because  it  sounded  more  romantic. 

Mrs.  Godwin  pursued  the  fugitives  to  Calais,  but 
in  vain.     Shelley  was  now  launched  on  a  new  life 
with  a  new  bride,   and — a  freakish  touch — accom- 
panied as  before  by  his  bride's  sister.     The  more  his 
life  changed,  the  more  it  was  the  same  thing — the 
same  plunging  without  forethought,  the  same  dis- 
regard for  all  that  is  conventionally  deemed  necessary. 
His  courage  is  often  praised,  and  rightly,  though  we 
ought  not  to  forget  that  ignorance,  and  even  obtuse- 
ness,  were  large  ingredients  in  it.     As  far  as  they  had 
any  plan,  it  was  to  reach  Switzerland  and  settle  on 
the   banks   of   some   lake,   amid   sublime   mountain 
scenery,  "  for  ever."     In  fact,  the  tour  lasted  but 
six  weeks.     Their  difficulties  began  in  Paris,  where 
only   an   accident  enabled   Shelley  to  raise  funds. 
Then  they  moved  slowly  across  war-wasted  France, 
Mary  and  Claire,  in  black  silk  dresses,  riding  by  turns 
on  a  mule,  and  Shelley  walking.     Childish  happiness 
glows  in  their  journals.     From  Troyes  Shelley  wrote 
to   the   abandoned   Harriet,    in   perfect   good  faith, 
pressing  her  to  join  them  in  Switzerland.     There  were 
sprained  ankles,  dirty  inns,  perfidious  and  disobhging 
drivers — the    ordinary    misadventures    of    the   road, 
magnified  a  thousand  times  by  their  helplessness,  and 
all  transfigured  in  the  purple  fight  of  youth  and  the 
intoxication  of  literature.     At  last  they  reached  the 
Lake   of   Lucerne,    settled   at   Brunnen,   and   began 
feverishly  to  read  and  write.     Shelley  worked  at  a 
novel  called   The  Assassins,   and  we  hear  of  him 


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  27 

"  sitting  on  a  rude  pier  by  the  lake  "  and  reading 
aloud  the  siege  of  Jerusalem  from  Tacitus.  Soon 
they  discovered  that  they  had  only  just  enough 
money  left  to  take  them  home.  Camp  was  struck 
in  haste,  and  they  travelled  down  the  Rhine.  When 
their  boat  was  detained  at  Marsluys,  all  three  sat 
writing  in  the  cabin — Shelley  his  novel,  Mary  a  story 
called  Hate,  and  Claire  a  story  called  The  Idiot — until 
they  were  tossed  across  to  England,  and  reached 
London  after  borrowing  passage-money  from  the 
captain. 

The  winter  was  spent  in  poverty,  dodging  creditors 
through  the  labyrinthine  gloom  of  the  town.  Chronic 
embarrassment  was  caused  by  Shelley's  extravagant 
credulity.  His  love  of  the  astonishing,  his  readiness 
to  believe  merely  because  a  thing  was  impossible, 
made  him  the  prey  of  every  impostor.  Knowing 
that  he  was  heir  to  a  large  fortune,  he  would  sub- 
sidise any  project  or  any  grievance,  only  provided 
it  were  wild  enough.  Godwin  especially  was  a  run- 
ning sore  both  now  and  later  on ;  the  philosopher 
was  at  the  beginning  of  that  shabby  degringolade  which 
was  to  end  in  the  ruin  of  his  self-respect.  In  spite 
of  his  anti-matrimonial  principles,  he  was  indignant 
at  his  disciple's  elopement  with  his  daughter,  and, 
in  spite  of  his  philosophy,  he  was  not  above  abusing 
and  sponging  in  the  same  breath.  The  worst  of  these 
difficulties,  however,  came  to  an  end  when  Shelley's 
grandfather  died  on  January  6,  1815,  and  he  was 
able,  after  long  negotiations,  to  make  an  arrange- 
ment with  his  father,  by  which  his  debts  were  paid 


28  SHELLEY 

and  he  received  an  income  of  £1000  a  year  in  con- 
sideration of  his  abandoning  his  interest  in  part  of 
the  estate. 

And  now,  the  financial  muddle  partly  smoothed 
out,  his  genius  began  to  bloom  in  the  congenial  air 
of  Mary's  companionship.  The  summer  of  1815, 
spent  in  rambles  in  various  parts  of  the  country,  saw 
the  creation  of  Alastor.  Early  in  1810  Mary  gave 
birth  to  her  first  child,  a  boy,  William  ;  and  in  the 
spring,  accompanied  by  the  baby  and  Claire,  they 
made  a  second  expedition  to  Switzerland.  A  little 
in  advance  another  poet  left  England  for  ever. 
George  Gordon,  Lord  Byron,  loaded  with  fame  and 
lacerated  by  chagrin,  was  beginning  to  bear  through 
Europe  that  "  pageant  of  his  bleeding  heart "  of 
which  the  first  steps  are  celebrated  in  Childe  Harold. 
Unknown  to  Shelley  and  Mary,  there  was  already  a 
link  between  them  and  the  luxurious  "  pilgrim  of 
eternity  "  rolling  towards  Geneva  in  his  travelling- 
carriage,  with  physician  and  suite  :  Claire  had  visited 
Byron  in  the  hope  that  he  might  help  her  to  em- 
ployment at  Drury  Lane  Theatre,  and,  instead  of 
going  on  the  stage,  had  become  his  mistress.  Thus 
united,  but  strangely  dissimilar,  the  two  parties 
converged  on  the  Lake  of  Geneva,  where  the  poets 
met  for  the  first  time.  Shelley,  though  jarred  by 
Byron's  worldliness  and  pride,  was  impressed  by  his 
creative  power,  and  the  days  they  spent  sailing  on 
the  lake,  and  wandering  in  a  region  haunted  by  the 
spirit  of  Rousseau,  were  fruitful.  The  Hymn  to 
Intellectual   Beauty  and  the  Lines  on  Mont  Blanc 


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  29 

were   conceived   this  summer.      In   September   the 
Shelleys  were  back  in  England. 

But  England,  though  he  had  good  friends  like 
Peacock  and  the  Leigh  Hunts,  was  full  of  private 
and  public  troubles,  and  was  not  to  hold  him  long. 
The  country  was  agitated  by  riots  due  to  unemploy- 
ment. The  Government,  frightened  and  vindictive, 
was  multiplying  trials  for  treason  and  blasphemous 
libel,  and  Shelley  feared  he  might  be  put  in  the 
pillory  himself.  Mary's  sister  Fanny,  to  whom  he 
was  attached,  killed  herself  in  October ;  Harriet's 
suicide  followed  in  December ;  and  in  the  same 
winter  the  Westbrooks  began  to  prepare  their  case 
for  the  Chancery  suit,  which  ended  in  the  permanent 
removal  of  Harriet's  children  from  bis  custody,  on 
the  grounds  that  his  immoral  conduct  and  opinions 
unfitted  him  to  be  their  guardian.  His  health,  too, 
seems  to  have  been  bad,  though  it  is  hard  to  know 
precisely  how  bad.  He  was  liable  to  hallucinations 
of  all  kinds ;  the  line  between  imagination  and 
reality,  which  ordinary  people  draw  quite  definitely, 
seems  scarcely  to  have  existed  for  him.  There  are 
many  stories  as  to  which  it  is  disputed  how  far,  if 
at  all,  reality  is  mixed  with  dream,  as  in  the  case 
of  the  murderous  assault  he  believed  to  have  been 
made  on  him  one  night  of  wind  and  rain  in  Wales ; 
of  the  veiled  lady  who  offered  to  join  her  life  to  his  ; 
of  the  Englishman  who,  hearing  him  ask  for  letters 
in  the  post-office  at  Pisa  or  Florence,  exclaimed, 
"  What,  are  you  that  damned  atheist  Shelley  ? " 
and  felled  him  to  the  ground.     Often  he  would  go 


30  SHELLEY 

half  frantic  with  delusions — as  that  his  father  and 
uncle  were  plotting  to  shut  him  up  in  a  madhouse, 
and  that  his  boy  William  would  be  snatched  from 
him  by  the  law.  Ghosts  were  more  familiar  to  him 
than  flesh  and  blood.  Convinced  that  he  was 
wasting  with  a  fatal  disease,  he  would  often  make 
his  certainty  of  early  death  the  pretext  for  aban- 
doning some  ill-considered  scheme ;  but  there  is 
probably  much  exaggeration  in  the  spasms  and  the 
consumptive  symptoms  which  figure  so  excitedly  in 
his  letters.  Hogg  relates  how  he  once  plagued  him- 
self and  his  friends  by  believing  that  he  had  elephan- 
tiasis, and  says  that  he  was  really  very  healthy. 
The  truth  seems  to  be  that  his  constitution  was 
naturally  strong,  though  weakened  from  time  to 
time  by  neurotic  conditions,  in  which  mental  pain 
brought  on  much  physical  pain,  and  by  irregular, 
infrequent,  and  scanty  meals. 

In  February  1817  he  settled  at  Marlow  with  Mary 
and  Claire.  Claire,  as  a  result  of  her  intrigue  with 
Byron — of  which  the  fruit  was  a  daughter,  Allegra, 
born  in  January — was  now  a  permanent  charge  on 
his  affectionate  generosity.  It  seemed  that  their 
wanderings  were  at  last  over.  At  Marlow  he  busied 
himself  with  politics  and  philanthropy,  and  wrote 
The  Revolt  of  Islam.  But,  partly  because  the  climate 
was  unsuitable,  partly  from  overwork  in  visiting  and 
helping  the  poor,  his  health  was  thought  to  be 
seriously  endangered.  In  March  1818,  together  with 
the  five  souls  dependent  on  him — Claire  and  her 
baby,  Mary  and  her  two  babies  (a  second,  Clara,  had 


SHELLEY   AND   HIS    AGE  31 

been  born  about  six  months  before) — he  left  Eng- 
land, never  to  return. 

Mary  disliked  hot  weather,  but  it  always  put 
Shelley  in  spirits,  and  his  best  work  was  done  be- 
neath the  sultry  blue  of  Italian  skies,  floating  in  a 
boat  on  the  Serchio  or  the  Arno,  baking  in  a  glazed 
cage  on  the  roof  of  a  Tuscan  villa,  or  lying  among 
the  ruins  of  the  Coliseum  or  in  the  pine-woods  near 
Pisa.  Their  Italian  wanderings  are  too  intricate  to 
be  traced  in  detail  here.  It  was  a  chequered  time, 
darkened  by  disaster  and  cheered  by  friendships. 
Both  their  children  died,  Clara  at  Venice  in  1818, 
and  William  at  Rome  in  1819.  It  is  impossible  not 
to  be  amazed  at  the  heedlessness — the  long  journeys 
in  a  rough  foreign  land,  the  absence  of  ordinary  pro- 
vision against  ailments — which  seems  to  have  caused 
the  death  of  these  beloved  little  beings.  The  birth 
in  1819  of  another  son,  Percy  (who  survived  to  be- 
come Sir  Percy  Shelley),  brought  some  comfort. 
Claire's  troubles,  again,  were  a  constant  anxiety. 
Shelley  worked  hard  to  persuade  Byron  either  to 
let  her  have  Allegra  or  to  look  after  his  daughter 
properly  himself ;  but  he  was  obdurate,  and  the 
child  died  in  a  convent  near  Venice  in  1822.  Shelley's 
association  with  Byron,  of  whom,  in  Julian  and 
Maddalo  (1818),  he  has  drawn  a  picture  with  the 
darker  features  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 
beneath  the  frankness,  the  cheerfulness,  the  wit  of 


32  SHELLEY 

his  intimate  conversation,  beneath  his  careful  cul- 
tivation of  the  graces  of  a  Regency  buck,  he  was 
fundamentally  selfish  and  treacherous.  Provided  no 
serious  demands  were  made  upon  him,  he  enjoyed 
the  society  of  Shelley  and  his  circle,  and  the  two 
were  much  together,  both  at  Venice  and  in  the 
Palazzo  Lanfranchi  at  Pisa,  where,  with  a  menagerie 
of  animals  and  retainers,  Byron  had  installed  himself 
in  those  surroundings  of  Oriental  ostentation  which  it 
amused  him  to  affect. 

A  more  unalloyed  friendship  was  that  with  the 
amiable  Gisborne  family,  settled  at  Leghorn  ;  its 
serene  cheerfulness  is  reflected  in  Shelley's  charming 
rhymed  Letter  to  Maria  Gisborne.  And  early  in  1821 
they  were  joined  by  a  young  couple  who  proved 
very  congenial.  Ned  Williams  was  a  half-pay 
lieutenant  of  dragoons,  with  literary  and  artistic 
tastes,  and  his  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  of  them — Mary,  Claire,  and 
Shelley — at  once  fell  in  love  with  the  dusky  beauty. 
Impassioned  letters  passed  between  her  and  Shelley, 
in  which  he  was  her  "  dear  brother  "  and  she  his 
"  dearest  sister  "  ;  but  she  was  soon  found  to  be  a 
very  ordinary  creature,  and  is  only  remembered  as 
the  instrument  chosen  by  chance  to  inspire  E'pi- 
'psychidion.  Finally  there  appeared,  in  January 
1822,  the  truest-hearted  and  the  most  lovable  of  all 
Shelley's  friends.     Edward  John  Trelawny,  a  cadet 


SHELLEY    AND    HIS    AGE  33 

of  a  Cornish  family,  "  with  his  knight-errant  aspect, 
dark,  handsome,  and  moustachioed,"  was  the  true 
buccaneer  of  romance,  but  of  honest  English  grain, 
and  without  a  trace  of  pose.  The  devotion  with 
which,  though  he  only  knew  Shelley  for  a  few  months, 
he  fed  in  memory  on  their  friendship  to  the  last  day 
of  his  life,  brings  home  to  us,  as  nothing  else  can, 
the  force  of  Shelley's  personal  attraction  ;  for  this 
man  lived  until  1881,  an  almost  solitary  survivor 
from  the  Byronic  age,  and  his  life  contained  matter 
enough  to  swamp  recollection  of  half-a-dozen  poets. 
It  seems  that,  after  serving  in  the  navy  and  desert- 
ing from  an  East  Indiaman  at  Bombay,  he  passed, 
in  the  Eastern  Archipelago,  through  the  incredible 
experiences  narrated  in  his  Adventures  of  a  Younger 
Son ;  and  all  this  before  he  was  twenty-one,  for  in 
1813  he  was  in  England  and  married.  Then  he  dis- 
appeared, bored  by  civilisation  ;  nothing  is  known 
of  him  until  1820,  when  he  turns  up  in  Switzerland 
in  pursuit  of  sport  and  adventure.  After  Shelley's 
death  he  went  to  Greece  with  Byron,  joined  the 
rebel  chief  Odysseus,  married  his  sister  Tersitza,  and 
was  nearly  killed  in  defending  a  cave  on  Mount 
Parnassus.  Through  the  subsequent  years,  which 
included  wanderings  in  America,  and  a  narrow 
escape  from  drowning  in  trying  to  swim  Niagara, 
he  kept  pressing  Shelley's  widow  to  marry  him. 
Perhaps  because  he  was  piqued  by  Mary's  refusal, 
he  has  left  a  rather  unflattering  portrait  of  her.  He 
was  indignant  at  her  desire  to  suppress  parts  of 
Queen  Mab  ;  but  he  might  have  admired  the  honesty 

c 


34  SHELLEY 

with  which  she  retained  Epipzychidion,  although 
that  poem  describes  her  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,  is  a  portrait  of  Trelawny  in  old  age. 

To  return  to  the  Shelleys.  It  was  decided  that 
the  summer  of  1822  should  be  spent  with  the 
Williamses,  and  after  some  search  a  house  just 
capable  of  holding  both  families  was  found  near 
Lerici,  on  the  east  side  of  the  Bay  of  Spezzia.  It 
was  a  lonely,  wind-swept  place,  with  its  feet  in  the 
waves.  The  natives  were  half-savage ;  there  was 
no  furniture,  and  no  facility  for  getting  provisions. 
The  omens  opened  badly.  At  the  moment  of  moving 
in,  news  of  Allegra's  death  came  ;  Shelley  was  shaken 
and  saw  visions,  and  Mary  disliked  the  place  at  first 
sight.  Still,  there  was  the  sea  washing  their  terrace, 
and  Shelley  loved  the  sea  (there  is  scarcely  one  of 
his  poems  in  which  a  boat  does  not  figure,  though 
it  is  usually  made  of  moonstone)  ;  and,  while  Williams 
fancied  himself  as  a  navigator,  Trelawny  was  really 
at  home  on  the  water.  A  certain  Captain  Roberts 
was  commissioned  to  get  a  boat  built  at  Genoa, 
where  Byron  also  was  fitting  out  a  yacht,  the  Bolivar. 
When  the  Ariel — for  so  they  called  her — arrived, 
the  friends  were  delighted  with  her  speed  and  handi- 
ness.  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 

1  Professor  Dowden,  Lift  of  Shelley,  vol.  ii.,  p.  501,  says 
"schooner-rigged."     This  is  a  landsman's  mistake. 


SHELLEY   AND    HIS    AGE  35 

Jane  sing  simple  melodies  to  her  guitar  in  the  moon- 
light, was  a  gleam  of  happiness  before  the  end.  It 
was  not  so  happy  for  Mary,  who  was  ill  and  oppressed 
with  housekeeping  for  two  families,  and  over  whose 
relations  with  Shelley  a  film  of  querulous  jealousy 
had  crept. 

Leigh  Hunt,  that  amiable,  shiftless,  Kadical  man 
of  letters,  was  coming  out  from  England  with  his 
wife  ;  on  July  1st  Shelley  and  Williams  sailed  in  the 
Ariel  to  Leghorn  to  meet  them,  and  settle  them 
into  the  ground-floor  of  Byron's  palace  at  Pisa. 
His  business  despatched,  Shelley  returned  from  Pisa 
to  Leghorn,  with  Hunt's  copy  of  Keats' s  Hyperion 
in  his  pocket  to  read  on  the  voyage  home.  Though 
the  weather  looked  threatening,  he  put  to  sea  again 
on  July  8th,  with  Williams  and  an  English  sailor-boy. 
Trelawny  wanted  to  convoy  them  in  Byron's  yacht, 
but  was  turned  back  by  the  authorities  because  he 
had  no  port-clearance.  The  air  was  sultry  and  still, 
with  a  storm  brewing,  and  he  went  down  to  his  cabin 
and  slept.  When  he  awoke,  it  was  to  see  fishing- 
boats  running  into  harbour  under  bare  poles  amid 
the  hubbub  of  a  thunder-squall.  In  that  squall  the 
Ariel  disappeared.  It  is  doubtful  whether  the  un- 
seaworthy  craft  was  merely  swamped,  or  whether, 
as  there  is  some  reason  to  suppose,  an  Italian  felucca 
ran  her  down  with  intent  to  rob  the  Englishmen. 
In  any  case,  the  calamity  is  the  crowning  example  of 
that  combination  of  bad  management  and  bad  luck 
which  dogged  Shelley  all  his  life.  It  was  madness  to 
trust  an  open  boat,  manned  only  by  the  inexperienced 


36  SHELLEY 

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  saved  them. 

He  sent  out  search-parties,  and  on  July  19th 
sealed  the  despairing  women's  certainty  of  disaster 
by  the  news  that  the  bodies  had  been  washed  ashore. 
Shelley's  was  identified  by  a  copy  of  Sophocles  in 
one  coat-pocket  and  the  Keats  in  another.  What 
Trelawny  then  did  was  an  action  of  that  perfect 
fitness  to  which  only  the  rarest  natures  are  prompted  : 
he  charged  himself  with  the  business  of  burning  the 
bodies.  This  required  some  organisation.  There 
were  official  formalities  to  fulfil,  and  the  materials 
had  to  be  assembled — the  fuel,  the  improvised  fur- 
nace, 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,  when 
the  islands  lay  hazy  along  the  horizon,  and  in  the 
background  the  marble-flecked  Apennines  gleamed. 
Byron  looked  on  until  he  could  stand  it  no  longer, 
and  swam  off  to  his  yacht.  The  heart  was  the  last 
part  to  be  consumed.  By  Trelawny's  care  the  ashes 
were  buried  in  the  Protestant  cemetery  at  Rome. 

It  is  often  sought  to  deepen  our  sense  of  this 
tragedy  by  speculating  on  what  Shelley  would  have 
done  if  he  had  lived.  But,  if  such  a  question  must 
be  asked,  there  are  reasons  for  thinking  that  he 
might  not  have  added  much  to  his  reputation.  It 
may  indeed  be  an  accident  that  his  last  two  years 


SHELLEY   AND    HIS    AGE  37 

were  less  fertile  in  first-rate  work  than  the  years 
1819  and  1820,  and  that  his  last  unfinished  poem, 
The  Triumph  of  Life,  is  even  more  incoherent 
than  its  predecessors  ;  yet,  when  we  consider  the 
nature  of  his  talent,  the  fact  is  perhaps  significant. 
His  song  was  entirely  an  affair  of  uncontrolled 
afflatus,  and  this  is  a  force  which  dwindles  in  middle 
life,  leaving  stranded  the  poet  who  has  no  other 
resource.  Some  men  suffer  spiritual  upheavals  and 
eclipses,  in  which  they  lose  their  old  selves  and 
emerge  with  new  and  different  powers ;  but  we 
may  be  fairly  sure  that  this  would  not  have  hap- 
pened to  Shelley,  that  as  he  grew  older  he  would 
always  have  returned  to  much  the  same  impressions  ; 
for  his  mind,  of  one  piece  through  and  through,  had 
that  peculiar  rigidity  which  can  sometimes  be  ob- 
served in  violently  unstable  characters.  The  colour 
of  his  emotion  would  have  fluctuated — it  took  on, 
as  it  was,  a  deepening  shade  of  melancholy  ;  but 
there  is  no  indication  that  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  very  peculiar  combination  of  the  two. 
He  was  a  dreamer,  but  he  never  dreamed  merely  for 
the  sake  of  dreaming ;  he  always  rushed  to  translate 
his  dreams  into  acts.  The  practical  side  of  him  was 
so  strong  that  he  might  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  for  strength  and  speed,  but  im- 
mensely oversparred.  His  life  was  a  scene  of  in- 
cessant bustle.  Glancing  through  his  poems,  letters, 
diaries,  and  pamphlets,  his  translations  from  Greek, 
Spanish,  German,  and  Italian,  and  remembering  that 
he  died  at  thirty,  and  was,  besides,  feverishly  active 
in  a  multitude  of  affairs,  we  fancy  that  his  pen  can 
scarcely  ever  have  been  out  of  his  hand.  And  not 
only  was  he  perpetually  writing  ;  he  read  glutton- 
ously. He  would  thread  the  London  traffic,  nourish- 
ing his  unworldly  mind  from  an  open  book  held  in 
one  hand,  and  his  ascetic  body  from  a  hunch  of 
bread  held  in  the  other.  This  fury  for  literature 
seized  him  early.     But  the  quality  of  his  early  work 

38 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  39 

was  astonishingly  bad.  An  author  while  still  a 
schoolboy,  he  published  in  1810  a  novel,  written  for 
the  most  part  when  he  was  seventeen  years  old, 
called  Zastrozzi,  the  mere  title  of  which,  with  its 
romantic  profusion  of  sibilants,  is  eloquent  of  its 
nature.  This  was  soon  followed  by  another  like  it, 
St.  Irvyne,  or  the  Rosicrucian.  Whether  they  are 
adaptations  from  the  German  1  or  not,  these  books 
are  merely  bad  imitations  of  the  bad  school  then  in 
vogue — the  flesh-creeping  school  of  skeletons  and 
clanking  chains,  of  convulsions  and  ecstasies,  which 
Miss  Austen,  though  no  one  knew  it,  had  killed  with 
laughter  years  before.2  "  Verezzi  scarcely  now  shud- 
dered when  the  slimy  lizard  crossed  his  naked  and 
motionless  limbs.  The  large  earthworms,  which 
twined  themselves  in  his  long  and  matted  hair, 
almost  ceased  to  excite  sensations  of  horror  " — that 
is  the  kind  of  stuff  in  which  the  imagination  of  the 
young  Shelley  rioted.  And  evidently  it  is  not  con- 
sciously imagined ;  life  really  presented  itself  to  him 
as  a  romance  of  this  kind,  with  himself  as  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  all  eternity.  This  attitude 
found  vent  in  a  mass  of  sentimental  verse  and  prose, 
much  of  it  more  or  less  surreptitiously  published, 

1  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. 

2  Northanger  Abbey,  satirising  Mrs.  Rad cliff e's  novels,  was 
written  before  1798,  but  was  not  published  until  1818. 


40  SHELLEY 

which  the  researches  of  specialists  have  brought  to 
light,  and  which  need  not  be  dwelt  upon  here. 

But  very  soon  another  influence  began  to  mingle 
with  this  feebly  extravagant  vein,  an  influence  which 
purified  and  strengthened,  though  it  never  quite 
obliterated  it.  At  school  he  absorbed,  along  with 
the  official  tincture  of  classical  education,  a  violent 
private  dose  of  the  philosophy  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion ;  he  discovered  that  all  that  was  needed  to 
abolish  all  the  evil  done  under  the  sun  was  to  destroy 
bigotry,  intolerance,  and  persecution  as  represented 
by  religious  and  monarchical  institutions.  At  first 
this  influence  combined  with  his  misguided  literary 
passions  only  to  heighten  the  whole  absurdity,  as 
when  he  exclaims,  in  a  letter  about  his  first  dis- 
appointed love,  "  I  swear,  and  as  I  break  my  oaths, 
may  Infinity,  Eternity,  blast  me — never  will  I  for- 
give Intolerance  !  "  The  character  of  the  romance 
is  changed  indeed  ;  it  has  become  an  epic  of  human 
regeneration,  and  its  emotions  are  dedicated  to  the 
service  of  mankind  ;  but  still  it  is  a  romance.  The 
results,  however,  are  momentous ;  for  the  hero, 
being  a  man  of  action,  is  no  longer  content  to  write 
and  pay  for  the  printing  :  in  his  capacity  of  liberator 
he  has  to  step  into  the  arena,  and,  above  all,  he  has 
to  think  out  a  philosophy. 

An  early  manifestation  of  this  impulse  was  the 
Irish  enterprise  already  mentioned  (p.  13).  Public 
affairs  always  stirred  him,  but,  as  time  went  on,  it 
was  more  and  more  to  verse  and  less  to  practical 
intervention,  and  after  1817  he  abandoned  argument 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  41 

altogether  for  song.  But  one  pamphlet,  A  Proposal 
for  putting  Reform  to  the  Vote  (1817),  is  characteristic 
of  the  way  in  which  he  was  always  labouring  to  do 
something,  not  merely  to  ventilate  existing  evils, 
but  to  promote  some  practical  scheme  for  abolishing 
them.  Let  a  national  referendum,  he  says,  be  held 
on  the  question  of  reform,  and  let  it  be  agreed  that 
the  result  shall  be  binding  on  Parliament ;  he  him- 
self will  contribute  £100  a  year  (one-tenth  of  his 
income)  to  the  expenses  of  organisation.  He  is  in 
favour  of  annual  Parliaments.  Though  a  believer 
in  universal  suffrage,  he  prefers  to  advance  by 
degrees  ;  it  would  not  do  to  abolish  aristocracy  and 
monarchy  at  one  stroke,  and  to  put  power  into  the 
hands  of  men  rendered  brutal  and  torpid  by  ages  of 
slavery ;  and  he  proposes  that  the  payment  of  a 
small  sum  in  direct  taxes  should  be  the  qualification 
for  the  parliamentary  franchise.  The  idea,  of  course, 
was  not  in  the  sphere  of  practical  politics  at  the  time, 
but  its  sobriety  shows  how  far  Shelley  was  from 
being  a  vulgar  theory-ridden  crank  to  whom  the 
years  bring  no  wisdom. 

Meanwhile  it  had  been  revealed  to  him  that 
"  intolerance  "  was  the  cause  of  all  evil,  and,  in  the 
same  flash,  that  it  could  be  destroyed  by  clear  and 
simple  reasoning.  Apply  the  acid  of  enlightened 
argument,  and  religious  beliefs  will  melt  away,  and 
with  them  the  whole  rotten  fabric  which  they  support 
— crowns  and  churches,  lust  and  cruelty,  war  and 
crime,  the  inequality  of  women  to  men,  and  the 
inequality  of  one  man  to  another.     With  Shelley,  to 


42  SHELLEY 

embrace  the  dazzling  vision  was  to  act  upon  it  at 
once.     The  first  thing,  since  religion  is  at  the  bottom 
of  all  force  and  fraud,  was  to  proclaim  that  there  is 
no  reason  for  believing  in  Christianity.     This  was  easy 
enough,  and  a  number  of  impatient  argumentative 
pamphlets  were  dashed  off.     One  of  these,  The  Neces- 
sity of  Atheism,  caused,  as  we  saw  (p.  20),  a  revolu- 
tion in  his  life.     But,  while   Christian  dogma  was 
the  heart  of  the  enemy's  position,  there  were  out- 
works which  might  also  be  usefully  attacked : — there 
were  alcohol   and   meat,   the   causes   of   all   disease 
and  devastating  passion  ;    there  were  despotism  and 
plutocracy,  based  on  commercial  greed  ;    and  there 
was   marriage,   which,   irrationally  tyrannising   over 
sexual   relations,    produces   unnatural   celibacy   and 
prostitution.     These  threads,  and  many  others,  were 
all  taken  up  in  his  first  serious  poem,  Queen  Mob 
(1812-13),  an  over-long  rhapsody,  partly  in  blank 
verse,  partly  in  loose  metres.     The  spirit  of  Ianthe 
is  rapt  by  the  Fairy  Mab  in  her  pellucid  car  to  the 
confines  of  the  universe,  where  the  past,  present, 
and  future  of  the  earth  are  unfolded  to  the  spirit's 
gaze.     We  see  tyrants  writhing  upon  their  thrones ; 
Ahasuerus,    "  the   wandering  Jew,"   is   introduced ; 
the  consummation  on  earth  of  the  age  of  reason  is 
described.     In  the  end  the  fairy'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." 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  43 

Though  many  poets  have  begun  their  careers  with 
something  better  than  this,  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 
and  loose,  but  it  soars  from  the  ground  and  spins 
itself  into  a  series  of  etherial  visions.  And  these 
visions,  though  thejT-  look  utterly  disconnected  from 
reality,  are  in  fact  only  an  aspect  of  his  passionate 
interest  in  science.  In  this  respect  the  sole  difference 
between  Queen  Mab  and  such  poems  as  The  West 
Wind  and  The  Cloud  is  that,  in  the  prose  of 
the  notes  appended  to  Queen  Mab,  with  their  dis- 
quisitions on  physiology  and  astronomy,  deter- 
minism and  utilitarianism,  the  scientific  skeleton  is 
explicit.  These  notes  are  a  queer  medley.  We  may 
laugh  at  their  crudity — their  certainty  that,  once 
orthodoxy  has  been  destroyed  by  argument,  the 
millennium  will  begin ;  what  is  more  to  the  purpose 
is  to  recognise  that  here  is  something  more  than  the 
ordinary  dogmatism  of  youthful  ignorance.  There 
is  a  flow  of  vigorous  language,  vividness  of  imagina- 
tion, and,  above  all,  much  conscientious  reasoning 
and  a  passion  for  hard  facts.  His  wife  was  not  far 
wrong  when  she  praised  him  for  a  "  logical  exact- 
ness of  reason."  The  arguments  he  uses  are,  indeed, 
all  second-hand,  and  mostly  fallacious ;  but  he  knew 
instinctively  something  which  is  for  ever  hidden 
from  the  mass  of  mankind — the  difference  between 
an  argument  and  a  confused  stirring  of  prejudices. 
Then,  again,  he  was  not  content  with  abstract 
generalities  :    he  was  always  trying  to  enforce  his 


44  SHELLEY 

views  by  facta  industriously  collected  from  such 
books  of  medicine,  anatomy,  geology,  astronomy, 
chemistry,  and  history  as  he  could  get  hold  of.  For 
instance,  he  does  not  preach  abstinence  from  flesh 
on  pure  a  priori  grounds,  but  because  "  the  orang- 
outang perfectly  resembles  man  both  in  the  order 
and  number  of  his  teeth."  We  catch  here  what  is 
perhaps  the  fundamental  paradox  of  his  character — 
the  combination  of  a  curious  rational  hardness  with 
the  wildest  and  most  romantic  idealism.  For  all  its 
airiness,  his  verse  was  thrown  off  by  a  mind  no 
stranger  to  thought  and  research. 

We  are  now  on  the  threshold  of  Shelley's  poetic 
achievement,  and  it  will  be  well  before  going  further 
to  underline  the  connection,  which  persists  all  through 
his  work  and  is  already  so  striking  in  Queen  Mab, 
between  his  poetry  and  his  philosophical  and  re- 
ligious ideas. 

Like  Coleridge,  he  was  a  philosophical  poet.  But 
his  philosophy  was  much  more  definite  than  Cole- 
ridge's ;  it  gave  substance  to  his  character  and  edge 
to  his  intellect,  and,  in  the  end,  can  scarcely  be  dis- 
tinguished from  the  emotion  generating  his  verse. 
There  is,  however,  no  trace  of  originality  in  his 
speculative  writing,  and  we  need  not  regret  that, 
after  hesitating  whether  to  be  a  metaphysician  or  a 
poet,  he  decided  against  philosophy.  Before  finally 
settling  to  poetry,  he  at  one  time  projected  a  com- 
plete and  systematic  account  of  the  operations  of 
the  human  mind.  It  was  to  be  divided  into  sections 
— childhood,   youth,   and  so  on.     One  of  the  first 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  45 

things  to  be  done  was  to  ascertain  the  real  nature  of 
dreams,  and  accordingly,  with  characteristic  passion 
for  a  foundation  of  fact,  he  turned  to  the  only  facts 
accessible  to  him,  and  tried  to  describe  exactly  his 
own  experiences  in  dreaming.  The  result  showed 
that,  along  with  the  scientific  impulse,  there  was 
working  in  him  a  more  powerful  antagonistic  force. 
He  got  no  further  than  telling  how  once,  when  walk- 
ing with  Hogg  near  Oxford,  he  suddenly  turned  the 
corner  of  a  lane,  and  a  scene  presented  itself  which, 
though  commonplace,  was  yet  mysteriously  con- 
nected with  the  obscurer  parts  of  his  nature.  A 
windmill  stood  in  a  plashy  meadow ;  behind  it  was 
a  long  low  hill,  and  "  a  grey  covering  of  uniform 
cloud  spread  over  the  evening  sky.  It  was  the 
season  of  the  year  when  the  last  leaf  had  just  fallen 
from  the  scant  and  stunted  ash."  The  manuscript 
concludes  :  "I  suddenly  remembered  to  have  seen 
that  exact  scene  in  some  dream  of  long —  Here  I 
was  obliged  to  leave  off,  overcome  with  thrilling 
horror."  And,  apart  from  such  overwhelming  surges 
of  emotion  from  the  depths  of  sub-consciousness,  he 
does  not  seem  ever  to  have  taken  that  sort  of  interest 
in  the  problems  of  the  universe  which  is  distinctive 
of  the  philosopher  ;  in  so  far  as  he  speculated  on  the 
nature  and  destiny  of  the  world  or  the  soul,  it  was 
not  from  curiosity  about  the  truth,  but  rather  be- 
cause correct  views  on  these  matters  seemed  to  him, 
especially  in  early  years,  an  infallible  method  of 
regenerating  society.  As  his  expectation  of  heaven 
on  earth  became  less  confident,  so  the  speculative 


46  SHELLEY 

impulse  waned.  Not  long  before  his  death  he  told 
Trelawny  that  he  was  not  inquisitive  about  the 
system  of  the  universe,  that  his  mind  was  tranquil 
on  these  high  questions.  He  seems,  for  instance,  to 
have  oscillated  vaguely  between  belief  and  disbelief 
in  personal  life  after  death,  and  on  the  whole  to  have 
concluded  that  there  was  no  evidence  for  it. 

At  the  same  time,  it  is  essential  to  a  just  appre- 
ciation of  him,  either  as  man  or  poet,  to  see  how  all 
his  opinions  and  feelings  were  shaped  by  philosophy, 
and  by  the  influence  of  one  particular  doctrine. 
This  doctrine  was  Platonism.  He  first  went  through 
a  stage  of  devotion  to  what  he  calls  "  the  sceptical 
philosophy,"  when  his  writings  were  full  of  schoolboy 
echoes  of  Locke  and  Hume.  At  this  time  he  avowed 
himself  a  materialist.  Then  he  succumbed  to  Bishop 
Berkeley,  who  convinced  him  that  the  nature  of 
everything  that  exists  is  spiritual.  We  find  him 
saying,  with  charming  pompousness,  "  I  confess  that 
I  am  one  of  those  who  are  unable  to  refuse  their 
assent  to  the  conclusions  of  those  philosophers  who 
assert  that  nothing  exists  but  as  it  is  perceived." 
This  "  intellectual  system,"  he  rightly  sees,  leads  to 
the  view  that  nothing  whatever  exists  except  a 
single  mind  ;  and  that  is  the  view  which  he  found, 
or  thought  that  he  found,  in  the  dialogues  of  Plato, 
and  which  gave  to  his  whole  being  a  bent  it  was  never 
to  lose.  He  liked  to  call  himself  an  atheist ;  and, 
if  pantheism  is  atheism,  an  atheist  no  doubt  he  was. 
But,  whatever  the  correct  label,  he  was  eminently 
religious.     In  the  notes  to  Queen  Mab  he  announces 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  47 

his  belief  in  "  a  pervading  Spirit  co-eternal  with  the 
universe,"  and  religion  meant  for  him  a  "  perception 
of  the  relation  in  which  we  stand  to  the  principle 
of  the  universe  " — a  perception  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  ac- 
corded perfectly  with  his  predisposition — the  theory 
that  all  the  good  and  beautiful  things  that  we  love 
on  earth  are  partial  manifestations  of  an  absolute 
beauty  or  goodness,  which  exists  eternal  and  un- 
changing, and  from  which  everything  that  becomes 
and  perishes  in  time  derives  such  reality  as  it  has. 
Hence  our  human  life  is  good  only  in  so  far  as  we 
participate  in  the  eternal  reality ;  and  the  com- 
munion is  effected  whenever  we  adore  beauty,  whether 
in  nature,  or  in  passionate  love,  or  in  the  inspiration 
of  poetry.  We  shall  have  to  say  something  presently 
about  the  effects  of  this  Platonic  idealism  on  Shelley's 
conception  of  love  ;  here  we  need  only  notice  that 
it  inspired  him  to  translate  Plato's  Symposium,  a 
dialogue  occupied  almost  entirely  with  theories  about 
love.  He  was  not,  however,  well  equipped  for  this 
task.  His  version,  or  rather  adaptation  (for  much 
is  omitted  and  much  is  paraphrased),  is  fluent,  but 
he  had  not  enough  Greek  to  reproduce  the  finer 
shades  of  the  original,  or,  indeed,  to  avoid  gross 
mistakes. 

A  poet  who  is  also  a  Platonist  is  hkely  to  exalt 
his  office  ;  it  is  his  not  merely  to  amuse  or  to  please, 
but  to  lead  mankind  nearer  to  the  eternal  ideal — 


48  SHELLEY 

Shelley  called  it  Intellectual  Beauty — which  is  the 
only  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  perverse  and  paradoxical  article,  not  without 
much  good  sense,  on  The  Four  Ages  of  Poetry.  Pea- 
cock maintained  that  genuine  poetry  is  only  possible 
in  half-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  mind  was,  of  course,  the  movement 
represented  by  Wordsworth,  Southey,  and  Coleridge, 
the  romantic  poets  of  the  Lake  School,  whom  he 
describes  as  a  "  modern-antique  compound  of  frippery 
and  barbarism."  He  must  have  greatly  enjoyed 
writing  such  a  paragraph  as  this  :  "A  poet  in  our 
times  is  a  semi-barbarian  in  a  civilised  community. 
.  .  .  The  march  of  his  intellect  is  like  that  of  a  crab, 
backward.  The  brighter  the  light  diffused  around 
him  by  the  progress  of  reason,  the  thicker  is  the 
darkness  of  antiquated  barbarism  in  which  he  buries 
himself  like  a  mole,  to  throw  up  the  barren  hillocks 
of  his  Cimmerian  labours."  These  gay  shafts  had  at 
any  rate  the  merit  of  stinging  Shelley  to  action. 
The  Defence  of  Poetry  was  his  reply.  People  like 
Peacock  treat  poetry,  and  art  generally,  as  an  adven- 
titious seasoning  of  life — ornamental  perhaps,  but 
rather  out  of  place  in  a  progressive  and  practical  age. 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  49 

Shelley  undermines  the  whole  position  by  asserting 
that  poetry — a  name  which  includes  for  him  all 
serious  art — is  the  very  stuff  out  of  which  all  that  is 
valuable  and  real  in  life  is  made.  "  A  poem  is  the 
very  image  of  life  expressed  in  its  eternal  truth." 
"  The  great  secret  of  morals  is  love,  or  a  going  out 
of  our  own  nature,  and  an  identification  of  ourselves 
with  the  beautiful  that  exists  in  thought,  action,  or 
person,  not  our  own.  A  man,  to  be  greatly  good, 
must  imagine  intensely  and  comprehensively ;  he 
must  put  himself  in  the  place  of  another  and  of 
many  others  ;  the  pains  and  pleasures  of  his  species 
must  become  his  own.  The  great  instrument  of 
moral  good  is  the  imagination."  And  it  is  on  the 
imagination  that  poetry  works,  strengthening  it  as 
exercises  strengthen  a  limb.  Historically,  he  argues, 
good  poetry  always  coexists  with  good  morals ; 
for  instance,  when  social  life  decays,  drama  decays. 
Peacock  had  said  that  reasoners  and  mechanical 
inventors  are  more  useful  than  poets.  The  reply  is 
that,  left  to  themselves,  they  simply  make  the  world 
worse,  while  it  is  poets  and  "  poetical  philosophers  " 
who  produce  "  true  utility,"  or  pleasure  in  the 
highest  sense.  Without  poetry,  the  progress  of 
science  and  of  the  mechanical  arts  results  in  mental 
and  moral  indigestion,  merely  exasperating  the 
inequality  of  mankind.  "  Poetry  and  the  principle 
of  Self,  of  which  money  is  the  visible  incarnation, 
are  the  God  and  mammon  of  the  world."  While  the 
emotions  penetrated  by  poetry  last,  "  Self  appears 
as  what  it  is,   an  atom  to  a  universe."     Poetry's 

D 


50  SHELLEY 

"  secret  alchemy  turns  to  potable  gold  the  poisonous 
waters  which  flow  from  death  through  life."  It 
makes  the  familiar  strange,  and  creates  the  universe 
anew.  "  Poets  are  the  hierophants  of  an  unappre- 
hended inspiration ;  the  mirrors  of  the  gigantic 
shadows  which  futurity  casts  upon  the  present ; 
the  words  which  express  what  they  understand  not ; 
the  trumpets  which  sing  to  battle,  and  feel  not  what 
they  inspire  ;  the  influence  which  is  moved  not,  but 
moves.  Poets  are  the  unacknowledged  legislators  of 
the  world." 

Other  poets  besides  Shelley  have  seen 

"  Through  all  that  earthly  dress 
Bright  shoots  of  everlastingnes3," 

and  others  have  felt  that  the  freedom  from  self, 
which  is  attained  in  the  vision,  is  supremely  good. 
What  is  peculiar  to  him,  and  distinguishes  him  from 
the  poets  of  religious  mysticism,  is  that  he  reflected 
rationally  on  his  vision,  brought  it  more  or  less  into 
harmony  with  a  philosophical  system,  and,  in  em- 
bracing it,  always  had  in  view  the  improvement  of 
mankind.  Not  for  a  moment,  though,  must  it  be 
imagined  that  he  was_a_didactic  poet.  It  was  the 
theorj^  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  for  a  brief 
period,  when  the  first  impulse  of  the  Romantic  Move- 
ment was  spent,  it  was  again  to  become  the  theory 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  that  the  object  of  poetry 
is  to  inculcate  correct  principles  of  morals  and 
religion.  Poetry,  with  its  power  of  pleasing,  was  the 
jam  which  should  make  us  swallow  the  powder  un- 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  51 

awares.  This  conception  was  abhorrent  to  Shelley, 
both  because  poetry  ought  not  to  do  what  can  be 
done  better  by  prose,  and  also  because,  for  him,  the 
pleasureand  the  lesson  were  indistinguishably  one. 
The  poet  is  to  improve  us,  not  by  insinuating  a 
moral,  but  by  communicating  to  others  something 
of  that  ecstasy  with  which  he  himself  burns  in  con- 
templating eternal  truth  and  beauty  and  goodness. 

Hitherto  all  the  writings  mentioned  have  been, 
except  The  Defence  of  Poetry,  those  of  a  young  and 
enthusiastic  revolutionary,  which  might  have  some 
interest  in  their  proper  historical  and  biographical 
setting,  but  otherwise  would  only  be  read  as  curio- 
sities. We  have  seen  that  beneath  Shelley's  twofold 
drift  towards  practical  politics  and  speculative 
philosophy  a  deeper  force  was  working.  Yet  it  is 
characteristic  of  him  that  he  always  tended  to  regard 
the  writing  of  verse  as  a  pis  alter .  In  1819,  when  he 
was  actually  working  on  Prometheus,  he  wrote  to 
Peacock,  "  I  consider  poetry  very  subordinate  to 
moral  and  political  science,"  adding  that  he  only 
wrote  it  because  his  feeble  health  made  it  hopeless 
to  attempt  anything  more  useful.  We  need  not 
take  this  too  seriously  ;  he  was  often  wrong  about 
the  reasons  for  his  own  actions.  From  whatever 
motive,  write  poetry  he  did.  We  will  now  consider 
some  of  the  more  voluminous,  if  not  the  most  valu- 
able, results. 

Alastor,  or  the  Spirit  of  Solitude,1  is  a  long  poem, 

1  "  Alastor "  is  a   Greek  word   meaning  "  the  victim  of  an 
Avenging  Spirit." 


52  SHELLEY 

written  in  1815,  which  seems  to  shadow  forth  the 
emotional  history  of  a  young  and  beautiful  poet. 
As  a  child  he  drank  deep  of  the  beauties  of  nature 
and  the  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  nuns  of  Egypt  and  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  Carmanian  waste,"  and,  arrived  at  the  vale  of 
Cashmire,  lies  down  to  sleep  in  a  dell.  Here  he  has 
a  vision.  A  "  veiled  maid  "  sits  by  him,  and,  after 
singing  first  of  knowledge  and  truth  and  virtue,  then 
of  love,  embraces  him.  When  he  awakes,  all  the 
beauty  of  the  world  that  enchanted  and  satisfied  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  eagle  enfolded  by  a  serpent  and  feeling 
the  poison  in  his  breast.  His  limbs  grow  lean,  his 
hair  thin  and  pale.  Does  death  contain  the  secret 
of  his  happiness  ?  At  last  he  pauses  "  on  the  lone 
Chorasmian  shore,"  and  sees  a  frail  shallop  in  which 
he  trusts  himself  to  the  waves.  Day  and  night  the 
boat  flies  before  the  storm  to  the  base  of  the  cliffs  of 
Caucasus,  where  it  is    engulfed  in    a  cavern.      Fol- 


PRINCIPAL   WRITINGS  53 

lowing  the  twists  of  the  cavern,  after  a  narrow 
escape  from  a  maelstrom,  he  floats  into  a  calm  pool, 
and  lands.  Elaborate  descriptions  of  forest  and 
mountain  scenery  bring  us,  as  the  moon  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." 

In  Alastor  he  melted  with  pity  over  what  he  felt  to  be 
his  own  destiny  ;  in  The  Revolt  of  Islam  (1817)  he  was 
"  a  trumpet  that  sings  to  battle."  This,  the  longest  of 
Shelley's  poems  (there  are  4176  lines  of  it,  exclusive 
of  certain  IjTical  passages),  is  a  versified  novel  with  a 
more  or  less  coherent  plot,  though  the  mechanism  is 
cumbrous,  and  any  one  who  expects  from  the  title  a 
story  of  some  actual  rebellion  against  the  Turks 
will  be  disappointed.  Its  theme,  typified  by  an  in- 
troductory vision  of  an  eagle  and  serpent  battling 
in  mid-sky,  is  the  cosmic  struggle  between  evil  and 
good,  or,  what  for  Shelley  is  the  same  thing,  between 
the  forces  of  established  authority  and  of  man's 
aspiration  for  liberty,  the  eagle  standing  for  the 
powerful  oppressor,  and  the  snake  for  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  ;  "  the  Snake  "  was  a  name  by 
which  it  amused  him  to  be  known  among  his  friends. 


54  SHELLEY 

The  clash  of  the  two  opposites  is  crudely  and  nar- 
rowly conceived,  with  no  suggestion  yet  of  some 
more  tremendous  force  behind  both,  such  as  later 
on  was  to  give  depth  to  his  view  of  the  world  conflict. 
The  loves  and  the  virtues  of  Laon  and  Cythna,  the 
gifted  beings  who  overthrow  the  tyrant  and  perish 
tragically  in  a  counter-revolution,  are  too  bright 
against  a  background  that  is  too  black  ;  but  even 
so  they  were  a  good  opportunity  for  displaying  the 
various  phases  through  which  humanitarian  passion 
may  run — the  first  whispers  of  hope,  the  devotion 
of  the  pioneer,  the  joy  of  freedom  and  love,  in  triumph 
exultation  tempered  by  clemency,  in  defeat  despair 
ennobled  by  firmness.  And  although  in  this  extra- 
ordinary production  Shelley  has  still  not  quite  found 
himself,  the  technical  power  displayed  is  great.  The 
poem  is  in  Spenserian  stanzas,  and  he  manages  the 
long  breaking  wave  of  that  measure  with  sureness 
and  ease,  imparting  to  it  a  rapidity  of  onset  that  is 
all  his  own.  But  there  are  small  blemishes  such  as, 
even  when  allowance  is  made  for  haste  of  composi- 
tion (it  was  written  in  a  single  summer),  a  naturally 
delicate  ear  would  never  have  passed  ;  he  apologises 
in  the  preface  for  one  alexandrine  (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 
eight  places  where  obviously  redundant  syllables 
have  crept  in.  A  more  serious  defect  is  the  per- 
sistence, still  unassimilated,  of  the  element  of  the 
romantic-horrible.  When  Laon,  chained  to  the  top 
of  a  column,  gnaws  corpses,  we  feel  that  the  author 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  55 

of  Zastrozzi  is  still  slightly  ridiculous,  magnificent 
though  his  writing  has  become.  It  is  hard,  again, 
not  to  smile  at  this  world  in  which  the  melodious 
voices  of  young  eleutherarchs  have  only  to  sound  for 
the  crouching  slave  to  recover  his  manhood  and  for 
tyrants  to  tremble  and  turn  pale.  The  poet  knows, 
as  he  wrote  in  answer  to  a  criticism,  that  his  mission 
is  "to  apprehend  minute  and  remote  distinctions 
of  feeling,"  and  "  to  communicate  the  conceptions 
which  result  from  considering  either  the  moral  or 
the  material  universe  as  a  whole."  He  does  not  see 
that  he  has  failed  of  both  aims,  partly  because  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,  and  mountain  shimmer 
through  a  gorgeous  mist  that  never  was  of 'this  earth, 
the  "  material  universe  "  may  perhaps  be  admitted 
to  be  grasped  as  a  whole  ;  and  he  has  embodied  his 
conception  of  the  "  moral  universe  "  in  a  picture  of 
all  the  good  impulses  of  the  human  heart,  that 
should  be  so  fruitful,  poisoned  by  the  pressure  of 
religious  and  political  authority.  It  was  natural 
that  the  method  which  he  chose  should  be  that  of 
the  romantic  narrative — we  have  noticed  how  he 
began  by  trying  to  write  novels — nor  is  that  method 
essentially  unfitted  to  represent  the  conflict  between 
good  and  evil,  with  the  whole  universe  for  a  stage; 
instances  of  great  novels  that  are  epics  in  this  sense 
will  occur  to  every  one.  But  realism  is  required, 
and  Shelley  was  constitutionally  incapable  of  realism. 


56  SHELLEY 

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  Wollstone- 
craft,  his  wife's  illustrious  mother.  They  are  neither 
of  the  world  nor  out  of  it,  and  consequently,  in  so  far 
as  they  are  localised  and  incarnate  and  their  actions 
woven  into  a  tale,  The  Revolt  of  Islam  is  a  failure. 
In  his  next  great  poem  he  was  to  pursue  precisely 
the  same  aims,  but  with  more  success,  because  he 
had  now  hit  upon  a  figure  of  more  appropriate 
vagueness  and  sublimity.  The  scheme  of  Prometheus 
Unbound  (1819)  is  drawn  from  the  immortal  creations 
of  Greek  tragedy. 

He  had  experimented  with  Tasso  and  had  thought 
of  Job  ;  but  the  rebellious  Titan,  Prometheus,  the 
benefactor  of  mankind  whom  /Eschylus  had  repre- 
sented as  chained  by  Zeus  to  Caucasus,  with  a 
vulture  gnawing  his  liver,  offered  a  perfect  embodi- 
ment of  Shelley's  favourite  subject,  "  the  image," 
to  borrow  the  words  of  his  wife,  "  of  one  warring 
with  the  Evil  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,  emanating  from  a  reliance  in  the  ultimate 
omnipotence  of  Good."  In  the  Greek  play,  Zeus  is 
an  usurper  in  heaven  who  has  supplanted  an  older 
and  milder  dynasty  of  gods,  and  Pror*'  ^eus,  visited 
in  his  punishment  by  the  nymphs  of  ocean,  knows 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  57 

a  secret  on  which  the  rule  of  Zeus  depends.  Shelley 
took  over  these  features,  and  grafted  on  them  his 
own  peculiar  confidence  in  the  ultimate  perfection 
of  mankind.  His  Prometheus  knows  that  Jupiter 
(the  Evil  Principle)  will  some  day  be  overthrown, 
though  he  does  not  know  when,  and  that  he  himself 
will  then  be  released  ;  and  this  event  is  shown  as 
actually  taking  place.  It  may  be  doubted  whether 
this  treatment,  while  it  allows  the  poet  to  describe 
what  the  world  will  be  like  when  freed  from  evil, 
does  not  diminish  the  impressiveness  of  the  suffering 
Titan  ;  for  if  Prometheus  knows  that  a  term  is  set 
to  his  punishment,  his  defiance  of  the  oppressor  is 
easier,  and,  so  far,  less  sublime.  However  that  may 
be,  his  opening  cries  of  pain  have  much  romantic 
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  will  repent  and  submit  to  the  tyrant. 
On  his  refusal,  the  Furies  are  let  loose  to  torture 
him,  and  his  agony  takes  the  form  of  a  vision  of  all 
the  suffering  of  the  world.  The  agony  passes,  and 
Mother  Earth  calls  up  spirits  to  soothe  him  with 
images  of  delight ;  but  he  declares  "  most  vain  all 
hope  but  love,"  and  thinks  of  Asia,  his  wife  in  happier 
days.  The  second  act  is  full  of  the  dreams  of  Asia. 
With  Panthea,  one  of  the  ocean  nymphs  that  watch 
over  Promp^'ns,  she  makes  her  way  to  the  cave 
of  Demogorgon,   "  that  terrific  gloom,"  who  seems 


58  SHELLEY 

meant  to  typify  the  Primal  Power  of  the  World. 
Hence  they  are  snatched  away  by  the  Spirit  of  the 
Hour  at  which  Jove  will  fall,  and  the  coming  of  change 
pulsates  through  the  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  the  Hour  arrives  ;  Demogorgon 
descends  from  it,  and  hurls  him  to  the  abyss.  Pro- 
metheus, set  free  by  Hercules,  is  united  again  to 
Asia.  And  now,  with  the  tyranny  of  wrongful 
power, 

"  The  loathsome  mark  has  fallen,  the  man  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,  the  mighty 
parent,  is  superseded  by  the  Spirit  of  the  Earth,  the 
guide  of  our  planet  through  the  realms  of  sky  ;  while 
his  fair  and  weaker  companion  and  attendant,  the 
Spirit  of  the  Moon,  receives  bliss  from  the  annihila- 
tion of  Evil  in  the  superior  sphere."  We  are  in  a 
strange  metaphysical  region,  an  interstellar  space  of 
incredibly  rarefied  fire  and  light,  the  true  home  of 
Shelley's  spirit,  where  the  circling  spheres  sing  to 
one  another  in  wave  upon  wave  of  lyrical  rapture, 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  59 

as  inexpressible  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  the  beauty  of  the  interspersed  songs 
has  dazzled  the  critics.  Not  only  are  the  personages 
too  transparently  allegorical,  but  the  allegory  is 
insipid  ;  especially  tactless  is  the  treatment  of  the 
marriage  between  Prometheus,  the  Spirit  of  Humanity, 
and  Asia,  the  Spirit  of  Nature,  as  a  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  "  a  mere 
improvise,"  the  boiling  over  of  his  sympathy  with 
the  Greeks,  who  were  in  revolt  against  the  Turks. 
He  wove  into  it,  with  all  possible  heightening  of 
poetic  imagery,  the  chief  events  of  the  period  of 
revolution  through  which  southern  Europe  was  then 
passing,  so  that  it  differs  from  the  Prometheus  in 
having  historical  facts  as  ostensible  subject.  Through 
it  reverberates  the  dissolution  of  kingdoms  in  feats 
of  arms  by  land  and  sea  from  Persia  to  Morocco, 
and  these  cataclysms,  though  suggestive  of  some- 


60  SHELLEY 

thing  that  transcends  any  human  warfare,  are  yet 
not  completely  pinnacled  in  "  the  intense  inane." 
But  this  is  not  the  only  merit  of  Hellas  ;  its  poetry 
is  purer  than  that  of  the  earlier  work,  because  Shelley 
no  longer  takes  sides  so  violently.  He  has  lost  the 
cruder  optimism  of  the  Prometheus,  and  is  thrown 
back  for  consolation  upon  something  that  moves  us 
more  than  any  prospect  of  a  heaven  realised  on 
earth  by  abolishing  kings  and  priests.  When  the 
chorus  of  captive  Greek  women,  who  provide  the 
lyrical  setting,  sing  round  the  couch  of  the  sleeping 
sultan,  we  are  aware  of  an  ineffable  hope  at  the  heart 
of  their  strain  of  melancholy  pity ;  and  so  again 
when  their  burthen  becomes  the  transience  of  all 
things  human.  The  sultan,  too,  feels  that  Islam  is 
doomed,  and,  as  messenger  after  messenger  an- 
nounces the  success  of  the  rebels,  his  fatalism  ex- 
presses itself  as  the  growing  perception  that  all  this 
blood  and  all  these  tears  are  but  phantoms  that  come 
and  go,  bubbles  on  the  sea  of  eternity.  This  again 
is  the  purport  of  the  talk  of  Ahasuerus,  the  Wandering 
Jew.  who  evokes  for  him  a  vision  of  Mahmud  II 
capturing  Constantinople.     The  sultan  is  puzzled  : 

"  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  the  one  eternal  Mind.  Ever 
louder  and  more  confident  sounds  this  note,  until  it 
drowns  even  the  cries  of  victory  when  the  tide  of 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  61 

battle  turns  in  favour  of  the  Turks.  The  chorus, 
lamenting  antiphonally  the  destruction  of  liberty, 
are  interrupted  by  repeated  howls  of  savage  triumph  : 
"  Kill !  crush  !  despoil !  Let  not  a  Greek  escape  !  " 
But  these  discords  are  gradually  resolved,  through 
exquisitely  complicated  cadences,  into  the  golden  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  be  restored ;  but  the  wisdom  of  its 
thinkers  and  the  creations  of  its  artists  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  Shelley  should  have  chosen  the  form  of  drama, 
since  the  last  thing  one  would  say  of  him  is  that 
he  had  the  dramatic  talent.     Prometheus  and  Hellas, 


62  SHELLEY 

however,  are  dramas  only  in  name ;  there  is  no 
thought  in  them  of  scenic  representation.  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  beside  it  the  frag- 
ment of  a  projected  play  about  Charles  I  (1822), 
a  theme  which,  with  its  crowd  of  historical  figures, 
was  ill-suited  to  his  powers.  And  not  only  is  The 
Cenci  a  play  ;  it  is  the  most  successful  attempt 
since  the  seventeenth  century  at  a  kind  of  writing, 
tragedy  in  the  grand  style,  over  which  all  our  poets, 
from  Addison  to  Swinburne,  have  more  or  less  come 
to  grief.  Its  subject  is  the  fate  of  Beatrice  Cenci, 
the  daughter  of  a  noble  Roman  house,  who  in  1599 
was  executed  with  her  stepmother  and  brother  for 
the  murder  of  her  father.  The  wicked  father,  more 
intensely  wicked  for  his  grey  hairs  and  his  immense 
ability,  whose  wealth  had  purchased  from  the  Pope 
impunity-  for  a  long  succession  of  crimes,  hated  his 
children,  and  drove  them  to  frenzy  by  his  relentless 
cruelty.  When  to  insults  and  oppression  he  added 
the  horrors  of  an  incestuous  passion  for  his  daughter, 
the  cup  overflowed,  and  Beatrice,  faced  with  shame 
more  intolerable  than  death,  preferred  parricide. 
Here  was  a  subject  made  to  Shelley's  hand — a 
naturally  pure  and  gentle  soul  soiled,  driven  to 
violence,  and  finally  extinguished,  by  unnameable 
wrong,  while  all  authority,  both  human  and  divine, 
is  on  the  side  of  the  persecutor.  Haunted  by  the 
grave,  sad  eyes  of  Guido  Reni's  picture  of  Beatrice, 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  63 

so  that  the  very  streets  of  Rome  seemed  to  echo  her 
name — though  it  was  only  old  women  calling  out 
"  rags "  (cenci) — he  was  tempted  from  his  airy 
nights  to  throw  himself  for  once  into  the  portrayal 
of  reality.  There  was  no  need  now  to  dip  "  his  pen 
in  earthquake  and  eclipse  "  ;  clothed  in  plain  and 
natural  language,  the  action  unfolded  itself  in  a 
crescendo  of  horror ;  but  from  the  ease  with  which 
he  wrote — it  cost  him  relatively  the  least  time  and 
pains  of  all  his  works — it  would  be  rash  to  infer  that 
he  could  have  constructed  an  equally  good  tragedy 
on  any  other  subject  than  the  injured  Beatrice  and 
the  combination,  which  Count  Francesco  Cenci  is, 
of  paternal  power  with  the  extreme  limit  of  human 
iniquity. 

With  the  exception  of  The  Cenci,  everything  Shelley 
published  was  almost  entirely  unnoticed  at  the  time. 
This  play,  being  more  intelligible  than  the  rest, 
attracted  both  notice  and  praise,  though  it  was  also 
much  blamed  for  what  would  now  be  called  its 
unpleasantness.  Many  people,  among  them  his  wife, 
regretted  that,  having  proved  his  ability  to  handle 
the  concrete,  he  still  should  devote  himself  to  ideal  and 
unpopular  abstractions,  such  as  The  Witch  of  Atlas 
(1821),  a  fantastical  piece  in  rime  royal,  which  seems 
particularly  to  have  provoked  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  a  richness  that 
bewilders   because   it   leads   to   nothing.     The   poet 


64  SHELLEY 

juggles  with  flowers  and  gems,  stars  and  spirits, 
lovers  and  meteors ;  we  are  constantly  expecting 
him  to  break  into  some  design,  and  are  as  constantly 
disappointed.  Our  bewilderment  is  of  a  peculiar 
kind  ;  it  is  not  the  same,  for  instance,  as  that  pro- 
duced by  Blake's  prophetic  books,  where  we  are 
conscious  of  a  great  spirit  fumbling  after  the  inex- 
pressible. Shelley  is  not  a  true  mystic.  He  is  seldom 
puzzled,  and  he  never  seems  to  have  any  difficulty  in 
expressing  exactly  what  he  feels  ;  his  images  are 
perfectly  definite.  Our  uneasiness  arises  from  the 
fact  that,  with  so  much  clear  definition,  such  great 
activity  in  reproducing  the  subtlest  impressions  which 
Nature  makes  upon  him,  his  work  should  have  so  little 
artistic  purpose  or  form.  Stroke  is  accumulated  on 
stroke,  each  a  triumph  of  imaginative  beauty  ;  but  as 
they  do  not  cohere  to  any  discoverable  end,  the  total 
impression  is  apt  to  be  one  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  different  person 
from  Shelley.  The  son  of  a  livery-stable  keeper,  he 
had  been  an  apothecary's  apprentice,  and  for  a  short 
time  had  walked  the  hospitals.  He  was  driven  into 
literature  by  sheer  artistic  passion,  and  not  at  all 
from  any  craving  to  ameliorate  the  world.  His  odes 
are  among  the  chief  glories  of  the  English  language. 
His  life,  unlike  Shelley's,  was  devoted  entirely  to  art, 
and  was  uneventful,  its  only  incidents  an  unhappy 
love-affair,  and  the  growth,  hastened  by  disappointed 
passion   and   the   Quarterly   Review's   contemptuous 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  65 

attack  on  his  work,  of  the  consumption  which  killed 
him  at  the  age  of  twenty-six.  He  was  sent  to  Italy 
as  a  last  chance.  Shelley,  who  was  then  at  Pisa, 
proposed  to  nurse  him  back  to  health,  and  offered 
him  shelter.  Keats  refused  the  invitation,  and  died 
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  was  a  poet, 
in  sympathy  with  the  Radicals,  an  exile,  and  the 
victim  of  the  Tory  reviewers.  There  is  not  in 
Adonais  that  note  of  personal  bereavement  which 
wails  through  Tennyson's  In  Memoriam  or  Cowley's 
Ode  on  the  Death  of  Mr.  Hervey.  Much,  especially 
in  the  earlier  stanzas,  is  common  form.  The  Muse 
Urania  is  summoned  to  lament,  and  a  host  of  per- 
sonified abstractions  flit  before  us,  "  like  pageantry 
of  mist  on  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,  but  as  he  proceeds  he  warms  to  his 
work.  The  poets  gather  round  Adonais'  bier,  and 
in  four  admirable  stanzas  Shelley  describes  himself 
as  "  a  phantom  among  men,"  who 

"  Had  gazed  on  Nature's  naked  loveliness, 
Actseon-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." 

E 


66  SHELLEY 

The  Quarterly  Reviewer  is  next  chastised,  and  at 
last  Shelley  has  found  his  cue.  The  strain  rises  from 
thoughts  of  mortality  to  the  consolations  of  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  philosophy  and  of  his  suffering,  that  we  noticed 
in  Hellas,  only  here  the  pathos  is  more  acute.  So 
strong  is  the  sense  of  his  own  misery,  the  premoni- 
tion of  his  own  death,  that  we  scarcely  know,  nor 
does  it  matter,  whether  it  is  in  the  person  of  Keats 
or  of  himself  that  he  is  lamenting  the  impermanence 
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  moonshine  and  madness.  In 
Alastor,  the  poet,  at  the  opening  of  his  career,  had 
pursued  in  vain  through  the  wilderness  of  the  world 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  67 

a  vision  of  ideal  loveliness  ;  it  would  now  seem  that 
this  vision  is  at  last  embodied  in  "  the  noble  and 
unfortunate  Lady  Emilia  Viviani,"  to  whom  Efipsy- 
chidion  is  addressed.  Shelley  begins  by  exhausting, 
in  the  effort  to  express  her  perfection,  all  the  meta- 
phors that  rapture  can  suggest.  He  calls  her  his 
adored  nightingale,  a  spirit- winged  heart,  a  seraph  of 
heaven,  sweet  benediction  in  the  eternal  curse,  moon 
beyond  the  clouds,  star  above  the  storm,  "  thou 
Wonder  and  thou  Beauty  and  thou  Terror  !  Thou 
Harmony  of  Nature's  art !  "  She  is  a  sweet  lamp,  a 
;i  well  of  sealed  and  secret  happiness,"  a  star,  a  tone, 
a  light,  a  solitude,  a  refuge,  a  delight,  a  lute,  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  "  is  unequal  to  express  her ;  he 
breaks  off  in  despair.  A  calmer  passage  of  great 
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  requires  that  everyone  should  bind 
himself  for  life  to  one  mistress  or  friend  ;  for  the 
secret  of  true  love  is  that  it  is  increased,  not  dimi- 
nished, by  division  ;  like  imagination,  it  fills  the 
universe ;  the  parts  exceed  the  whole,  and  this  is 
the  great  characteristic  distinguishing  all  things  good 
from  all  things  evil.  We  then  have  a  shadowy  record 
of  love's  dealings  with  him.  In  childhood  he  clasped 
the  vision  in  every  natural  sight  and  sound,  in  verse, 


68  SHELLEY 

and  in  philosophy.  Then  it  fled,  this  "  soul  out  of 
my  soul."  He  goes  into  the  wintry  forest  of  life, 
where  "  one  whose  voice  was  venomed  melody " 
entraps  and  poisons  his  youth.  The  ideal  is  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-like  trance,  a  frozen  ocean. 
At  last  the  long-sought  vision  comes  into  the  wintry 
forest ;  it  is  Emily,  like  the  sun,  bringing  light  and 
odour  and  new  life.  Henceforth  he  is  a  world  ruled 
by  and  rejoicing  in  these  twin  spheres.  "  As  to  real 
flesh  and  blood,"  he  said  in  a  letter  to  Leigh  Hunt, 
"  you  know  that  I  do  not  deal  in  those  articles  ;  you 
might  as  well  go  to  a  gin-shop  for  a  leg  of  mutton 
as  expect  anything  human  or  earthly  from  me." 
Yet  it  is  certain  that  the  figures  behind  the  shifting 
web  of  metaphors  are  partly  real — that  the  poisonous 
enchantress  is  his  first  wife,  and  the  moon  that  saved 
him  from  despair  his  second  wife.  The  last  part  of 
the  poem  hymns  the  bliss  of  union  with  the  ideal. 
Emily  must  fly  with  him  ;  "  a  ship  is  floating  in  the 
harbour  now,"  and  there  is  "  an  isle  under  Ionian 
skies,"  the  fairest  of  all  Shelley's  imaginary  land- 
scapes, where  their  two  souls  may  become  one. 
Then,  at  the  supreme  moment,  the  song  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." 


PRINCIPAL    WRITINGS  69 

We  have  now  taken  some  view  of  the  chief  of 
Shelley's  longer  poems.  Most  of  these  were  pub- 
lished during  his  life.  They  brought  him  little 
applause  and  much  execration,  but  if  he  had  written 
nothing  else  his  fame  would  still  be  secure.  They 
are,  however,  less  than  half  of  the  verse  that  he 
actually  wrote.  Besides  many  completed  poems,  it 
remained  for  his  wife  to  decipher,  from  scraps  of 
paper,  scribbled  over,  interlined,  and  erased,  a  host 
of  fragments,  all  valuable,  and  many  of  them  gems 
of  purest  ray.  We  must  now  attempt  a  general 
estimate  of  this  whole  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  last  two  chapters  by  philosophical 
and  political  topics,  and  this  although  Shelley  is 
the  most  purely  lyrical  of  English  poets.  The  fact 
is  that  in  nearly  all  English  poets  there  is  a  strong 
moral  and  philosophical  strain,  particularly  in  those 
of  the  period  1770-1830.  They  are  deeply  interested 
in  political,  scientific,  and  religious  speculations ; 
in  sesthetic  questions  only  superficially,  if  at  all. 
Shelley,  with  the  tap-roots  of  his  emotions  striking 
deep  into  politics  and  philosophy,  is  only  an  extreme 
instance  of  a  national  trait,  which  was  unusually 
prominent  in  the  early  part  of  the  nineteenth  century 
owing  to  the  state  of  our  insular  politics  at  the  time, 
though  it  must  be  admitted  that  English  artists  of 
all  periods  have  an  inherent  tendency  to  moralise, 
which  has  sometimes  been  a  weakness,  and  some- 
times has  given  them  surprising  strength. 

Like  the  other  poets  of  the  Romantic  Movement, 
Shelley  expended  his  emotion  on  three  main  objects- 
politics,  nature,  and  love.  In  each  of  these  subjects 
he  struck  a  note  peculiar  to  himself,  but  his  singu- 

70 


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION         71 

larity  is  perhaps  greatest  in  the  sphere  of  politics. 
It  may  be  summed  up  in  the  observation  that  no 
English  imaginative  writer  of  the  first  rank  has  been 
equally  inspired  by  those  doctrines  that  helped  to 
produce  the  French  Revolution.  That  all  men  are 
born  free  and  equal ;  that  by  a  contract  entered  into 
in  primitive  times  they  surrendered  as  much  of  their 
rights  as  was  necessary  to  the  well-being  of  the  com- 
munity ;  that  despotic  governments  and  established 
religions,  being  violations  of  the  original  contract,  are 
encroachments  on  those  rights  and  the  causes  of  all 
evil ;  that  inequalities  of  rank  and  power  can  be 
abolished  by  reasoning,  and  that  then,  since  men  are 
naturally  good,  the  golden  age  will  return — these  are 
positions  which  the  English  mind,  with  its  dislike 
of  the  a  'priori,  will  not  readily  accept.  The  English 
Utilitarians,  who  exerted  a  great  influence  on  the 
course  of  affairs,  and  the  classical  school  of  econo- 
mists that  derived  from  them,  did  indeed  hold  that 
men  were  naturally  good,  in  a  sense.  Their  theory 
was  that,  if  people  were  left  to  themselves,  and  if 
the  restraints  imposed  by  authority  on  thought  and 
commerce  were  removed,  the  operation  of  ordinary 
human  motives  would  produce  the  most  beneficent 
results.  But  their  theory  was  quite  empirical ; 
worked  out  in  various  ways  by  Adam  Smith,  Bentham, 
and  Mill,  it  admirably  suited  the  native  independence 
of  the  English  character,  and  was  justified  by  the 
fact  that,  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
governments  were  so  bad  that  an  immense  increase 
of  wealth,  intelligence,  and  happiness  was  bound  to 


72  SHELLEY 

come  merely  from  making  a  clean  sweep  of  obsolete 
institutions.  Shelley's  Radicalism  was  not  of  this 
drab  hue.  He  was  incapable  of  soberly  studying 
the  connections  between  causes  and  effects — an  in- 
capacity which  comes  out  in  the  distaste  he  felt  for 
history — and  his  conception  of  the  ideal  at  which  the 
reformer  should  aim  was  vague  and  fantastic.  In 
both  these  respects  his  shortcomings  were  due  to 
ignorance  of  human  nature  proceeding  from  ignorance 
of  himself. 

And  first  as  to  the  nature  of  his  ideals.  While  all 
good  men  must  sympathise  with  the  sincerity  of  his 
passion  to  remould  this  sorry  scheme  of  things 
"  nearer  to  the  heart's  desire,"  few  will  find  the 
model,  as  it  appears  in  his  poems,  very  exhilarating. 
It  is  chiefly  expressed  in  negatives  :  there  will  be  no 
priests,  no  kings,  no  marriage,  no  war,  no  cruelty ; 
man  will  be  "  tribeless  and  nationless."  Though  the 
earth  will  teem  with  plenty  beyond  our  wildest 
imagination,  the  general  effect  is  insipid  ;  or,  if  there 
are  colours  in  the  scene,  they  are  hectic,  unnatural 
colours.  His  couples  of  lovers,  isolated  in  bowers 
of  bliss,  reading  Plato  and  eating  vegetables,  are 
poor  substitutes  for  the  rich  variety  of  human  emo- 
tions which  the  real  world,  with  all  its  admixture  of 
evil,  actually  admits.  Hence  Shelley's  tone  irritates 
when  he  shrilly  summons  us  to  adore  his  New  Jeru- 
salem. Reflecting  on  the  narrowness  of  his  ideals, 
we  are  apt  to  see  him  as  an  ignorant  and  fanatical 
sectary,  and  to  detect  an  unpleasant  flavour  in  his 
verse.     And  we  perceive  that,   as  with  all  honest 


THE    POET   OF   REBELLION         73 

fanatics,  his  narrowness  comes  from  ignorance  of 
himself.  The  story  of  Mrs.  Southey's  buns  is  typical. 
When  he  visited  Southey  there  were  hot  buttered 
buns  for  tea,  and  he  so  much  offended  Mrs.  Southey 
by  calling  them  coarse,  disgusting  food  that  she 
determined  to  make  him  try  them.  He  ate  first  one, 
then  another,  and  ended  by  clearing  off  two  plates 
of  the  unclean  thing.  Actively  conscious  of  nothing 
in  himself  but  aspirations  towards  perfection,  he 
never  saw  that,  like  everyone  else,  he  was  a  cockpit 
of  ordinary  conflicting  instincts  ;  or,  if  this  tumult 
of  lower  movements  did  emerge  into  consciousness, 
he  would  judge  it  to  be  wholly  evil,  since  it  had  no 
connection,  except  as  a  hindrance,  with  his  activities 
as  a  reformer.  Similarly  the  world  at  large,  full  as 
it  was  of  nightmare  oppressions  of  wrong,  fell  for  him 
into  two  sharply  opposed  spheres  of  light  and  dark- 
ness— on  one  side  the  radiant  armies  of  right,  on  the 
other  the  perverse  opposition  of  devils. 

With  this  hysterically  over-simplified  view  of  life, 
fostered  by  lack  of  self-knowledge,  was  connected  a 
corresponding  mistake  as  to  the  means  by  which  his 
ends  could  be  reached.  One  of  the  first  observations 
which  generous  spirits  often  make  is  that  the  un- 
satisfactory state  of  society  is  due  to  some  very  small 
kink  or  flaw  in  the  dispositions  of  the  majority  of 
people.  This  perception,  which  it  does  not  need 
much  experience  to  reach,  is  the  source  of  the  common 
error  of  youth  that  everything  can  be  put  right  by 
some  simple  remedy.  If  only  some  tiny  change 
could  be  made  in  men's  attitude  towards  one  another 


74  SHELLEY 

and  towards  the  universe,  what  a  flood  of  evil  could 
be  dammed  ;  the  slightness  of  the  cause  is  as  striking 
as  the  immensity  of  the  effect.  Those  who  ridicule 
the  young  do  not,  perhaps,  always  see  that  this  is 
perfectly  true,  though  of  course  they  are  right  in 
denouncing  the  inference  so  often  drawn — and  here 
lay  Shelley's  fundamental  fallacy — that  the  required 
tiny  change  depends  on  an  effort  of  the  will,  and  that 
the  will  only  does  not  make  the  effort  because  feeling 
is  perverted  and  intelligence  dimmed  by  convention, 
traditions,  prejudices,  and  superstitions.  It  is  cer- 
tain, for  one  thing,  that  will  only  plays  a  small  part 
in  our  nature,  and  that  by  themselves  acts  of  will 
cannot  make  the  world  perfect.  Most  men  are  helped 
to  this  lesson  by  observation  of  themselves  ;  they 
see  that  their  high  resolves  are  ineffective  because 
their  characters  are  mixed.  Shelley  never  learnt 
this.  He  saw,  indeed,  that  his  efforts  were  futile, 
even  mischievous  ;  but,  being  certain,  and  rightly,  of 
the  nobility  of  his  aims,  he  could  never  see  that  he 
had  acted  wrongly,  that  he  ought  to  have  calculated 
the  results  of  his  actions  more  reasonably.  Ever 
thwarted,  and  never  nearer  the  happiness  he  desired 
for  himself  and  others,  he  did  not,  like  ordinary  men, 
attain  a  juster  notion  of  the  relation  between  good 
and  ill  in  himself  and  in  the  world  ;  he  lapsed  into 
a  plaintive  bewildered  melancholy,  translating  the 
inexplicable  conflict  of  right  and  wrong  into  the 
transcendental  view  that 

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


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION         75 

But  his  failure  is  the  world's  gain,  for  all  that  is 
best  in  his  poetry  is  this  expression  of  frustrated 
hope.  He  has  indeed,  when  he  is  moved  simply 
by  public  passion,  some  wonderful  trumpet-notes  ; 
what  hate  and  indignation  can  do,  he  sometimes 
does.  And  his  rapturous  dreams  of  freedom  can 
stir  the  intellect,  if  not  the  blood.  But  it  must  be 
remarked  that  poetry  inspired  solely  by  revolutionary 
enthusiasm  is  liable  to  one  fatal  weakness  :  it  de- 
generates too  easily  into  rhetoric.  To  avoid  being  a 
didactic  treatise  it  has  to  deal  in  high-flown  ab- 
stractions, and  in  Shelley  fear,  famine,  tyranny,  and 
the  rest,  sometimes  have  all  the  emptiness  of  the 
classical  mamier.  They  appear  now  as  brothers, 
now  as  parents,  now  as  sisters  of  one  another  ;  the 
task  of  unravelling  their  genealogy  would  be  as 
difficult  as  it  is  pointless.  If  Shelley  had  been 
merely  the  singer  of  revolution,  the  intensity  and 
sincerity  of  his  feeling  would  still  have  made  him  a 
better  poet  than  Byron  ;  but  he  would  not  have  been 
a  great  poet,  partly  because  of  the  inherent  draw- 
backs of  the  subject,  partly  because  of  his  strained 
and  false  view  of  "  the  moral  universe "  and  of 
himself.  His  song,  in  treating  of  men  as  citizens, 
as  governors  and  governed,  could  never  have  touched 
such  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  considering  human  beings 
in  their  public  capacity  ;  it  meant  also  a  new  kind 
of  sensitiveness  to  their  environment.     If  we  turn, 


76  SHELLEY 

say,  from  Pope's  The  Rape  of  tlie  Lock  to  Words- 
worth's The  Prelude,  it  is  as  if  we  have  passed 
from  a  saloon  crowded  with  a  bewigged  and  painted 
company,  wittily  conversing  in  an  atmosphere  that 
has  become  rather  stuffy,  into  the  freshness  of  a 
starlit  night.  And  just  as,  on  stepping  into  the  open 
air,  the  splendours  of  mountain,  sky,  and  sea  may 
enlarge  our  feelings  with  wonder  and  delight,  so  a 
corresponding  change  may  occur  in  our  emotions 
towards  one  another  ;  in  this  setting  of  a  universe 
with  which  we  feel  ourselves  now  rapturously,  now 
calmly,  united,  we  love  with  less  artifice,  with  greater 
impetuosity  and  self-abandonment.  "  Thomson  and 
Cowper,"  says  Peacock,  "  looked  at  the  trees  and 
hills  which  so  many  ingenious  gentlemen  had  rhymed 
about  so  long  without  looking  at  them,  and  the 
effect  of  the  operation  on  poetry  was  like  the  dis- 
covery of  a  new  world."  The  Romantic  poets  tended 
to  be  absorbed  in  their  trees  and  hills,  but  when  they 
also  looked  in  the  same  spirit  on  their  own  hearts, 
that  operation  added  yet  another  world  to  poetry. 
In  Shelley  the  absorption  of  the  self  in  nature  is 
carried  to  its  furthest  point.  If  the  passion  to  which 
nature  moved  him  is  less  deeply  meditated  than  in 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  its  exuberance  is  wilder ; 
and  in  his  best  lyrics  it  is  inseparably  mingled  with 
the  passion  which  puts  him  among  the  world's  two 
or  three  greatest  writers  of  love-poems. 

Of  all  his  verse,  it  is  these  songs  about  nature  and 
love  that  every  one  knows  and  likes  best.  And,  in 
fact,  many  of  them  seem  to  satisfy  what  is  perhaps 


THE    POET   OF   REBELLION         77 

the  ultimate  test  of  true  poetry  :  they  sometimes 
have  the  power,  which  makes  poetry  akin  to  music, 
of  suggesting  by  means  of  words  something  which 
cannot  possibly  be  expressed  in  words.  Obviously 
the  test  is  impossible  to  use  with  any  objective 
certainty,  but,  for  a  reason  which  will  appear,  it 
seems  capable  of  a  fairly  straightforward  application 
to  Shelley's  work. 

First  we  may  observe  that,  just  as  the  sight  of  some 
real  scene — not  necessarily  a  sunset  or  a  glacier,  but 
a  ploughed  field  or  a  street-corner — may  call  up 
emotions  which  "  lie  too  deep  for  tears  "  and  cannot 
be  put  into  words,  this  same  effect  can  be  produced 
by  unstudied  descriptions.  Wordsworth  often  pro- 
duces it : 

"  I  wandered  lonely  as  a  clond 

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  beyond  Shelley's  reach,  though  he  has 
many  pictures  which  are  both  detailed  and  emotional. 
Consider,  for  instance,  these  lines  from  The  Invita- 
tion (1822).  He  calls  to  Jane  Williams  to  come 
away  "  to  the  wild  woods  and  the  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 ; 


78  SHELLEY 

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  of  careful  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, 
Wakes  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  details  clearly — unlike  Byron,  who  had 
for  nature  but  a  vague  and  a  preoccupied  eye — and 
evidently,  too,  his  observation  is  steeped  in  strong 
feeling,  and  is  expressed  in  most  melodious  language. 
Yet  we  get  the  impression  that  he  neither  saw  nor 
felt  anything  beyond  exactly  what  he  has  expressed  ; 
there  is  no  suggestion,  as  there  should  be  in  great 
poetry,  of  something  beyond  all  expression.     And, 


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION        79 

curiously  enough,  this  seems  to  be  true  even  of  those 
fanciful  poems  so  especially  characteristic  of  him, 
such  as  The  Cloud  and  Arethusa,  where  he  has  dashed 
together  on  his  palette  the  most  startling  colours  in 
nature,  and  composed  out  of  them  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  jug  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  our 
breath ;  it  is  superhuman,  miraculous ;  but  he 
never  falters,  so  vehement  is  the  impulse  of  his 
delight.  It  is  only  afterwards  that  we  ask  ourselves 
whether  there  is  anything  beyond  the  mere  delight ; 
and  realising  that,  though  we  have  been  rapt  far 
above  the  earth,  we  have  had  no  disturbing  glimpses 
of  infinity,  we  are  left  with  a  slight  flatness  of  dis- 
appointment. 

But  disappointment  vanishes  when  we  turn  to  the 
poems  in  which  ecstasy  is  shot  through  with  that 


80  SHELLEY 

strain  of  melancholy  which  we  have  already  noticed. 
He  invokes  the  wild  West  Wind,  not  so  much  to  exult 
impersonally  in  the  force  that  chariots  the  decaying 
leaves,  spreads  the  seeds  abroad,  wakes  the  Mediter- 
ranean from  its  slumber,  and  cleaves  the  Atlantic, 
as  to  cry  out  in  the  pain  of  his  own  helplessness  and 
failure  : 

"  Oh  lift  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  Eugancan  hills,  growing 
from  misty  morning  through  blue  noon  to  twilight, 
brings,  as  he  looks  over  "  the  waveless  plain  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, 
Never  thus  could  voyage  on." 

The  contrast  between  the  peaceful  loveliness  of 
nature  and  his  own  misery  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, 


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION  81 

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  not  mere  sentimental  self-pity ;  it  is 
the  cry  of  a  soul  that  has  known  moments  of  bliss 
when  it  has  been  absorbed  in  the  sea  of  beauty  that 
surrounds  it,  only  the  moments  pass,  and  the  re- 
union, ever  sought,  seems  ever  more  hopeless.  Over 
and  over  again  Shelley's  song  gives  us  both  the 
fugitive  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  cceur  rather  than  anywhere 
else  ?  There  is  one  poem — perhaps  his  greatest  poem 
— which  may  suggest  the  answer.  In  the  Sensitive 
Plant  (1820)  a  garden  is  first  described  on  which  are 


82  SHELLEY 

lavished  all  liis  powers  of  weaving  an  imaginary 
landscape  out  of  flowers  and  light  and  odour.  All 
the  flowers  rejoice  in  one  another's  love  and  beauty 
except  the  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."  "  A  Lady,  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  the  horrors  of  corrup- 
tion and  decay  when  the  power  of  good  has  vanished 
and  the  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  may  console  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, 


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION         83 

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  his  philosophical  ideas.  It  is  the 
creed  of  the  student  of  Berkeley,  of  Plato,  of  Spinoza. 
What  is  real  and  unchanging  is  the  one  spirit  which 
interpenetrates  and  upholds  the  world  with  "  love 
and  beauty  and  delight,"  and  this  spirit — the  vision 
which  Alastor  pursued  in  vain,  the  "  Unseen  Power  " 
of  the  Ode  to  Intellectual  Beauty — is  what  is  always 
suggested  by  his  poetry  at  its  highest  moments. 
The  suggestion,  in  its  fulness,  is  of  course  ineffable ; 
only  in  the  case  of  Shelley  some  approach  can  be 
made  to  naming  it,  because  he  happened  to  be  steeped 
in  philosophical  ways  of  thinking.  The  forms  in 
which  he  gave  it  expression  are  predominantly  melan- 
choly, because  this  kind  of  idealism,  with  its  insist- 
ence on  the  unreality  of  evil,  is  the  recoil  from  life 
of  an  unsatisfied  and  disappointed  soul. 

His  philosophy  of  love  is  but  a  special  case  of  this 
all-embracing   doctrine.    We   saw   how   in   Epipsy- 


84  SHELLEY 

chidion  he  rejected  monogamic  principles  on  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  most 
nearly  attain  to  communion  with  the  eternal  reality. 
Hence  the  more  of  it  the  better.  The  more  we  divide 
and  spread  our  love,  the  more  nearly  will  the  frag- 
ments of  goodness  and  beauty  that  are  in  each  of 
us  find  their  true  fruition.  This  doctrine  may  be 
inconvenient  in  practice,  but  it  is  far  removed  from 
vulgar  sensualism,  of  which  Shelley  had  not  a  trace. 
Hogg  says  that  he  was  "  pre-eminently  a  ladies' 
man,"  meaning  that  he  had  that  childlike  helpless- 
ness and  sincerity  which  go  straight  to  the  hearts 
of  women.  To  this  youth,  preaching  sublime  mys- 
teries, and  needing  to  be  mothered  into  the  bargain, 
they  were  as  iron  to  the  magnet.  There  was  always 
an  Eve  in  his  Eden,  and  each  was  the  "  wonder  of 
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  an  incarnation  of  the  soul  of  the  world,  a 
momentary  mirror  of  the  eternal.  Such  an  attitude 
towards  the  least  controllable  of  passions  has  several 
drawbacks  :  it  involves  a  certain  inhumanity,  and 
it  is  only  possible  for  long  to  one  who  remains  ignorant 
of  himself  and  cannot  see  that  part  of  the  force  im- 
pelling him  is  blind  attraction  towards  a  pretty  face. 
It  also  has  the  result  that,  if  the  lover  is  a  poet, 


THE    POET    OF   REBELLION  85 

his  love-songs  will  be  sad.  Obsessed  by  the  idea  of 
communion  with  some  divine  perfection,  he  must 
needs  be  often  cast  down,  not  only  by  finding  that, 
Ixion-like,  he  has  embraced  a  cloud  (as  Shelley  said 
of  himself  and  Emilia),  but  because,  even  when  the 
object  of  his  affection  is  worthy,  complete  com- 
munion is  easier  to  desire  than  to  attain.  Thus 
Shelley's  love-songs  are  just  what  might  be  expected. 
If  he  does  strain  to  the  moment  of  ingress  into  the 
divine  being,  it  is  to  swoon  with  excess  of  bliss,  as 
at  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  ; 
Iso  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.  Sometimes  his  sadness  is  faint  and  re- 
strained : 

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


8G  SHELLEY 

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  his  heart : 

"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 
he  merely  utters  ecstatic  delight,  or  calm  pleasure, 
or  bitter  indignation,  he  conveys  ineffable  sugges- 
tions beyond  what  the  bare  words  express. 


THE    POET    OF    REBELLION         87 

It  remains  to  point  out  that  there  is  one  means  of 
conveying  such  suggestions  which  was  outside  the 
scope  of  his  genius.  One  of  the  methods  which 
poetry  most  often  uses  to  suggest  the  ineffable  is 
by  the  artful  choice  and  arrangement  of  words. 
A  word,  simply  by  being  cunningly  placed  and  given 
a  certain  colour,  can,  in  the  hands  of  a  good  crafts- 
man, open  up  indescribable  vistas.  But  Keats, 
when,  in  reply  to  a  letter  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  he  should  follow. 
Shelley  was  not  merely  not  a  craftsman  by  nature, 
he  was  not  the  least  interested  in  those  matters  which 
are  covered  by  the  clumsy  name  of  "  technique." 
It  is  characteristic  of  him  that,  while  most  great 
poets  have  been  fertile  coiners  of  new  words,  his 
only  addition  to  the  language  is  the  ugly  "  idealism  " 
in  the  sense  of  "  ideal  object."  He  seems  to  have 
strayed  from  the  current  vocabulary  only  in  two 
other  cases,  both  infelicitous — "  glode  "  for  "  glided," 
and  "  blosmy  "  for  "  blossomy."  He  did  not,  like 
Keats,  look  on  fine  phrases  with  the  eye  of  a  lover. 
His  taste  was  the  conventional  taste  of  the  time. 
Thus  he  said  of  Byron's  Cain,  "  It  is  apocalyptic,  it 
is  a  revelation  not  before  communicated  to  man  "  ; 
and  he  thought  Byron  and  Tom  Moore  better  poets 
than  himself.  As  regards  art,  he  cheapened  Michael 
Angelo,  and  the  only  things  about  which  he  was 
enthusiastic  in  Italy,  except  the  fragments  of  anti- 


88  SHELLEY 

quity  which  he  loved  for  their  associations,  were  the 
paintings  of  Raphael  and  Guido  Reni.  Nor  do  we 
find  in  him  any  of  those  new  metrical  effects,  those 
sublime  inventions  in  prosody,  with  which  the  great 
masters  astonish  us.  Blank  verse  is  a  test  of  poets 
in  this  respect,  and  Shelley's  blank  verse  is  limp 
and  characterless.  Those  triumphs,  again,  which 
consist  in  the  beauty  of  complicated  wholes,  were 
never  his.  He  is  supreme,  indeed,  in  simple  out- 
bursts where  there  is  no  question  of  form,  but  in 
efforts  of  longer  breath,  where  architecture  is  re- 
quired, he  too  often  sprawls  and  fumbles  before  the 
inspiration  comes. 

Yet  his  verse  has  merits  which  seem  to  make  such 
criticisms  vain.  We  may  trace  in  it  all  kinds  of 
arrieres  pensees,  philosophical  and  sociological,  that 
an  artist  ought  not  to  have,  and  we  may  even  dislike 
its  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  away  by  some 
"  unseen  power  "  that  fell  upon  him  unpremeditated. 
His  emotions  were  of  that  fatal  violence  which  dis- 
tinguishes so  many  illustrious  but  unhappy  souls 
from  the  mass  of  peaceable  mankind.  In  the  early 
part  of  last  century  a  set  of  illustrations  to  Faust 
by  Retzch  used  to  be  greatly  admired  ;  about  one  of 
them,  a  picture  of  Faust  and  Margaret  in  the  arbour, 
Shelley  says  in  a  letter  to  a  friend  :  "  The  artist 
makes  one  envy  his  happiness  that  he  can  sketch 
such  things  with  calmness,  which  I  only  dared  look 
upon  once,  and  which  made  my  brain  swim  round 


THE   POET  OF  REBELLION         89 

only  to  touch  the  leaf  on  the  opposite  side  of  which 
I  knew  that  it  was  figured."  So  slight  were  the 
occasions  that  could  affect  him  even  to  vertigo. 
When,  from  whatever  cause,  the  frenzy  took  him, 
he  would  write  hastily,  leaving  gaps,  not  caring  about 
the  sense.  Afterwards  he  would  work  conscientiously 
over  what  he  had  written,  but  there  was  nothing  left 
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  was  that  his 
verse  preserved  an  unparallelled  rush  and  spontaneity, 
which  is  perhaps  as  great  a  quality  as  anything 
attained  by  the  more  bee-like  toil  of  better  artists. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL    NOTE 

The  literature  dealing  with  Shelley's  work  and  life  is 
immense,  and  no  attempt  will  be  made  even  to  summarise  it 
here.  A  convenient  one-volume  edition  of  the  poems  is  that 
edited  by  Professor  Edward  Dowden  for  Messrs.  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.  Stopfoid  Brooke.  The  Prose  Works 
have  been  collected  and  edited  by  Mr.  H.  Buxton  Fornian 
in  four  volumes  (1876-1880).  Of  the  letters  there  is  an 
edition  by  Mr.  Roger  Ingpen  (2  vols.,  1909).  A  number 
of  letters  to  Elizabeth  Hitchener  were  published  by  Mr. 
Bertram  Dobell  in  1909. 

For  a  first-hand  knowledge  of  a  poet's  life  and  character 
the  student  must  always  go  to  the  accounts  of  contemporaries. 
In  Shelley's  case  these  are  copious.  There  are  T.  L.  Peacock's 
Memoirs  (edited  by  H.  F.  B.  Brett-Smith,  1909) ;  Peacock's 
Nightmare  Abbey  contains  an  amusing  caricature  of  Shelley 
in  the  person  of  Scythrops  ;  and  in  at  least  two  of  her  novels 
Mary  Shelley  has  left  descriptions  of  her  husband  :  Adrian, 
Earl  of  Windsor,  in  The  Last  Man,  is  a  portrait  of  Shelley, 
and  Lodore  contains  an  account  of  his  estrangement  from 
Harriet.  His  cousin  Tom  Medwin's  Life  (1847)  is  a  bad 
book,  full  of  inaccuracies.  But  Shelley  had  one  unique  piece 
of  good  fortune  :  two  friends  wrote  books  about  him  that 
are  masterpieces.  T.  J.  Hogg's  Life  is  especially  valuable 
for  the  earlier  period,  and  E.  J.  Trelawny's  Records  of  Shelley, 
Byron,  and  the  Author,  describes  him  in  the  last  year  before 
his  death.  Hogg's  Life  has  been  republished  in  a  cheap 
edition  by  Messrs.  Routledge,  and  there  is  a  cheap  edition  of 

90 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE  91 

Trelawny's  Records  in  Messrs.  Routledge's  "  New  Universal 
Library."  But  both  these  books,  while  they  give  incom- 
parably vivid  pictures  of  the  poet,  are  rambling  and  un- 
conventional, and  should  be  supplemented  by  Professor 
Dowden's  Life  of  Shelley  (2  vols.,  1886),  which  will  always 
remain  the  standard  biography.  Of  other  recent  lives,  Mr. 
A.  Clutton-Brock's  Shelley  :  the  Man  and  the  Poet  (1910)  may 
be  recommended. 

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

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


INDEX 


Adonais,  64 
Alastor,  51 

Allegra,  child  of  Claire  Clair- 
mont  and  Byron,  30,  31,  34 
Austen,  Miss,  39 

Boinville,  Mrs.,  23 
Brandes,  Dr.  George,  10 
Browne,  Miss  Felicia  Dorothea, 

20 
Burns,  Robert,  75 
Byron,  Lord,  10,  28,  31,  32,  31, 

75,  78,  87 

Castlereagh,  Lord,  12-14 
Cenci,  The,  62 
Clairmont,  Charles,  24 
—  Clara  (Claire),  24,  25,  26, 
28,  30,  31 
Cloud,  The,  79 
Coleridge,  S.  T.,  11,  44,  76 
Congress  of  Vienna,  the,  15 

Defence  of  Poetry,  The,  48 
Dowden,  Prof.  E.,  34 

Epipsychidion,  66,  84 
Eugancan  Hills,  Lines  written  in 

the,  80 
Evening,  Ponte  a  Mare,  78 

French  Revolution,  effect  of, 
in  England,  11 


George  III,  12,  14 

—  IV,  14 

Gisborne,  Mrs.,  32 
Godwin,  Fanny,  24,  29 

—  Mary  Wollstonecraft   (see 
Shelley,  Mary) 

—  Mrs.,  24,  26 

—  William,  22,  24,  27 
Grove,  Harriet,  19,  84 

Hellas,  59 

Hemans,    Mrs.     (see    Browne, 

Miss  Felicia  Dorothea) 
Hitchener,   Elizabeth,  21,   23, 

84 
Hogs,  T.  J.,  16,  19-21,  30,  45, 

84 
Hunt,  Leigh,  35 
Hymn  to  Pan,  81 

"  I  fear  thy  kisses,"  85 
Indian  Serenade,  The,  85 
Invitation,  The,  77 
Ireland,   England's  treatment 
of,  11,  12 

—  Shelley's    expedition    to, 
13,40 

Julian  and  Maddalo,  31 

Keats,  John,  35,  64,  87 


92 


INDEX 


93 


Landoe,  W.  S.,  10 

Lind,  Dr.,  56 

Liverpool,  Lord,  13 

Love,  Shelley's  philosophy  of, 

68,  83 
Love's  Philosophy,  85 

Masque  of  Anarchy,  The,  14 
Moore,  Thomas,  87 

Necessity  of  Atheism,  The,   20, 
42 

Peacock,  T.  L.,  48,  51,  76 
Peter  Bell  the  Third,  15 
Peterloo  Massacre,  the,  14 
Pope,  Alexander,  76 
Princess  Caroline,  the,  14 
Prometheus  Unbound,  56 
Proposal,  a,  for  Putting  Reform 
to  the  Vote,  41 

Queen  Mab,  42 

Radcliffe,  Mrs.,  39 
Reform  Act  of  1832,  the,  12 
Revolt  of  Islam,  The,  30,  53 
Roberts,  Captain,  34 

St.  Irvyne,  or  the  Rosicrucian, 

39 
Sensitive  Plant,  The,  81 
Shelley,  Clara,  28,  31 

—  Mary,  24,  26,  33,  56,  58, 
63,  68,  64 

—  Mr.  (afterwards  Sir) 
Timothy,  16,  20 

—  Percy  Bysshe.  His  family, 
13,  18 ;  expedition  to  Ireland, 
13  ;  writes   political  poems, 


13;  encourages  revolutionary 
movements,  15 ;  personal 
appearance,  17  ;  at  Eton,  18  ; 
at  Oxford,  19 ;  interest  in 
science,  19  ;  expelled  from 
Oxford,  20 ;  entanglement 
with  Harriet  Westbrook,  21; 
first  marriage,  22 ;  elopes 
with  Mary  Godwin,  25  ;  first 
Swiss  journey,  26  ;  second 
Swiss  journey,  28  ;  deprived 
of  children  by  Chancery 
decree,  29 ;  hallucinations, 
29;  settles  at  Marlow,  30; 
leaves  England  for  Italy, 
31 ;  Italian  period,  31-34  ; 
his  love  of  the  sea,  34 ; 
drowned,  35 ;  his  body 
burned  by  Trelawny,  36 ; 
early  work,  38-44;  logical 
character  of  his  mind,  43  ; 
his  philosophy,  44-47,  81 
sqq.  ;  describes  himself  in 
Adonais,  65;  influenced  by 
principles  of  the  French  Re- 
volution, 71 ;  revolutionary 
poems,  75 ;  connection  of 
his  melancholy  and  his  philo- 
sophy, 80-86 
Shelley,  Sir  Bysshe,  18,  27 

—  Sir  Percy,  31 

—  William,  28,  31 
Sidmouth,  Lord,  13 
Skylark,  To  a,  86 
Southey,  Mrs.,  73 

—  Robert,  11 

Stanzas  written  in  dejection  near 

Naples,  80 
Swellfoot  the  Tyrant,  14 


94 


INDEX 


Thomson,  James,  11 
Trelawny,  E.  J.,  32,  36 
Turner,  Cornelia,  23,  84 

Viviani,  Emilia,  32,  67,  84 

Westbkook,  Eliza,  21,  23 
—  Harriet,  21,  23.  68,  84 
Wat   Wind,  Ode  to  the,  80 
"  When  the  lamp  is  shattered,"  86 


Williams,  Jane,    32,    35,   77, 

84 
—  Ned,  32,  35 
Witch  of  Atlas,  The,  63 
Wollstonecraft,  Mary,  24 
Wordsworth,  William,  11,  15, 

76,77 

Zastrozzi,  39 


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