With a theoretic mind, up to a certain point, precociously developed, though not mature, Shelley, in earlier as well as later years, sought after a creed; he could not steep himself in mere sensation, in a luxury of odours, and colours, and sounds; and at first, not having had time or faculty to develop out of experience and his deepest thoughts and feelings a genuine faith, he accepted one ready-made, lived in it and by it; and this creed,—that of the critical movement preceding the Revolution,lies behind the colour, melody, and interwoven imagery of all his earlier verse. The ethics of self-interest with which Shelley came in contact through the French philosophes had no attraction for him; but the science and metaphysics of the Aufklärung imposed themselves upon his intellect as if they were a discovery of new and sacred truth. The Revolution, however, had not been self-consistent in its metaphysics, nor was Shelley. The deism of Robespierre had appeared as ridiculous and childish to the materialists as it had appeared impious to the Catholics. Shelley, belonging as he did partly to the nineteenth century and to the transcendental movement, could not be satisfied by a barren deism, the worship of an Etre Suprême, out of and above nature; but when he caught up the materialism of the French atheistic philosophy, he did not sufficiently calculate upon an element in his own nature which, though opposed to equally opposed to atheism. From first to. deism, was his spirit of pure individualism, takes Shelley to task for desiring “the organization of a society whose institution shall serve as a bond to its members."—See "William Godwin," by C. Kegan Paul, vol. ii. p. 204. last Shelley moved spirit-like in a world which was spiritual, and while strenuously denying the existence of anything immaterial, he attains what his feelings and imagination demanded by a system of levelling-up, by endowing matter with all the attributes of mind. It is impossible to reduce to entire consistency the statements made by Shelley at the time when "Queen Mab" was written. A creative God he constantly denies; but he will not deny the existence of a Spirit of the Universe; this Spirit, however, cannot be immaterial; its action is necessary, it is incapable of will and of moral qualities, it is equally the author of evil and of good; we can stand in no relation to it, and hence religion is impossible. Yet because the principle of the universe acts necessarily it acts righteously; all evil is but apparent, and it becomes possible to love and to adore.* Shelley's faith was no dead accretion of dogma around his intellect; what he could not make his own fell away; what remained was a vital portion of his being, and with his growth it underwent vital processes of change. When Shelley wrote "Adonais" he had outgrown the creed of "Queen Mab; Queen Mab;" his materialism had given place to idealism; he no longer had any hesitation in attributing moral qualities to the Universal God; he was even prepared to admit the existence of an Evil Some additional light has been recently thrown upon the history of Shelley's opinions by his "Refutation of Deism," which it was my good fortune to recover in 1875. The copy obtained by me (from Mr Hookham) is now in the British Museum Library, and the little treatise has been reprinted from this copy, in the edition of Shelley's works published by Messrs Chatto & Windus. Spirit of the world, in order that he might save the moral character of the Supreme Being. Mr Browning, in his preface to the forged letters ascribed to Shelley, ventures to conjecture that, had he lived, Shelley would have come to accept the Christian faith. It may safely be affirmed that only in some transcendental sense, not in a historical sense, could Shelley ever have conceived the existence of a "Son of God." In his later years, Shelley distinguished between the doctrine of the founder of the Christian religion and the theology of historical Christianity. Shortly before his death he wrote: "I agree with Moore that the doctrines of the French and Material Philosophy are as false as they are pernicious; but still they are better than Christianity, inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism: for this reason, that the former is for a season, and that the latter is eternal." While remaining hostile to historical Christianity, Shelley had come to look on Jesus as a pure and impassioned prophet, who held a faith not very different from his own in its later development. Jesus conceived the ruling Power of the universe as "mysteriously and illimitably pervading the frame of things," "an overruling Spirit of the collective energy of the moral and material world." This Spirit Jesus called by the venerable name of God, nor did Shelley refuse to use the same word. Whether anything analogous to what we call Will can be attributed to this Power is a question which Shelley declined to consider; the action of the Power upon our spirits he conceived to be of the kind which we somewhat vaguely term impersonal. How far Shelley had travelled from the doctrine set forth in the notes to "Queen Mab," will appear from the following passage of singular beauty which occurs in the unfinished "Essay on Christianity":— “We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will. Our most imperial and stupendous qualities -those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected -are, relatively to the inferior portion of its mechanism, active and imperial; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent Power. This Power is God; and those who have seen God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature, been harmonized by their own will to so exquisite a consentaneity of power as to give forth divinest melody, when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame." This was the kind of faith which his own nature was, in its moments of highest light and ardour, fitted to yield to Shelley. Coleridge in an early poem uses imagery similar to that employed by Shelley in the passage which I have quoted, the purpose of Coleridge being not to describe the rare and exquisite phenomena of the life of the saint, the poet, or the perfect lover, but to suggest a theory of the genesis of consciousness and thought throughout the entire universe: "And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweep, At once the Soul of each and God of all ?" From any tendency to remove the ground of division between God and man, or mind and the material world, Coleridge delivered himself, and we know painfully, upon the testimony of the now venerable sage of Chelsea, that the philosopher of Highgate, when his articulation had become more nasal than Mr Carlyle might have desired, knew to distinguish "om-mject" from "sum-mject." Yet there are secret points of contact between Coleridge's early pantheistic heresy reproved by the "serious eye" of his "pensive Sara" and his later doctrine of the Reason. The Reason is that which is highest in each individual man, yet no man can call it his own; he does not possess it, he partakes of it; the Reason is the present Deity in the soul. The primary truths of theology and of morals are witnessed to by their own light, which is the light of Reason; it is in us, or we are in it, but it is not ours, nor of us. Wordsworth, if we are to believe the complaint of Shelley, did not possess imagination in the highest sense of that word. When things came within the belt of his own nature they melted into him, but he could not dart his contemplation from any point except that on which he actually stood. Wordsworth approached and communed with Nature-Shelley goes on to say-but he dared not pluck away her closest veil and consummate a perfect union. It is not difficult to put oneself at Shelley's point of view when he wrote these verses of his "Peter Bell," and it is true that Shelley was much more than Wordsworth like one of the brotherhood of the forces of nature, himself a kinsman of the wind and of the fire. Shelley's total being transforms itself into a single energy-now into the ecstatic clasping of the life of nature, now into an ardour of hope for man, now into E |