PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792-1822

THE first and foremost impression of Shelley is of a spirit of unrest, brooding-no, hovering, swooping-over a return of Chaos, which it has engineered. We are conscious of a continual search by him for new elements whence to construct new Heavens and a new earth. It is the French Revolution, exhausted, crushed by main force for the moment below the surface, panting, protesting, fermenting, in a haughty English, aristocratic nature. Visibly and audibly it is rebellious and scornful. It has idealized passion, erecting it into a divine law. Hither and thither it rushes, raising an altar wherever fancy has alighted for the instant. Never without an idol it tramples on whatever is no longer for it adorable. All must acknowledge the fascination of each fresh conception, if only it were permitted to stay long enough for a day-dream to repose in it. There is a longing to inform with a body each exhalation as it rises; to condense the rainbow-hued vapour. Alas! the pageant of fairy castles which dissolve into air as we wind the horn at their gates at length disappoints and tires. We begin to doubt whether they be more than gossamers of an intellect uncertain of itself.

Shelley was a born poet, whom nature in a freak bent, and warped, perhaps, also enriched, by the circumstances of his time, parentage, and domicile. Being what thus he was, he could not have been other than a poet professed, and nothing else. He was endowed with faculties in

abundance besides poetic imagination. His prose is delightful. He might have won fame as a novelist, a metaphysician, a religious teacher, a politician. As it was, from boyhood he chose, or, as doubtless he thought, was forced into, a social isolation which denied to his great intelligence any other fixed form of expression than poetry. Made for friendship, to admire, and be admired, to be a disciple, and have disciples, he did not take excommunication kindly. He threw the blame upon existing institutions, a feudal aristocracy, religion degenerated into formalism and priestcraft, statesmen, Courts, and Kings, Heaven itself. Refused an audience otherwise, he uttered his rage and contempt in verse. The narrow circle he joined in default of a larger gave him the public he needed. It was too affectionate, too deeply interested, to criticize as it might and could. He himself had too much to say, and felt too ardently, to care to stop and meditate. Often his rank exuberance is owing to the chase of a fugitive fancy. Forth has started one till a second got up, and set his brain coursing in a fresh direction.

His besetting fault as a poet is excess. Denunciation is pursued to scurrility. Descriptions of natural loveliness are lengthened into tedious langour. Vital problems are discussed, at once with too much subtlety, and too little depth. Redundancy damps the fire of Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Rosalind and Helen, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, The Masque of Anarchy, Julian and Maddalo. It draws a film over The Sensitive Plant, and even the beauty of Adonais. Indignation raves in the greenness of Queen Mab, with its uncultured Hebrews' exulting in 'old Salem's shameful glories', and 'howling hideous praises to their Demon-God'! It blunts the edge of the more mature satires, Swellfoot the Tyrant, Castlereagh,

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and the rest. When, as frequently, the resentment is righteous in its origin, its virtue still, as with Byron's, is marred by vituperation. The fury of the flame turns the water into steam. However much there is to say, however suggestive the text to be expounded, the inability to know when to stop stifles the effect.

The blemishes are not surprising in the circumstances. There were his self-banishment from home and family, social ostracism, exalted views of duty to Humanity, not invariably carried into practice, a fervent belief in the existence of a conspiracy of Tories and critics to suppress him, and a combination of intellectual and spiritual, perhaps even social, pride with physical and moral shyness. Add the gifts, in such a medley insidiously and peculiarly dangerous, of an infallible ear for rhythm, and a vast mine of fancy. Take the whole together; and we have a clue to the flaws of Alastor and its successors, and to their as extraordinary beauties too. The entire realm of poetry can show nothing so phenomenal. It was a strange universe, paradoxically monstrous, as paradoxically ideal, which spread before the poet's eyes. Turned back upon himself, he had fed upon, and held incessant communion with, his own imagination. He could at will be in the Tropics, fanned

With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods,

or in the Aegean isle,

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.

In a moment he passed in fancy from beauty to horror, from a June garden's

fresh odour, sent

From the turf, like the voice and the instrument,

to its decay, weeds and toad-stools rotting

flake by flake,

Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake,
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by.1

It is not nature; it is a reflection of a picture discerned within, with some help from books, and projected into verse. So with the characters moving over the mirror his poems present. The reader sees nothing, none, that he has ever beheld, or that he supposes had ever been beheld. He feels that the narrator has chosen to imprison himself within his own spacious but tortuous being, and there and thence has spun a whole universe, Hell and Heaven, and chiefly Hell.

The voluminous works upon which, within a term not much prolonged beyond that of Adonais, he spent the uttermost of his extraordinary powers, demonstrate their own weight and compass. Consider, for instance, the Prometheus Unbound and the Cenci. The Prometheus raises tremendous problems, and only half, if at all, solves any of them. The hero of the drama is himself a problem unanswered. It is unintelligible why, if peace was to be made on the conditions hazily indicated, the conflict between him and Zeus need ever have arisen. Yet the Play, unsatisfactory as it essentially is, satisfies us sufficiently of its author's genius. In the conception it is as much a torso as an actual, confessed fragment, like the Hyperion of Keats. But it is colossal. In its ways of thought and style it is, moreover, an exact type of its author's common manner. The Cenci belongs to a different class altogether. It is a triumph, in the coldness of its horrors, over the temptation to its creator, being what he was, to burst through all the barriers of tragic art. The

spirit is not Aeschylean; not Shakespearean. There is some analogy to Marlowe, only with more of the truly poetical. Alas! for the ugliness of the theme!

The phenomenon is that, while it and the Prometheus are curiously unlike, both are absolutely and equally representative of their author in one essential respect. Independent as many poets are, determined to follow their own bias, even insolent to the reading world, they have an eye to it nevertheless; they evidently have weighed how they can most certainly render themselves audible to it. It would be difficult to match Shelley in the singleness of his regard to himself alone as he writes/Doubtless he would have liked to be popular. He never endeavoured to attain that end by consulting public tastes in the smallest particulars. He has general sympathies; not the sympathy which is at pains to comprehend a different point of view from one's own. Paradox as it seems, it is one of the explanations of the peculiar Shelley cult. Never was there a body of writings which to the initiated is a surer index of the author's mind, which admits reverent students, enamoured even of defects, to more intimate communion with it, for the very reason that it never appears to be looking to opinion outside. Had Shelley cared for external favour, he might have corrected diffuseness in diction and obscurity in ideas; he would have had a larger public, and fewer worshippers.

The serene unconsciousness that his readers have their likes and dislikes, which he might at least try to understand though without deferring to them, applies to all his work. He takes account so far of society about him as to lecture it on its shortcomings. He never learned that pity teaches how to cure. The apartness is the more instead of the less palpable that his inspiration constantly