Shelley by Sydney Waterlow - HTML preview

Chapter III. The Poet of Rebellion, of Nature, and of Love

 

It may seem strange that so much space has been occupied in the last two chapters by philosophical and political topics, and this although Shelley is the most purely lyrical of English poets. The fact is that in nearly all English poets there is a strong moral and philosophical strain, particularly in those of the period 1770-1830. They are deeply interested in political, scientific, and religious speculations in aesthetic questions only superficially, if at all Shelley, with the tap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the state of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has given them surprising strength.

Like the other poets of the Romantic Movement Shelley expended his emotion on three main objects--politics, nature, and love. In each of these subjects he struck a note peculiar to himself, but his singularity is perhaps greatest in the sphere of politics. It may be summed up in the observation that no English imaginative writer of the first rank has been equally inspired by those doctrines that helped to produce the French Revolution. That all men are born free and equal; that by a contract entered into in primitive times they surrendered as much of their rights as was necessary to the well-being of the community, that despotic governments and established religions, being violations of the original contract, are encroachments on those rights and the causes of all evil; that inequalities of rank and power can be abolished by reasoning, and that then, since men are naturally good, the golden age will return--these are positions which the English mind, with its dislike of the 'a priori', will not readily accept. The English Utilitarians, who exerted a great influence on the course of affairs, and the classical school of economists that derived from them, did indeed hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory was that, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation of ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history--and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both these respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human nature proceeding from ignorance of himself.

And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all good men must sympathise with the sincerity of his passion to remould this sorry scheme of things "nearer to the heart's desire," few will find the model, as it appears in his poems, very exhilarating. It is chiefly expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty  -man will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the general effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its admixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates when he shrilly summons us to adore his New Jerusalem. Reflecting on the narrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant and fanatical sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. And we perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his narrowness comes from ignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. When he visited Southey there were hot buttered buns for tea, and he so much offended Mrs. Southey by calling them coarse, disgusting food that she determined to make him try them. He ate first one, then another, and ended by clearing off two plates of the unclean thing. Actively conscious of nothing in himself but aspirations towards perfection, he never saw that, like everyone else, he was a cockpit of ordinary conflicting instincts; or, if this tumult of lower movements did emerge into consciousness, he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it had no connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities as a reformer. Similarly the world at large, full as it was of nightmare oppressions of wrong, fell for him into two sharply opposed spheres of light and darkness on one side the radiant armies of right, on the other the perverse opposition of devils.

With this hysterically over-simplified view of life, fostered by lack of self-knowledge, was connected a corresponding mistake as to the means by which his ends could be reached. One of the first observations which generous spirits often make is that the unsatisfactory state of society is due to some very small kink or flaw in the dispositions of the majority of people. This perception, which it does not need much experience to reach, is the source of the common error of youth that everything can be put right by some simple remedy. If only some tiny change could be made in men's attitude towards one another and towards the universe, what a flood of evil could be dammed; the slightness of the cause is as striking as the immensity of the effect. Those who ridicule the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is perfectly true, though of course they are right in denouncing the inference so often drawn--and here lay Shelley's fundamental fallacy--that the required tiny change depends on an effort of the will, and that the will only does not make the effort because feeling is perverted and intelligence dimmed by convention traditions, prejudices, and superstitions. It is certain, for one thing, that will only plays a small part in our nature, and that by themselves acts of will cannot make the world perfect. Most men are helped to this lesson by observation of themselves; they see that their high resolves are ineffective because their characters are mixed. Shelley never learnt this. He saw, indeed, that his efforts were futile even mischievous; but, being certain, and rightly, of the nobility of his aims, he could never see that he had acted wrongly, that he ought to have calculated the results of his actions more reasonably. Ever thwarted, and never nearer the happiness he desired for himself and others, he did not, like ordinary men attain a juster notion of the relation between good and ill in himself and in the world; he lapsed into a plaintive bewildered melancholy, translating the inexplicable conflict of right and wrong into the transcendental view that

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

 Stains the white radiance of Eternity."

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 lovepoems.

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."

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 lovesongs 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!"

   "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, 1