Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 6

But she has antic.i.p.ated all their main positions, and formulated the ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of the French Revolution as Paine's _Rights of Man_ or Condorcet's _Sketch_. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.

The chief merit of the _Vindication_ is its clear perception that everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the att.i.tude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers.

Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliant courage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It would have been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea for the reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of women to political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in a single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." She had the insight to perceive that the first task of the pioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of her s.e.x.

She begins by linking her argument with a splendid imprudence to the revolutionary movement. It had proclaimed the supremacy of reason, and based freedom on natural right. Why was it that the new Const.i.tution ignored women? With a fresh simplicity, she appeals to the French Convention in the name of its own abstract principles, as modern women appeal (with more experience of the limitations of male logic) to English Liberalism. But she knew very well what was the enormous despotism of interest and prejudice that she was attacking. The sensualist and the tyrant were for her interchangeable terms, and with great skill she enlists on her side the new pa.s.sion for liberty. "All tyrants want to crush reason, from the weak king to the weak father."

She demands the enlightenment of women, as the reformers demanded that of the ma.s.ses: "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything."

With a shrewd if instinctive insight into social psychology, she traces to the unenlightened self-interest of the dominant s.e.x the code of morals which has been imposed upon women. Rousseau supplies her with the perfect and finished statement of all that she opposed. He and his like had given a s.e.x to virtue. She takes her stand on a broad human morality. "Freedom must strengthen the reason of woman until she comprehend her duty." Against the perverted s.e.x-morality which treated woman in religion, in ethics, in manners as a being relative only to men, she directs the whole of her argument. It is "vain to expect virtue from women, till they are in some degree independent of men."

"Females have been insulated, as it were, and while they have been stripped of the virtue that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ign.o.ble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very const.i.tution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.... Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties.... If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the s.e.xes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfil the peculiar duties of their s.e.x, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to prevent misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses."

It is a brave but singularly balanced view of human life and society.

There is in it no trace of the dogmatic individualism that distorts the speculations of G.o.dwin and clogs the more practical thinking of Paine.

It is, indeed, a protest against the exaggeration of s.e.x, which instilled in women "the desire of being always women." It flouts that external morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seem to be this and that," because her whole status in the world depended on the opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which antic.i.p.ate Ibsen's _Doll's House_, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chast.i.ty, and an equal advance in education, to be the parents of their children. She is ready indeed to rest her whole case for the education of women upon the duties of maternity. "Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character takes woman out of her sphere." The education which she demanded was the co-education of men and women in common schools. She attacked the dual standard of s.e.xual morality with a brave plainness of speech. She demanded the opening of suitable trades and professions to women. She exposed the whole system which compels women to "live by their charm." But a less destructive reformer never set out to overthrow conventions. For her the duty always underlies the right, and the development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for the life of fellowship.

CHAPTER VIII

Sh.e.l.lEY

If it were possible to blot out from our mind its memory of the Bible and of Protestant theology, and with that mind of artificial vacancy to read _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson Agonistes_, how strange and great and mad would the genius of Milton appear. We should wonder at his creative mythological imagination, but we should marvel past all comprehending at his conceptions of the divine order, and the destiny of man. To attempt to understand Sh.e.l.ley without the aid of G.o.dwin is a task hardly more promising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible.

The parallel is so close that one is tempted to pursue it further, for there is between these two poets a close sympathy amid glaring contrasts. Each admitted in spite of his pa.s.sion for an ideal world an absorbing concern in human affairs, and a vehement interest in the contemporary struggle for liberty. If the one was a Republican Puritan and the other an anarchical atheist, the dress which their pa.s.sion for liberty a.s.sumed was the uniform of the day. Neither was an original thinker. Each steeped himself in the cla.s.sics. But more important even than the cla.s.sics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a purely sensuous mind. Sh.e.l.ley no more innovated or created in metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as the grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession.

The name of Sh.e.l.ley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floats before our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. But Sh.e.l.ley's world was the world of the utilitarian G.o.dwin and the mathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not a common characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and Sh.e.l.ley to the choir in which Dante and Goethe are leaders. For Keats beauty was truth, and that was all he cared to know. Coleridge, indeed, was a metaphysician of some pretensions, but the "honey dew" on which he fed when he wrote _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ was not the _Critique of Pure Reason_. But to Sh.e.l.ley _Political Justice_ was the veritable "milk of paradise." We must drink of it ourselves if we would share his banquet. G.o.dwin in short explains Sh.e.l.ley, and it is equally true that Sh.e.l.ley is the indispensable commentary to G.o.dwin. For all that was living and human in the philosopher he finds imaginative expression. His mind was a selective soil, in which only good seed could germinate. The flowers wear the colour of life and emotion. In the clear light of his verse, gleaming in their pa.s.sionate hues, they display for us their values. Some of them, the bees of a working hive will consent to fertilise; from others they will turn decidedly away. Sh.e.l.ley is G.o.dwin's fertile garden. From another standpoint he is the desert which G.o.dwin laid waste.

It is, indeed, the commonplace of criticism to insist on the reality which the ideal world possessed for Sh.e.l.ley. Other poets have ill.u.s.trated thought by sensuous imagery. To Sh.e.l.ley, thought alone was the essential thing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for him what a Centaur or a Pegasus were for common fancy. He sees in _Prometheus Unbound_ a spirit who

Speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank, then plunged aside to die.

Another spirit rides on a sage's "dream with plumes of flame"; and a third tells how a poet

Will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume, The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed, nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.

How naturally from Sh.e.l.ley's imagination flowed the lines about Keats:--

All he had loved and moulded into thought From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound Lamented Adonais.

This was no rhetoric, no affectation of fancy. Sh.e.l.ley saw the immortal shapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortal Keats, because for him an idea or a pa.s.sion was incomparably more real and more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whose existence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not a distant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever ready to retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his daily habitation. He lived in it, and guided himself by its intellectual compa.s.s among the perils and wonders of life, as naturally as other men feel their way by touch. This ardent, sensitive, emotional nature, with all its gift of lyrical speech and pa.s.sionate feeling, was in fact the ideal man of the G.o.dwinian conception, who lives by reason and obeys principles. Three men in modern times have achieved a certain fame by their rigid obedience to "rational" conceptions of conduct--Thomas Day, who wrote _Sandford and Merton_, Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. But the erratic, fanciful Sh.e.l.ley was as much the enthusiastic slave of reason, as any of these three; and he seemed erratic only because to be perfectly rational is in this world the wildest form of eccentricity. He came upon _Political Justice_ while he was still a school-boy at Eton; and his diaries show that there hardly pa.s.sed a year of his life in which he omitted to re-read it. Its phraseology colours his prose; his mind was built upon it, as Milton's was upon the Bible. We hardly require his own confession to a.s.sure us of the debt. "The name of G.o.dwin," he wrote in 1812, "has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering then, these feelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had pa.s.sed from this earth of ours. It is not so.

You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of human kind."

The enthusiastic youth was to learn that his master's preoccupation was with concerns more sordid and more pressing than the welfare of human kind; but if close personal intercourse brought some disillusionment regarding G.o.dwin's private character, it only deepened his intellectual influence, and confirmed Sh.e.l.ley's lifelong adhesion to his system. No contemporary thinker ever contested G.o.dwin's empire over Sh.e.l.ley's mind; and if in later years Plato claimed an ever-growing share in his thoughts, we must remember that in several of his fundamental tenets G.o.dwin was a Platonist without knowing it. It is only in his purely personal utterances, in the lyrics which rendered a mood or an impression, or in such fancies as the _Witch of Atlas_, that Sh.e.l.ley can escape from the obsession of _Political Justice_. The voice of G.o.dwin does not disturb us in _The Skylark_, and it is silenced by the violent pa.s.sions of _The Cenci_. But in all the more formal and graver utterances of Sh.e.l.ley's genius, from _Queen Mab_ to _h.e.l.las_, it supplies the theme and Sh.e.l.ley writes the variations. _Queen Mab_, indeed, is nothing but a fervent lad's attempt to state in verse the burden of G.o.dwin's prose. Some pa.s.sages in it (notably the lines about commerce) are a mere paraphrase or summary of pages from _The Enquirer_ or _Political Justice_. In the _Revolt of Islam_, and still more in _Prometheus Unbound_, Sh.e.l.ley's imagination is becoming its own master.

The variations are more important, more subtle, more beautiful than the theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for fancy to embroider. It is only in _h.e.l.las_ that Sh.e.l.ley's power of narrative (in Ha.s.san's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his pa.s.sion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a masterpiece which owes to G.o.dwin only some general ideas. If the transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned.

It was rather that Sh.e.l.ley was gaining the full mastery of his own native powers of expression. In these poems he a.s.sumes or preaches all G.o.dwin's characteristic doctrines, perfectibility, non-resistance, anarchism, communism, the power of reason and the superiority of persuasion over force, universal benevolence, and the ascription of moral evil to the desolating influence of "positive inst.i.tution."

The general agreement is so obvious that one need hardly ill.u.s.trate it.

What is more curious is the habit which Sh.e.l.ley acquired of reproducing even the minor opinions or ill.u.s.trations which had struck him in his continual reading of G.o.dwin. When Mammon advises Swellfoot the Tyrant to refresh himself with

A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook Such as is served at the Great King's second table.

The price and pains which its ingredients cost Might have maintained some dozen families A winter or two--not more.

he is simply making an ironical paraphrase from G.o.dwin. The fine scene in Canto XI. of the _Revolt of Islam_, in which Laon, confronting the tyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who was about to stab him, is a too brief rendering of G.o.dwin's reflections on the story of Marius and the Executioner (see p. 128).

And one more daring, raised his steel anew To pierce the stranger: "What hast thou to do With me, poor wretch?"--calm, solemn and severe That voice unstrung his sinews, and he threw His dagger on the ground, and pale with fear, Sate silently.

The pages of Sh.e.l.ley are littered with such reminiscences.

Matthew Arnold said of Sh.e.l.ley that he was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." One is tempted to retort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and to people a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But the metaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The world into which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was not a void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to common mortals are usual, normal, inevitable--oppressions and wars, follies and crimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury.

If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage and terror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Sh.e.l.ley, Matthew Arnold held, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomed to the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind of sanity to Sh.e.l.ley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to an angel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a country clergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, _The Wonderful Visit_. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our follies and our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists have loved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit as insight in _L'Ingenu_--the American savage who landed in France, and made the amazing discovery of civilisation. Sh.e.l.ley had not dropped from the clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to be discovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiable indignation.

One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devoted to the beauty of virtue; but one quality Sh.e.l.ley lacked which is commonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathy which can make its own the motives and desires of other men.

Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of observation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he rather exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the G.o.dwinian phraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament.

So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental, anti-human. If he had grown up a mediaeval Christian, he would have found no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the formula was G.o.dwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural, incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in the doctrine that "positive inst.i.tutions" have poisoned and distorted the natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in _Queen Mab_ of all the oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away to absolve nature:

Nature!--No!

Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society....

Let priest-led slaves 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.

It is a stimulating doctrine, for if humanity had only to rid itself of kings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief and eventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. There is, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoological fact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is there anything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives to inst.i.tutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share in the making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are the creation of the servility and superst.i.tion of the ma.s.s of men. The eighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal.

Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flock has sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in the lore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns to bear upon the slender fabric of Sh.e.l.ley's dream. _Queen Mab_ was a boy's precocious effort, and in later verses Sh.e.l.ley put the case for his view of evil in a more persuasive form. He is now less concerned to declare that it is unnatural, than to insist that it flows from defects in men which are not inherent or irremovable. The view is stated with pessimistic malice by a Fury in _Prometheus Unbound_ after a vision of slaughter.

FURY.

Blood thou can'st see, and fire; and can'st hear groans.

Worse things unheard, unseen, remain behind.

PROMETHEUS.

Worse?

FURY.

In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear, All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want--worse need for them.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Many are strong and rich, and would be just, But live among their suffering fellow-men As if none felt; they know not what they do.

Sh.e.l.ley so separated the good and evil in the world, that he was presently vexed as acutely as any theist with the problem of accounting for evil. Paine felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. He traced all the wrongs of society to the egoism of priests and kings; and, since he did not a.s.sume the fundamental goodness of human nature, it troubled none of his theories to accept the crude primitive fact of self-interest. What Sh.e.l.ley would really have said in answer to a question about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaic mood, it is hard to guess, and the speculation does not interest us.

Sh.e.l.ley's prose opinions were of no importance. What we do trace in his poetry is a tendency, half conscious, uttering itself only in figures and parables, to read the riddle of the universe as a struggle between two hostile principles. In the world of prose he called himself an atheist. He rejoiced in the name, and used it primarily as a challenge to intolerance. "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion," he said once to his friend Trelawny, "a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my abhorrence of superst.i.tion. I took up the word as a knight takes up a gauntlet in defiance of injustice."