Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer Part 3

And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.

Spirit! no year of my eventful being Has pa.s.s'd unstain'd by crime and misery, Which flows from G.o.d's own faith. I've marked his slaves With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace; and that they now Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise?"

Protestant Christians may urge that all this is not Christianity; if it be not--for it is the record of the Church--I would ask, what is?

and where shall we find the history of Christianity for the fifteen centuries before Luther's time? and where, to-day? Their predecessors plucked the plumage from the dying bird of mythology, as they, themselves, have robbed the liberal orchard of all its choicest fruits and palmed them off as of their own growth. Protestants would not, I dare say, now countenance the persecutions of the past, but yet, I would tell them that their Protestantism has been a great mistake; and that, at this moment, there is no unity among the opposers of Catholicism, who are split into a thousand sects, wrangling for superiority, like wolves over offal; and that their churches are gradually converging toward Rationalism on the one hand, and Catholic Sacerdotalism on the other; in regard to which last, the Historical Roman Church--the only Christian body which presents a solid phalanx--one must not be too iconoclastic, remembering that, in the monastic houses and great ecclesiastical libraries we have had conserved for us, although, perchance by accident, the records of all the philosophy, all the jurisprudence, all the polity, all the literature, and all the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, that remained from the Alexandrian library and pre-Christian times--the mediaeval clerics were the great conservators of knowledge, which we inherit directly from Europe; and we should be, therefore, grateful to them equally with Mohammedanism, from which we received, through the Crusaders and the Moors, the basis of nearly all science and luxury, from Asia. There were, undoubtedly, many bad popes, men as bad as the incestuous, and, according to the recent dogma, the infallible Alexander Borgia; priests who are not all vile, but many n.o.bler than their system, acknowledge this with regret, and among whom there are some whom I can reverence, such as John Henry Newman, for instance, whose life would favorably compare with that of Sh.e.l.ley, or any liberal. There have been popes, also, whose lives have been as pure, as disinterested, and as virtuous as that of any stoic or epicurean.

We owe much to Sixtus the Fifth, founder of the Vatican Library, and would-be regenerator of order in his temporal dominions; to Leo the Great, whose patronage of the arts has sent us down the wondrous statuary, painting, and works of genius, which are the admiration of the world; and to Hildebrand, who brought together, in one harmonious whole, the struggling elements of European society. It is well to note, too, in order that I may not be misunderstood, that Catholicism is better than savage Fetishism, and Rationalism in degree superior to either; and, further, that Liberalism should only war with evil principles, and not with men whom they are generally the exponents of ignorantly, and to the best of their knowledge. Comtism[D]

acknowledges the fact that Christianity was not simply a mere advance on, but where we shall only find the civilization of Europe as it was during mediaeval times, and recognizes this most strongly, by placing over fifty of these great geniuses and luminaries, popes, bishops, and saints of the Catholic Church, in the Comtist Calendar, under the sixth and seventh months dedicated to St. Paul or Catholicism, and Charlemagne or Feudal Civilization respectively. We should thank the followers of Comte for thus bringing to our notice what we might be liable to occasionally forget in our bigotry and frequent over-anxiety.

[Footnote D: Comtism, or Positivism is that casuistical system of modern Atheism, founded by Auguste Comte, the Ignatius Loyola of Materialism, and which that learned pantarchical madman strung together in Esquirol's lunatic asylum. It is an insidious philosophy, full of Jesuistry, and teaches a _soi-disant_ Religion which is Ir-religion, a pseudo-G.o.d, which has no conceivable existence, and an impossible immortality of the soul, ignoring a future state. The present crusade of Comtism in our midst, with false colors flying can be justly compared to that of St. Francois Xavier in Hindostan.]

In popularizing terms wrongly, lies much mischief. If the misapplied term Christianity, signify the current notion, zeal for truth, the good of mankind, and active virtue or Christism, the reputed precepts of Christ, then Sh.e.l.ley taught that ethical system, and the so-called Christian world which persecuted him, the opposite.

No one believed, better than Sh.e.l.ley, in the necessity of continuity, and that all theological systems are a portion of the development of Humanity.

It should likewise be remembered, that even in the grossest superst.i.tion, as in the highest belief, the underlying aspiration, veiled perhaps, under some beautiful myth, is a straining after the pure and the good, and, as Sh.e.l.ley puts it:

"All original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Ja.n.u.s, have a double face of false and true."

It should also be considered, that it is better not to interfere with the faith of the ignorant, but let them remain in an exoteric condition, until they are properly developed by sufficient education and consequent intelligence. It is just as much the duty of advanced thinkers not to tamper with the beliefs of men who are in an early stage of progress, as it is not to put a flaming torch in the possession of a lunatic, or a razor in the hands of a child.

Sh.e.l.ley, in his philosophy, accepted all this, with the full consciousness that in the end truth would prevail--he yearned for the time when priest-led slaves would

"Cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe, Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good,"

and for that epoch when "the Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arise from its a.s.sociations, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love."

With Sh.e.l.ley we can turn with delight to the gospels of the future, as of the ancient past; and the ramifications of the Trinity of a truly Rational Religion, Mature, Science, and Art, where we have, instead of idle prayers, addressed to gross material idols, or the impossible ent.i.ties. .h.i.therto depicted in theological systems, a feeling of real satisfaction in learning how to live rather than to die, and in practicing virtue and benevolence for their own sakes, than for improbable rewards in the unsatisfactory hereafter, enunciated from the theological platform.

Like a true religionist, Sh.e.l.ley tells us that aspirations to "Madre Natura," like the following, should be poured out in silent, grateful communion with Omnipresence, and not in temples made by hands:

Spirit of Nature! here!

In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple.

Yet not the slightest leaf That quivers to the pa.s.sing breeze Is less instinct with thee; Yet not the meanest worm That lurks in graves, and fattens on the dead Less shares thy eternal breath.

Spirit of Nature! thou!

Imperishable as this scene, Here is thy fitting temple.

From such a soul-inspiring altar should praises like these be raised, and with what sacred feeling would the pure worshipper revel "where spirits live and dream--where all that is sweet in sound, or pure in vision floats on the air, or pa.s.ses dimly before the sight," for as the late Professor J.G. Hoyt, in his essay on Sh.e.l.ley beautifully points out--"To him everything was G.o.d, and G.o.d was everything. Every place was peopled with forms of beauty and animated with living intelligences. Hills and valleys, forests and fountains, were each thronged with presiding deities--bright effluences from the Diving that stirred within, and shone above the whole."

In leaving the first portion of my paper, I will make the following quotation from a remarkable article on Sh.e.l.ley in the pages of the _National Magazine_, which all minds unshackled, and free from prejudice, must acknowledge to be correct in the main, and which admirably sums up his efforts in metaphysical philosophy. Our attention is called to the fact that we discover in all Sh.e.l.ley's writings "a freer and purer development of what is best and n.o.blest in ourselves. We are taught in it to love all living and lifeless things, with which in the material and moral universe we are surrounded--we are taught to love the wisdom and goodness and majesty of the Almighty, for we are taught to love the universe, his symbol and visible exponent. G.o.d has given two books for the study and instruction of mankind; the book of revelation and the book of nature.

In one at least of these was Sh.e.l.ley deeply versed, and in this one he has given admirable lessons to his fellow-men. Throughout his writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. The poet meets us on the common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic G.o.dliness of the soul.

He tells us--he makes us feel that there is nothing higher than human hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labor devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human virtue and happiness, and stimulates us

"To love and hear--to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

It is observed by Sh.e.l.ley that

"The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are ent.i.tled to the grat.i.tude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain."

The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty in the political and social relations.

Sh.e.l.ley was not one who

"beheld the woe In which mankind was bound, and deem'd that fate Which made them abject, would preserve them so."

but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him from his work. His n.o.blest endeavors were directed toward the cause of suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the G.o.ddess of Freedom, to whom, in that soul inspiring "Ode to Liberty," he offers chaplets of the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy. He has given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French Revolution, when an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires, who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Sh.e.l.ley wrote lines pregnant with republican feelings:

"I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan To think that a most ambitious slave, Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne Where it had stood even now; thou didst prefer A frail and b.l.o.o.d.y pomp, which time has swept In fragments towards oblivion. Ma.s.sacre, For this I pray'd would on thy sleep have crept, Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear and l.u.s.t, And stifled thee, their minister. I know Too late, since thou and France are in the dust, That virtue owns a more eternal foe Than force or fraud; old custom, legal crime, And b.l.o.o.d.y Faith, the foulest birth of time."

With full knowledge of all this, he hopefully looked with loving eyes toward this side of the Atlantic, to your magnificent const.i.tution and model Republic, built on the consolidated masonic bases of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, as did also the ma.s.s of my compatriots, who, suffering under a more intolerant despotism, and unable to help themselves, had no hand or voice in the attempted tyranny, from which your forefathers properly rebelled one hundred years ago.

In "h.e.l.las" we find Sh.e.l.ley advocating the cause of Greece, and it is believed, that that poem a.s.sisted his friend Byron in the determination to wield his sword in the cause of Grecian Liberty. "The Revolt of Islam," his most mystical work, next to his early effort, "St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian," is full of the most majestic and sympathetic thoughts, and underlying its weirdness we have all those elements "which essentially compose a poem in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality, and with the view of kindling in the bosom of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, nor the continual presence and pressure of evil, can ever totally extinguish among mankind."

Can we wonder that Sh.e.l.ley could be else than Republican when he regarded what Thackeray afterward summed up with biting irony, the record of the reigning house of Great Britain, the mad Guelph _Defenders of the Christian Faith_(_?_), the results of whose labors have been corroborated by Greville and recent writers?

To what a line of monarchs, was Sh.e.l.ley called upon to give allegiance and prostrate himself before, and can we be astonished that he thus describes the state these abominable Hanoverians had "England in 1819:"

"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,-- Princes the dregs of their dull race who flow Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,-- Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop blind in blood without a blow,-- A people starved and stabbed in unfilled field,-- An army which liberticide and prey Make as a two-edged sword to all who wield,-- Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay-- Religion Christless, G.o.dless, a book sealed,-- A Senate--time's worst statute unrepealed,-- Are graves from which a glorious phantom may Burst to illumine our tempestuous day?"

To aid Republicanism, he threw himself with fervor into the cause of the unhappy Caroline of Brunswick; and on her account he wrote "G.o.d Save the Queen," in imitation of the British national anthem, and the satirical piece ent.i.tled "Swellfoot, the Tyrant." In the following words he attacked the prime minister, Lord Castleragh, whose reactionary counsels were transforming England into a state a.n.a.logous to that of Russia to-day:

"Then trample and dance, thou oppressor, For thy victim is no redressor!

Thou art sole lord and possessor Of her corpses, and clods and abortions--they pave Thy path to a grave."

For the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, his hatred was intense; for, in addition to the crime of robbing him of his children, this occupant of the wool-sack, had made the seat of justice an appanage for his l.u.s.t of wealth and power. I have already quoted some verses on this renowned lawyer, and will now present you with two others bearing on the same subject:

"Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Lord Eldon, an ermine gown; His big tears (for he wept well) Turned to mill stones as they fell;

"And _the little children_, who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them."

In _Queen Mab_, Sh.e.l.ley has presented us with an unmistakable portraiture of the "First Gentleman in Europe;" and in the following lines, which I have taken from this poem, I have chosen two extracts, descriptive of the origin of political despotism, and the reason of its continuance:

"Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?

Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread? From vice, black, loathsome vice, From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong; From all that genders misery, and makes Of earth this th.o.r.n.y wilderness; from l.u.s.t, Revenge and murder."

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton."

Sh.e.l.ley believed in reformation, not revolution; and in the "Revolt of Islam" and his Irish pamphlets, we find him advocating a bloodless revolution, except where force was used, and then force for force, if compromise were hopeless. His idea was ever the foundation of political systems founded on that of this country, or on the ancient Greek Republic. He says:

"The study of modern history is the study of kings, financiers, statesmen, and priests. The history of ancient Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers, and poets; it is the history of men compared with the history of t.i.tles. What the Greeks were was a reality, not a promise.

And what we are and hope to be is derived, as it were, from the influence of these glorious generations."

Hoping almost against hope for the regeneration of his country, he submitted to the people of England a proposal for putting to the vote the great reform question, which was filling the public mind; but he was conscious that in the then unprepared state of public knowledge and feeling, universal suffrage was fraught with peril, and remarks that although

"A pure republic may be shown, by inferences the most obvious and irresistible, to be that system of social order the fittest to produce the happiness and promote the genuine eminence of man. Yet nothing can less consist with reason, or afford smaller hopes of any beneficial issue, than the plan which should abolish the regal and the aristocratical branches of our const.i.tution, before the public mind, through many gradations of improvement, shall have arrived at the maturity which shall disregard these symbols of its childhood."

An essay has come down to us (unhappily unfinished), in which he argues in favor of "Government by Juries." It is but a fragment; and yet it shows us that his mind was ever in search of the right solution of the question of proper legislation for the ma.s.ses. William Pitt, with enemies on every side, publicly acknowledged the extraordinary genius which impelled the American revolution, and admired the const.i.tution of this country, as well as the masterly character of the "Declaration of Independence." In unstinted praise does he speak of the learning and remarkable public spirit of the signers. With equal praise, I am confident, everyone must eulogize the "Declaration of Rights," compiled by Sh.e.l.ley, which he put before his countrymen sixty-three years ago. Therein he has given the whole of his conception of the correct theory of government, and it cannot fail to be read by advanced minds with feelings of genuine pleasure.