ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. SHELLEY. Ir would have been nothing very extraordinary though Shelley had been still alive; so far, that is, as a man and his human life may be judged from an ordinary estimate. Had he been living now, the poet would have been considerably younger than many people one knows, whose years, moreover, do not of themselves necessarily indicate a speedy close of life. Shelley would have been, by this time, an old man, certainly, but he would not have been much older than Mr. Carlyle, who can still travel to Scotland when he is inclined, or write letters to the newspapers on current politics. Then it was only the other day that one, whose vigorous manhood was contemporary with Shelley's, passed away in the gifted and interesting Barry Cornwall. Mr. R. H. Horne is still active, though full of years, and both Mr. P. J. Bailey and Sir Henry Taylor virtually belonged to the generation that knew Shelley. He would have been eighty-five, or thereby, had he lived to the present year, which indeed has seen David Laing pass away at just that patriarchal age. Yet it is wearing on to sixty years since Shelley's tragic end, while biographers and critics have long been busy with himself and his writings, and the antiquaries are now engaged with probable relics of his furni ture. For over half a century, then, the question has been agitated as to Shelley's place as a poet. It has generally been allowed that he was a man of no ordinary power; while a few have studied him faithfully, and a majority, as usual, has given a verdict in utter ignorance of the merits of the case. He has been overrated and he has been underrated, belauded and maligned, feared and worshipped, and misrepresented. As usual, those who condemn him most readily, and most thoroughly, are those that know least about him; while it must be added that among his warmest admirers are those whose admiration is challenged by the wrong things, or is pitched in a falsetto key. All this indicates that there must be something more than ordinary about Shelley-something that raises him quite out of and above the crowd of human agents, and something that makes him peculiar even among English men of letters. It is not a common thing to find a number of able thinkers puzzling themselves, and starting theories, and making mistakes soon to be rectified-condemning, and praising, and excusing, and expounding-all in connection with a mere soldier in life's great battle, who has fought the usual fight and got done with it. Shelley must have been an uncommon man before his personality should postulate such an uncommon interest, and give rise to so much criticism, at once tentative, warm, and contradictory. We seem to have got at the right distance from him to warrant something like a definite estimate of his vital worth: of what he was in himself, and what he did for literature, Yet, as has already been said, the poet, in the matter of length of years, might still have been with us; and it is a fact that Captain Trelawny, who was one of the close companions of his last days, is not only still alive, but has this year re-written the book containing his impressions of Shelley and Byron. At the very outset, then, the difficulty meets us, as to whether it is altogether fair to judge of Shelley from what it was given him to do in his short span of thirty years. When we think of what other eminent men might have been had they died so young-Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott, even Shakspeare himself-we are inclined to pause before giving judgment. Chaucer, without his " Canterbury Tales;" Milton, with no "Paradise Lost;" Thomas Carlyle, merely as a translator and biographical essayist, were indeed but striplings compared with the men when displaying their full complement of results. Had Shelley, too, lived even to the threescore years of Chaucer, what, with his enormous assimilative faculty, his singular introspective power, his strength of creative energy, might he not have done? Judging from "Prometheus Unbound" and the "Cenci," it seems not an unfair inference to make that Shelley, with matured and disciplined experience, had it in him to stand abreast of the foremost Elizabethans. On the other hand, however, it is impossible to overlook the nature of his unique development, as far as it went. He defies any convenient theory of averages; he will not brook to be judged in relation to an ordinary criterion. It is quite possible to consider him middle-aged, in some respects, while just emerging from his teens, and to aver that his intellectual maturity was reached and over before his early death. Shelley, at twenty-two, had spiritual insight and grasp of understanding that might have served a superior nature at forty; and Shelley, at twenty-nine, was as far from concentration of purpose, from sanity of outlook, and from practical sagacity as any schoolboy not utilised by Lord Macaulay. On the score of great personal intensity and rapt enthusiasm for his ideal, of a certain frenzy of Flatonic sentiment, and of bright and pure melodious expression, Shelley's death, before reaching the ordinary years of maturity, was a great blow to the literature of his country; but in so far as he seemed likely to add dignity to the national poetry, to furnish fresh æsthetic material, or to contribute a new impulse to social regeneration, the poet seemed to have done his best and his worst. a worker in poetic transcendentalism he had probably not reached perfection; as an individual he might have grown and expanded for those about him and directly concerned with his character and conduct, while it is hardly probable that his general influence would have gained by length of days. Even on the "unworldly" hypothesis of his admirers, this seems a perfectly legitimate conclusion to draw; for, if a man at thirty has no better sociological theories than Shelley had, when, indeed, is he likely to have them? The truth appears to be, that if the poet is not to be charged with moral insanity, he must be let off with social puerility and a marvellous poetic licence. Mr. Symonds, frore 66 the lofty æsthetical standpoint he takes, along with other devotees, bewails and condemns the attitude of some of the leading critics among Shelley's contemporaries, but in doing so he overlooks the fact that critics, even when considering poetry, deal with assumed human beings, and not with essential or possible demigods. How should a Quarterly" Reviewer, in reading "Queen Mab" or "Laon and Cythnia," be in a position to know that the author was not amenable to average social law, to say nothing of civilization or common decency? It is all very well after the lapse of sixty years to reduce moral chaos within the elastic stretch and grasp of a fine frenzy; it is quite a different thing to feel that it may taint existing conditions to the core. Were it not that idealism, even of the kind in which Shelley revels, stands so greatly in need of commonplace material and outward symbols, it might be possible for happy majorities to rejoice in it; but as matters stand there is no denying that it is quite beyond the æsthetic attainment of the average Englishman. And thus if Shelley's supreme reverence for liberty was likely to develope in the direction it had steadily held for years, there seems no harshness to his memory in saying that the world had quite enough of it. As a social reformer the post was not likely to have much success, even if privileged with a length of days that would have classed him with the oldest patriarch. In so far as he advocated a theory of liberty, Shelley may safely be put to one side as unprofitable, and what remains of him for consideration will be the life he led and the poetry he wrote. Now both are so bound up with his theories that it is difficult to consider them apart. It is not possible, for instance, to defend his treatment of his first wife, and there are features in all his leading poems which would seem to be beyond the reach of even the tenderest generosity. Mr. Symonds, though an ardent admirer, is not quite a blind devotee of the poet, and he is willing to admit that extraordinary enthusiasm and imperfect experience may have induced outrageous blunders. In reference to the painful circumstances connected with Harriet, he looks from a much loftier and manlier standpoint than, for example, Mr. W. M. Rosetti, whose attempted palliation of the poet's conduct is nothing short of vulgar bravado; but Mr. Symonds, also, is just too anxicus to overlook the patent facts of the case. He is very hopeful that a statement yet to be made will shed an entirely new light upon the matter, if not, indeed, wholly exculpate the apparently erring husband. An ordinary onlooker cannot but wonder that such extenuating account has not been made long ere now. Harriet could hardly be made worse than partial biographers have already made her, and there is certainly room for brightening the memory of Shelley. In a word, if such things in the lives of great men are to be discussed at all, they must be brought to the bar of common sense, and estimated according to recognised social law. Little good can be done by such criticisms as those, on the one hand, of Dr. Johnson and De Quincey respecting Milton and Goethe, or those of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Michael Rosetti touching Byron and Shelley, on the other. Readers of what the poets have left would rather dispense with such special pleading, and, indeed (were it possible), forget the untoward facts altogether. Mr. Symonds, in his narrative, has succeeded in fairly establishing one thing, and that is, that, so far as can be made out, the first Mrs. Shelley was not an unworthy wife of her extraordinary husband. He has also shewn that, through the poet's incessant quest after a Fair Ideal, even the second wife was perilously near a crisis. But the poet's mind was disabused in time, and circumstances favoured a return to comparative sanity. All this would not be worth dwelling on at all, were it not connected more or less intimately, with Shelley's poetry. For, after all, that is the main thing about the man of vital interest to this and all coming generations. If he has left anything worth reading; if it is safe to read it; if our wives and sisters could profit by the study of it, as well as ourselves; if, in short, he has contributed to literature anything that is worth preserving, then by all means let due credit be given. We are probably, at present, just too much inclined to philosophise over our men of letters. Esthetic criticism is prone to discover what was never from the first in the writer's intention: it starts with a theory, and speedily turns out, by a process of ingenious reconciliation, a beautiful symmetrical unity. This habit has become so inveterate, that there seems a risk of great ancients shading off into sun-myths, and criticism toning down into a system of ideas. Now Shelley would make a prime sun-myth, and his poems could be made to encompass him with varying degrees of splendour, till the aggregate glory would be of a kind not to be approached by ordinary methods of interpretation. Meanwhile, however, there are readers of verse to whom such æsthetical considerations are unpalatable, and there are very many others to whom they are as nothing and vanity. What is to be done with these in presence of work like Shelley's? They will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that his tone is oft-times depraved, and his ethics unwholesome, and it will be extremely difficult for even the ablest apologist to prove them wrong. Mr. Symonds says that the poet's theories about individual liberty took such hold of him, that, in his ardent advocacy, he went to the extremes that in his heart of hearts he had no desire to defend. That may have been, but if it is the case it simply emphasises the charge of puerility and inexperience that comes so readily to hand against Shelley. If he was so innocent as not to know that others besides himself took an interest in social problems, then perhaps he was warranted in giving poetic shape to thoughts that will, on the first blush, challenge the contempt they deserve. Some of his finest poetry is so sadly tainted that it will not bear reading except by professed students of verse, while it is only fair to add that it is quite an education in numbers to listen to his firm well-defined beat, and an elevation of soul to be held spell-bound by his harmonies. Let any-one read, for instance, the first fifteen stanzas of the first canto of the "Revolt of Islam," and say whether the man that provided such work-such a sweep of landscape, such depth of colour, such ease and breadth of detail and distance of perspective-were or were not a poetical maker of wholly exceptional calibre and resource! "And now 'tis like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's voice, That bids the heavens be mute!" But let the same reader advance through the poem, and the likelihood will be that, if he appreciates the poetic beauty aright, he will regret that it should have been, through moral perversity, little other than thrown away. It is a pity that so much of Shelley's poetry should illustrate the incongruous union of "Beauty and the Beast." For, whatever a poet may be advocating, he is fully entitled to his own opinion so long as he does not insult the native dignity of manhood. The day has gone past for condemning a man's philosophy of aesthetics, simply because he is of a different political creed from his critic, but the time is surely yet far distant-nay, hopelessly remote, when he shall be hailed as a public benefactor who shall glorify Catilline's young men, or advocate the universal reign of Circe. At this point, then, it is necessary to draw a sharp line in reference to Shelley. Mr. Symonds acknowledges this, and what he says is very much to the point. He carefully distinguishes his purely poetical quality, from his attitude as a theorist, though indeed he is somewhat lenient in his detailed criticism. But few will demur such a general estimate as the following, when they recall the lyrical of the "The Skylark" and "The Cloud," of the "Ode to the West Wind," and the "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," as well the majesty of movement that characterises the larger works, apart from the question of their substantial and theoretical value. "In range of power," says Mr. Symonds, "he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humorist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions, and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric." In the "Adonais," which is in many respects so tender and sweet and touching, there is much that draws one to Shelley in an attitude of respectful affection. There is singular pathos-a note that reaches the finer chords of emotion-is that implied wail for sympathy that strikes through the stanzas on himself. "Midst others of less note came one frail form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Actæon-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." THOMAS BAYNE, in St. James' Magazine. |