Shelley Part 4

His very gestures touch'd to tears The unpersuaded tyrant, never So moved before: his presence stung The torturers with their victim's pain, And none knew how; and through their ears, The subtle witchcraft of his tongue Unlocked the hearts of those who keep Gold, the world's bond of slavery.

Men wondered, and some sneer'd to see One sow what he could never reap: For he is rich, they said, and young, And might drink from the depths of luxury.

If he seeks Fame, Fame never crown'd The champion of a trampled creed: If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned 'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, Those who would sit near Power must toil; And such, there sitting, all may see

During the year he spent at Marlow, Sh.e.l.ley was a frequent visitor at Leigh Hunt's Hampstead house, where he made acquaintance with Keats, and the brothers Smith, authors of _Rejected Addresses_. Hunt's recollections supply some interesting details, which, since Hogg and Peac.o.c.k fail us at this period, may be profitably used. Describing the manner of his life at Marlow, Hunt writes as follows: "He rose early in the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring interest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job." Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley in her note on the _Revolt of Islam_, confirms this account of his Bible studies; and indeed the influence of the Old Testament upon his style may be traced in several of his poems. In the same paragraph from which I have just quoted, Leigh Hunt gives a just notion of his relation to Christianity, pointing out that he drew a distinction between the Pauline presentation of the Christian creeds, and the spirit of the Gospels. "His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith in the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one on the other, very formidable to those who chose to forget what Scripture itself observes on that point." We have only to read Sh.e.l.ley's _Essay on Christianity_, in order to perceive what reverent admiration he felt for Jesus, and how profoundly he understood the true character of his teaching. That work, brief as it is, forms one of the most valuable extant contributions to a sound theology, and is morally far in advance of the opinions expressed by many who regard themselves as specially qualified to speak on the subject. It is certain that, as Christianity pa.s.ses beyond its mediaeval phase, and casts aside the husk of out-worn dogmas, it will more and more approximate to Sh.e.l.ley's exposition. Here and here only is a vital faith, adapted to the conditions of modern thought, indestructible because essential, and fitted to unite instead of separating minds of divers quality. It may sound paradoxical to claim for Sh.e.l.ley of all men a clear insight into the enduring element of the Christian creed; but it was precisely his detachment from all its accidents which enabled him to discern its spiritual purity, and placed him in a true relation to its Founder. For those who would neither on the one hand relinquish what is permanent in religion, nor yet on the other deny the inevitable conclusions of modern thought, his teaching is indubitably valuable. His fierce tirades against historic Christianity must be taken as directed against an ecclesiastical system of spiritual tyranny, hypocrisy, and superst.i.tion, which in his opinion had r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of free inst.i.tutions, and fettered the human intellect. Like Campanella, he distinguished between Christ, who sealed the gospel of charity with his blood, and those Christians, who would be the first to crucify their Lord if he returned to earth.

That Sh.e.l.ley lived up to his religious creed is amply proved. To help the needy and to relieve the sick, seemed to him a simple duty, which he cheerfully discharged. "His charity, though liberal, was not weak. He inquired personally into the circ.u.mstances of his pet.i.tioners, visited the sick in their beds, ... and kept a regular list of industrious poor, whom he a.s.sisted with small sums to make up their accounts." At Marlow, the miserable condition of the lace-makers called forth all his energies; and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley tells us that an acute ophthalmia, from which he twice suffered, was contracted in a visit to their cottages. A story told by Leigh Hunt about his finding a woman ill on Hampstead Heath, and carrying her from door to door in the vain hopes of meeting with a man as charitable as himself, until he had to house the poor creature with his friends the Hunts, reads like a practical ill.u.s.tration of Christ's parable about the Good Samaritan. Nor was it merely to the so-called poor that Sh.e.l.ley showed his generosity. His purse was always open to his friends.

Peac.o.c.k received from him an annual allowance of 100_l._ He gave Leigh Hunt, on one occasion, 1000_l._; and he discharged debts of G.o.dwin, amounting, it is said, to about 6000_l._ In his pamphlet on _Putting Reform to the Vote_, he offered to subscribe 100_l._ for the purpose of founding an a.s.sociation; and we have already seen that he headed the Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 100_l._ These instances of his generosity might be easily multiplied; and when we remember that his present income was 1000_l._, out of which 200_l._ went to the support of his children, it will be understood not only that he could not live luxuriously, but also that he was in frequent money difficulties through the necessity of raising funds upon his expectations. His self-denial in all minor matters of expenditure was conspicuous. Without a murmur, without ostentation, this heir of the richest baronet in Suss.e.x ill.u.s.trated by his own conduct those principles of democratic simplicity and of fraternal charity which formed his political and social creed.

A glimpse into the cottage at Great Marlow is afforded by a careless sentence of Leigh Hunt's. "He used to sit in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus." Fancy Sh.e.l.ley with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a large, low-roofed room, correcting proofs of _Laon and Cythna_, between the Apollo of the Belvedere and the Venus de' Medici, life-sized, and as crude as casts by Shout could make them! In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother and Allegra, lived as Sh.e.l.ley's guests; and here Clara Sh.e.l.ley was born on the 3rd of September, 1817. In the same autumn, Sh.e.l.ley suffered from a severe pulmonary attack. The critical state of his health and the apprehension, vouched for by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, that the Chancellor might lay his vulture's talons on the children of his second marriage, were the motives which induced him to leave England for Italy in the spring of 1818.[18] He never returned. Four years only of life were left to him--years filled with music that will sound as long as English lasts.

It was on the 11th of March that the Sh.e.l.leys took their departure with Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra. They went straight to Milan, and after visiting the Lake of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice, and Rome, they settled early in the following December at Naples. Sh.e.l.ley's letters to Peac.o.c.k form the invaluable record of this period of his existence. Taken altogether, they are the most perfect specimens of descriptive prose in the English language; never over-charged with colour, vibrating with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of Italy, frank in criticism, and exquisitely delicate in observation. Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace, combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a style at once familiar and elevated. That Sh.e.l.ley's sensibility to art was not so highly cultivated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough in many pa.s.sages: but there is no trace of admiring to order in his comments upon pictures or statues.

Familiarity with the great works of antique and Italian art would doubtless have altered some of the opinions he at first expressed; just as longer residence among the people made him modify his views about their character. Meanwhile, the spirit of modest and unprejudiced attention in which he began his studies of sculpture and painting, might well be imitated in the present day by travellers who think that to pin their faith to some famous critic's verdict is the acme of good taste. If there were s.p.a.ce for a long quotation from these letters, I should choose the description of Pompeii (Jan. 26, 1819), or that of the Baths of Caracalla (March 23, 1819). As it is, I must content myself with a short but eminently characteristic pa.s.sage, written from Ferrara, Nov. 7, 1818:--

The handwriting of Ariosto is a small, firm, and pointed character, expressing, as I should say, a strong and keen, but circ.u.mscribed energy of mind; that of Ta.s.so is large, free, and flowing, except that there is a checked expression in the midst of its flow, which brings the letters into a smaller compa.s.s than one expected from the beginning of the word. It is the symbol of an intense and earnest mind, exceeding at times its own depth, and admonished to return by the chillness of the waters of oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet. You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object; and as we do not agree in physiognomy, so we may not agree now. But my business is to relate my own sensations, and not to attempt to inspire others with them.

In the middle of August, Sh.e.l.ley left his wife at the Bagni di Lucca, and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. He arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. _Julian and Maddalo_ was the literary fruit of this excursion--a poem which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to sadness amid all its splendour by the gloomy presence of the madhouse, ranks among Sh.e.l.ley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the sunset and the island of San Lazzaro:--

Oh!

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou paradise of exiles, Italy, Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers, Of cities they encircle!--It was ours To stand on thee, beholding it: and then, Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men Were waiting for us with the gondola.

As those who pause on some delightful way, Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening, and the flood Which lay between the city and the sh.o.r.e, Paved with the image of the sky. The h.o.a.r And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared, Thro' mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared Between the east and west; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep west into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills. They were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido through the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles-- And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"

Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station." So, o'er the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

I was about to speak, when--"We are even Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo, And bade the gondolieri cease to row.

"Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well If you hear not a deep and heavy bell."

I looked, and saw between us and the sun A building on an island, such a one As age to age might add, for uses vile,-- A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile; And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,-- We could just hear its coa.r.s.e and iron tongue: The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled In strong and black relief--"What we behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,"-- Said Maddalo; "and ever at this hour, Those who may cross the water hear that bell, Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, To vespers."

It may be parenthetically observed that one of the few familiar quotations from Sh.e.l.ley's poems occurs in _Julian and Maddalo_:--

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Byron lent the Sh.e.l.leys his villa of the Cappuccini near Este, where they spent some weeks in the autumn. Here _Prometheus Unbound_ was begun, and the _Lines written among Euganean Hills_ were composed; and here Clara became so ill that her parents thought it necessary to rush for medical a.s.sistance to Venice. They had forgotten their pa.s.sport; but Sh.e.l.ley's irresistible energy overcame all difficulties, and they entered Venice--only in time, however, for the child to die.

Nearly the whole of the winter was spent at Naples, where Sh.e.l.ley suffered from depression of more than ordinary depth. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley attributed this gloom to the state of his health; but Medwin tells a strange story, which, if it is not wholly a romance, may better account for the poet's melancholy. He says that so far back as the year 1816, on the night before his departure from London, "a married lady, young, handsome, and of n.o.ble connexions," came to him, avowed the pa.s.sionate love she had conceived for him, and proposed that they should fly together.[19] He explained to her that his hand and heart had both been given irrevocably to another, and, after the expression of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, they parted. She followed him, however, from place to place; and without intruding herself upon his notice, found some consolation in remaining near him. Now she arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of Sh.e.l.ley's life was a wide one, and included more destinies than his own.

[G.o.dwin, as we have reason to believe, attributed the suicide of f.a.n.n.y Imlay to her hopeless love for Sh.e.l.ley; and the tale of Harriet has been already told.] Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in Medwin's story, especially when we remember what Hogg half-humorously tells us about Sh.e.l.ley's attraction for women in London. At any rate, the excessive wretchedness of the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be accounted for by the "constant and poignant physical sufferings" of which Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley speaks, since these were habitual to him. She was herself, moreover, under the impression that he was concealing something from her, and we know from her own words in another place that his "fear to wound the feelings of others" often impelled him to keep his deepest sorrows to himself.[20]

All this while his health was steadily improving. The menace of consumption was removed; and though he suffered from severe attacks of pain in the side, the cause of this persistent malady does not seem to have been ascertained. At Naples he was under treatment for disease of the liver. Afterwards, his symptoms were ascribed to nephritis; and it is certain that his greater or less freedom from uneasiness varied with the quality of the water he drank. He was, for instance, forced to eschew the drinking water of Ravenna, because it aggravated his symptoms; while Florence, for a similar reason, proved an unsuitable residence. The final settlement of the Sh.e.l.leys at Pisa seems to have been determined by the fact that the water of that place agreed with him. That the spasms which from time to time attacked him were extremely serious, is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived with him at this period, and by his own letters. Some relief was obtained by mesmerism, a remedy suggested by Medwin; but the obstinacy of the torment preyed upon his spirits to such an extent, that even during the last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. It may be added that mental application increased the mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt that the composition of _The Cenci_ had cost him a fresh seizure. Yet though his sufferings were indubitably real, the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic disease; and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when he attributed Sh.e.l.ley's spasms to insufficient and irregular diet, and to a continual over-taxing of his nervous system.

Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley states that the change from England to Italy was in all respects beneficial to her husband. She was inclined to refer the depression from which he occasionally suffered, to his solitary habits; and there are several pa.s.sages in his own letters which connect his melancholy with solitude. It is obvious that when he found himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amus.e.m.e.nts of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven. Byron, who had some right to express a judgment in such a matter, described him as the most companionable man under the age of thirty he had ever met with. Sh.e.l.ley rode and practised pistol-shooting with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes, and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste. All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution, remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordinary kind he hated. The voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with Sh.e.l.ley's almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on his mistaking his wife's mention of the Aziola, a little owl common enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike for intercourse with commonplace people was the source of some disagreement between him and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, and kept him further apart from Byron than he might otherwise have been. In a valuable letter recently published by Mr.

Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to Trelawny, he said:--"She can't bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead."

In the year 1818-19 the Sh.e.l.leys had no friends at all in Italy, except Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs.

Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and G.o.dwin. She was a woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less enthusiastic than Sh.e.l.ley liked, quite capable of appreciating the inestimable privilege of his acquaintance. Her husband, to use a now almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his wife's enlightened opinions, and remained stanch through good and ill report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew almost no one.

Sh.e.l.ley's time was therefore pa.s.sed in study and composition. In the previous summer he had translated the _Symposium_ of Plato, and begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a fragment.

Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Ta.s.so struck him as cold and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely characteristic. "How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations. His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine. He often expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very beautiful kind.

He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one little remark, or rather maxim of his, which might do some good to the common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,--'Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnuova, come fa la luna'?" Dante and Petrarch remained the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of the _Inferno_ seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of Italian poems. Of Petrarch's "tender and solemn enthusiasm," he speaks with the sympathy of one who understood the inner mysteries of idealizing love.

It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that Sh.e.l.ley, notwithstanding his profound study of style and his exquisite perception of beauty in form and rhythm, required more than merely artistic excellences in poetry. He judged poems by their content and spirit; and while he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic manner, he held that art must be moralized in order to be truly great. The distinction he drew between Theocritus and the earlier Greek singers in the _Defence of Poetry_, his severe strictures on _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_ in a letter to Mary (Aug. 20, 1818), and his phrase about Ariosto, "who is entertaining and graceful, and _sometimes_ a poet," ill.u.s.trate the application of critical canons wholly at variance with the "art for art" doctrine.

While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek. Plato was often in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable companions.

How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be gathered from the following extract:--"I congratulate you on your conquest of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer there truly begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole b.l.o.o.d.y tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs.

Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Autos," he writes to Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820. _Faust_, too, was a favourite. "I have been reading over and over again _Faust_, and always with sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained." The profound impression made upon him by Margaret's story is expressed in two letters about Retzsch's ill.u.s.trations:--"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."

The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German were Sh.e.l.ley's translations from Homer and Euripides, from Dante, from Calderon's _Magico Prodigioso_, and from _Faust_, translations which have never been surpa.s.sed for beauty of form and complete transfusion of the spirit of one literature into the language of another. On translation, however, he set but little store, a.s.serting that he only undertook it when he "could do absolutely nothing else," and writing earnestly to dissuade Leigh Hunt from devoting time which might be better spent, to work of subordinate importance.[21] The following version of a Greek epigram on Plato's spirit will ill.u.s.trate his own method of translation:--

Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?

To what sublime and star-y-paven home Floatest thou?

I am the image of swift Plato's spirit, Ascending heaven:--Athens does inherit His corpse below.

Some time in the year 1820-21, he composed the _Defence of Poetry_, stimulated to this undertaking by his friend Peac.o.c.k's article on poetry, published in the _Literary Miscellany_.[22] This essay not only sets forth his theory of his own art, but it also contains some of his finest prose writing, of which the following pa.s.sage, valuable alike for matter and style, may be cited as a specimen:--

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the acc.u.mulation of the materials of external life exceed the quant.i.ty of the power of a.s.similating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circ.u.mference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to a.s.sert that the finest pa.s.sages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the s.p.a.ces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the "Paradise Lost" as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes a.s.sociated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, partic.i.p.ating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced princ.i.p.ally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a pa.s.sion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.

Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.

In the midst of these aesthetic studies, and while producing his own greatest works, Sh.e.l.ley was not satisfied that his genius ought to be devoted to poetry. "I consider poetry," he wrote to Peac.o.c.k, January 26th, 1819, "very subordinate to moral and political science, and if I were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter; for I can conceive a great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, and harmonizing the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled. Far from me is such an attempt, and I shall be content, by exercising my fancy, to amuse myself, and perhaps some others, and cast what weight I can into the scale of that balance which the Giant of Arthegall holds." Whether he was right in the conviction that his genius was no less fitted for metaphysical speculation or for political science than for poetry, is a question that admits of much debate.[23] We have nothing but fragments whereby to form a definite opinion--the unfinished _Defence of Poetry_, the unfinished _Essay on a Future State_, the unfinished _Essay on Christianity_, the unfinished _Essay on the Punishment of Death_, and the scattered _Speculations on Metaphysics_. None of these compositions justify the belief so confidently expressed by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley in her Preface to the prose works, that "had not Sh.e.l.ley deserted metaphysics for poetry in his youth, and had he not been lost to us early, so that all his vaster projects were wrecked with him in the waves, he would have presented the world with a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of these writers." Their incompleteness rather tends to confirm what she proceeds to state, that the strain of philosophical composition was too great for his susceptible nerves; while her further observation that "thought kindled imagination and awoke sensation, and rendered him dizzy from too great keenness of emotion," seems to indicate that his nature was primarily that of a poet deeply tinctured with philosophical speculation, rather than that of a metaphysician warmed at intervals to an imaginative fervour. Another of her remarks confirms us in this opinion. "He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry."[24] This is the position of the poet rather than the a.n.a.lyst; and, on the whole, we are probably justified in concluding with Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, that he followed a true instinct when he dedicated himself to poetry and trained his powers in that direction.[25]

To dogmatize upon the topic would be worse than foolish. There was something incalculable, incommensurable, and daemonic in Sh.e.l.ley's genius; and what he might have achieved, had his life been spared and had his health progressively improved, it is of course impossible to say.

In the spring of 1819 the Sh.e.l.leys settled in Rome, where the poet proceeded with the composition of _Prometheus Unbound_. He used to write among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled of all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of flowers and shrubs described in his incomparable letter of March the 23rd to Peac.o.c.k.

Rome, however, was not destined to retain them long. On the 7th of June they lost their son William after a short illness. Sh.e.l.ley loved this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours without taking rest. He was now practically childless; and his grief found expression in many of his poems, especially in the fragment headed "_Roma, Roma, Roma!

non e piu com' era prima_." William was buried in the Protestant cemetery, of which Sh.e.l.ley had written a description to Peac.o.c.k in the previous December. "The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright gra.s.s, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion."

Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they established themselves at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. Here Sh.e.l.ley began and finished _The Cenci_ at the instance of his wife, who rightly thought that he undervalued his own powers as a dramatic poet. The supposed portrait of Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affected his imagination, and he fancied that her story would form the fitting subject for a tragedy. It is fortunate for English literature that the real facts of that domestic drama, as recently published by Signor Bertolotti, were then involved in a tissue of romance and legend. During this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family. Mrs. Gisborne's son by a previous marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer, and Sh.e.l.ley conceived a project of helping him to build a steamer which should ply between Leghorn and Ma.r.s.eilles. He was to supply the funds, and the pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne family. The scheme eventually fell through, though Sh.e.l.ley spent a good deal of money upon it; and its only importance is the additional light it throws upon his public and private benevolence. From Leghorn the Sh.e.l.leys removed in the autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th of November, the present Sir Percy Florence Sh.e.l.ley was born. Here Sh.e.l.ley wrote the last act of _Prometheus Unbound_, which, though the finest portion of that unique drama, seems to have been an afterthought. In the Cascine outside Florence he also composed the _Ode to the West Wind_, the most symmetrically perfect as well as the most impa.s.sioned of his minor lyrics. He spent much time in the galleries, made notes upon the princ.i.p.al antique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study. The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the month of January, 1820, they took up their abode at Pisa.

1819 was the most important year in Sh.e.l.ley's life, so far as literary production is concerned. Besides _The Cenci_ and _Prometheus Unbound_, of which it yet remains to speak, this year saw the production of several political and satirical poems--the _Masque of Anarchy_, suggested by the news of the Peterloo ma.s.sacre, being by far the most important. Sh.e.l.ley attempted the composition of short popular songs which should stir the English people to a sense of what he felt to be their degradation. But he lacked the directness which alone could make such verses forcible, and the pa.s.sionate apostrophe to the Men of England in his _Masque of Anarchy_ marks the highest point of his achievement in this style:--

Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty mother, Hopes of her, and one another!

Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fall'n on you.

Ye are many, they are few.

_Peter Bell the Third_, written in this year, and _Swellfoot the Tyrant_, composed in the following autumn, are remarkable as showing with what keen interest Sh.e.l.ley watched public affairs in England from his exile home; but for my own part, I cannot agree with those critics who esteem their humour at a high rate. The political poems may profitably be compared with his contemporary correspondence; with the letters, for instance, to Leigh Hunt, November 23rd, 1819; and to Mr. John Gisborne, April 10th, 1822; and with an undated fragment published by Mr. Garnett in the _Relics of Sh.e.l.ley_, page 84. No student of English political history before the Reform Bill can regard his apprehensions of a great catastrophe as ill-founded. His insight into the real danger to the nation was as penetrating as his suggestion of a remedy was moderate. Those who are accustomed to think of the poet as a visionary enthusiast, will rub their eyes when they read the sober lines in which he warns his friend to be cautious about the security offered by the English Funds. Another letter, dated Lerici, June 29, 1822, ill.u.s.trates the same practical temper of mind, the same logical application of political principles to questions of public economy.

That _Prometheus Unbound_ and _The Cenci_ should have been composed in one and the same year must be reckoned among the greatest wonders of literature, not only because of their sublime greatness, but also because of their essential difference. aeschylus, it is well-known, had written a sequel to his _Prometheus Bound_, in which he showed the final reconciliation between Zeus, the oppressor, and Prometheus, the champion, of humanity. What that reconciliation was, we do not know, because the play is lost, and the fragments are too brief for supporting any probable hypothesis. But Sh.e.l.ley repudiated the notion of compromise. He could not conceive of the t.i.tan "unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary." He, therefore, approached the theme of liberation from a wholly different point of view. Prometheus in his drama is the humane vindicator of love, justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prometheus is the mind of man idealized, the spirit of our race, as Sh.e.l.ley thought it made to be. Jove is the incarnation of all that thwarts its free development. Thus counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental ant.i.theses of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate. They give the form of personality to Sh.e.l.ley's Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already expressed in the first canto of _Laon and Cythna_; but instead of being represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into the region of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry.

Prometheus resists Jove to the uttermost, endures all torments, physical and moral, that the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength and calmly expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives; Jove disappears; the burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes in the emanc.i.p.ation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain, but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia. Asia, withdrawn from sight during the first act, but spoken of as waiting in her exile for the fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit. She is the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean. Like Aphrodite, she rises in the aegean near the land called by her name; and in the time of tribulation she dwells in a far Indian vale. She is the Idea of Beauty incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor's vision, the breathing image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part. At the moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot see her, only feels her influence. The essential thought of Sh.e.l.ley's creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made real by a spirit, which he sometimes called the Spirit of Nature, but which is always conceived as more than Life, as that which gives its actuality to Life, and lastly as Love and Beauty. To adore this spirit, to clasp it with affection, and to blend with it, is, he thought, the true object of man. Therefore, the final union of Prometheus with Asia is the consummation of human destinies. Love was the only law Sh.e.l.ley recognized. Unterrified by the grim realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and society, he held fast to the belief that, if we could but pierce to the core of things, if we could but be what we might be, the world and man would both attain to their perfection in eternal love. What resolution through some transcendental harmony was expected by Sh.e.l.ley for the palpable discords in the structure of the universe, we hardly know. He did not give his philosophy systematic form: and his new science of love remains a luminous poetic vision--nowhere more brilliantly set forth than in the "sevenfold hallelujahs and harping symphonies" of this, the final triumph of his lyrical poetry.

In _Prometheus_, Sh.e.l.ley conceived a colossal work of art, and sketched out the main figures on a scale of surpa.s.sing magnificence. While painting in these figures, he seems to reduce their proportions too much to the level of earthly life. He quits his G.o.d-creating, heaven-compelling throne of mythopic inspiration, and descends to a love-story of Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these incarnated abstractions; nor, on the other hand, has he so elaborated their characters in detail as to give them the substantiality of persons. There is therefore something vague and hollow in both figures. Yet in the subordinate pa.s.sages of the poem, the true mythopic faculty--the faculty of finding concrete forms for thought, and of investing emotion with personality--shines forth with extraordinary force and clearness. We feel ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while we read the description of Ocea.n.u.s, and the raptures of the Earth and Moon.

A genuine liking for _Prometheus Unbound_ may be reckoned the touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry. The world in which the action is supposed to move, rings with spirit voices; and what these spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own heart's song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are hymns in _Prometheus_, which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from meaning, the substance of a new ethereal music; and yet although their verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance for those who understand. Sh.e.l.ley scorned the aesthetics of a school which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man whose sense of hearing is too gross for the tenuity of a bat's cry. A voice in the air thus sings the hymn of Asia at the moment of her apotheosis:--

Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them, As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds, ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; none beholds thee.

But thy voice sounds low and tender, Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost for ever!

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!