Shelley

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 degenerates too easily into rhetoric. To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner. 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 drawbacks 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, say, from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth'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 discovery 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 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 produces it:

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

Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind of effect is beyond Shelley's reach, though he has many pictures which are both detailed and emotional. Consider, for instance, these lines from 'The Invitation' (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;
   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,
   Walkes not one ripple from its summer dream.

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

Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense that he saw 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, 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 jag of a mountain crag
     Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
   An eagle alit one moment may sit
     In the light of its golden wings.
   And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
     Its ardours of rest and of love,
   And the crimson pall of eve may fall
     From the depths of heaven above,
   With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest,
     As still as a brooding dove."

Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and lightning? We hold 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 disappointment.

But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which ecstasy is shot through with that 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 Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves the Atlantic, as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and failure:

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

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