Shelley

Or an autumn day in the Euganean 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,
   Ne'er 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,
     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 reunion, 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 coeur' 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 lavished all his 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 corruption 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,
   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 melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its insistence 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 'Epipsychidion' 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 fragments 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 helplessness and sincerity which go straight to the hearts of women. To this youth, preaching sublime mysteries, 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 impelling him is blind attraction towards a pretty face. It also has the result that, if the lover is a poet, 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 communion 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;
   No sister-flower would be forgiven
     If it disdained its brother.
   And the sunlight clasps the earth,
     And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
   What is all this sweet work worth
     If thou kiss not me?"

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

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

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

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

or in

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

The very rapture of the skylark opens, as he listens, the wound at 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 suggestions beyond what the bare words express.

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 craftsman, 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 antiquity 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 outbursts where there is no question of form, but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, 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 distinguishes 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 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. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman 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 E. 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 Trelawny's 'Records' in Messrs. Routledge's "New Universal Library." But both these books, while they give incomparably vivid pictures of the poet, are rambling and unconventional, 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).

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