Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 7

Sh.e.l.ley was an atheist because Christians used the name of G.o.d to sanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. His mythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. His creed was an ardent dualism, in which a G.o.d and an anti-G.o.d contend and make history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse the names and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate G.o.ds in his Pantheon are always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and the Jupiter of his _Prometheus_ is morally a temporarily omnipotent devil. Like G.o.dwin he felt that the G.o.d of orthodoxy was a "tyrant," and he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He had made.

The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is stated with a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in _Queen Mab_. The first Canto of the _Revolt of Islam_ puts the position of dualism without reserve:

Know, then, that from the depths of ages old Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold, Ruling the world with a divided lot, Immortal, all-pervading, manifold, Twin Genii, equal G.o.ds--when life and thought Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.

The good principle was the Morning Star (as though to remind us of Lucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. The anti-G.o.d, whom men worship blindly as G.o.d, holds sway over our world.

Terror, madness, crime, and pain are his creation, and Asia in _Prometheus_ cries aloud--

Utter his name: a world pining in pain Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.

In the sublime mythology of _Prometheus_ the war of G.o.d and anti-G.o.d is seen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rend the heart of the merciful t.i.tan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murders and crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical cruelties in the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they are also the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven with the tragedy on earth; we suffer from the malignity of the World's Ruler, and triumph by the endurance of Man's Saviour.

Nothing could be more absurd than to call Sh.e.l.ley a Pantheist. Pantheism is the creed of conservatism and resignation. Sh.e.l.ley felt the world as struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain.

Certainly for Sh.e.l.ley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. G.o.dwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and a.s.sures the victory of life (see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend Thing, in Sh.e.l.ley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in the clerical error of some mediaeval copyist, fumbling with the scholia of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to Sh.e.l.ley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound.

Sh.e.l.ley can describe It only as G.o.dwin describes his principle by a series of negatives.

I see a mighty darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb, Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is A living spirit.

It is the eternal =X= which the human spirit always a.s.sumes when it is at a loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not, our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-note that promised triumph. Sh.e.l.ley, turning amid his singing to the supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his G.o.d very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe with a G.o.d of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a n.i.g.g.e.r clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.

If Sh.e.l.ley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind G.o.dwin, and G.o.dwin hated vagueness. His intellect had a.s.similated all the steps in the argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic form. Inst.i.tutions make us what we are, and to free us from their shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in the preface to _Prometheus_ to a.s.sure us that, if England were divided into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected intellectualism of the G.o.dwinian psychology. "Revenge and retaliation,"

he remarks in the preface to _The Cenci_ "are pernicious _mistakes_."

But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout as Sh.e.l.ley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these abstractions. G.o.dwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardent affectionate love for his kind. G.o.dwin's cold precept that it was the duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.

One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early escapades of the married boy--the visit to Dublin at the height of the agitation for Catholic emanc.i.p.ation, the printing of his Address to the Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his balcony at pa.s.sers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic n.o.blemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an a.s.sociation for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish amus.e.m.e.nt of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of pamphlets sealed up in bottles. Sh.e.l.ley at this age perpetrated "rags"

upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows'

rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which G.o.dwin, complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Sh.e.l.ley that he is much too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicarious maturity by reading history, and refers him to _Political Justice pa.s.sim_ for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt to improve mankind by forming political a.s.sociations.

It is questionable how far the world has to thank G.o.dwin for dissuading ardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. It is just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophet had been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands in an almost superst.i.tious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, there might have arisen under educated leaders some movement less cla.s.s-bound than Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and more intelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by G.o.dwin's quietism, literature gained. It was G.o.dwin's mission in life to save poets from Botany Bay; he rescued Sh.e.l.ley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge.

It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creature around him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity, while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Sh.e.l.ley followed in action the principles of universal benevolence. G.o.dwin omitted the beasts; but Sh.e.l.ley, practising vegetarianism and buying crayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the "boast" of the poet in _Alastor_:--

If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred--

We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, and meet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given his boots to a poor woman.

Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Sh.e.l.ley is Leigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poor woman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Sh.e.l.ley carries her in his arms to the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. The householder slams it in his face, with an "impostors swarm everywhere,"

and a "Sir, your conduct is extraordinary."

"Sir," cried Sh.e.l.ley, "I am sorry to say that _your_ conduct is not extraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. You will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head."

It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen) decided that the Sh.e.l.ley who carried this poor stranger into shelter, fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need, was unfit to bring up his own children.

If Sh.e.l.ley allowed himself to be persuaded by G.o.dwin to abandon his missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves half-consciously from the G.o.dwinian notion that mankind are to be reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose," he writes in the preface to _Prometheus_, "has been ... to familiarise ...

poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious pa.s.senger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." It was for want of virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after the Terror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all the horrors of oppression and reaction which Sh.e.l.ley described, the comfort of all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slow progress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyred patriots--these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at the end of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of _Prometheus Unbound_:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This like thy glory, t.i.tan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy--that was for Sh.e.l.ley the whole duty of man.

In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Sh.e.l.ley's view of progress differed at once from G.o.dwin's conception, and from the notion of a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day consider historical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfection, to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw the process of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet as the deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument (as G.o.dwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. The missionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shall start up," he prophesies in _Queen Mab_. The _Revolt of Islam_, so puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after Sh.e.l.ley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their countrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children, brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a free past. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are the winged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter the thrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It is enough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coasts around it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving, eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden with slaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. She paints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to the central article of revolutionary faith:

This need not be; ye might arise and will That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory.

That love which none may bind be free to fill The world like light; and evil faith, grown h.o.a.ry With crime, be quenched and die.

"Ye might arise and will"--it was the inevitable corollary of the facile a.n.a.lysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to kings, priests, and inst.i.tutions. Sh.e.l.ley's missionaries of liberty preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," but rather because to render its effects permanent, it must proceed to regiment the converts in organised a.s.sociations, which speedily develop all the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow.

The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage of G.o.dwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the second generation bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent verses are those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in the national revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be a slave?" Not less characteristic is the G.o.dwinian abhorrence of violence, and the G.o.dwinian trust in the magic of courageous pa.s.sivity. Laon finds the revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors, and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal.

O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill And pain still keener pain for ever breed.

He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaves who are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of the beauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length upon the victorious liberators, they stand pa.s.sive to be hewn down, as Sh.e.l.ley, in the _Masque of Anarchy_, written after Peterloo, advised the English reformers to do.

With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak In hot blushes on their cheek.

The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is something in the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathes the childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Sh.e.l.ley dreamed of "a nation made free by love." With a strange mystical insight, he stepped beyond the range of the G.o.dwinian ethics, when he conceived of his humane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrifice for the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, because he loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings at last by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laon walks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heaped for him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a last affirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty of comradeship.

Thrice Sh.e.l.ley essayed to paint the state of perfection which mankind might attain, when once it should "arise and will." The first of the three pictures is the most literally G.o.dwinian. It is the boyish sketch of _Queen Mab_, with pantisocracy faithfully touched in, and G.o.dwin's speculations on the improvement of the human frame suggested in a few pregnant lines. One does not feel that Sh.e.l.ley's mind is even yet its own master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the third act of _Prometheus Unbound_. He is still repeating a lesson, and it calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth.

There sings Sh.e.l.ley. The picture itself is a faithful ill.u.s.tration etched with a skilful needle to adorn the last chapter of _Political Justice_. Evil is once more and always something fact.i.tious and unessential. The Spirit of the Earth sees the "ugly human shapes and visages" which men had worn in the old bad days float away through the air like chaff on the wind. They were no more than masks. Thrones are kingless, and forthwith men walk in upright equality, neither fawning nor trembling. Republican sincerity informs their speech:

None talked that common false cold hollow talk Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.

Women are "changed to all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons,"

and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" c.u.mber the ground like the unnoticed ruins of a barbaric past.

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncirc.u.mscribed, but man Equal, uncla.s.sed, tribeless and nationless Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Pa.s.sionless.

The story ends there, and if we do not so much as wait for the a.s.surance that man pa.s.sionless, tribeless, and nationless lived happily ever afterwards, it is because we are unable to feel even this faint interest in his destiny. There is something amiss with an ideal which is constrained to express itself in negatives. What should be the climax of a triumphant argument becomes its refutation. To reduce ourselves to this abstract quintessential man might be euthanasia. It would not be paradise.

The third of Sh.e.l.ley's visions of perfection is the climax of _h.e.l.las_.

One feels in attempting to make about _h.e.l.las_ any statement in bald prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a channel of sense, has a power which defies the a.n.a.lytic understanding.

_h.e.l.las_, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolute music. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey a definite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymes will carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and the picture hold your imagination.

And yet Sh.e.l.ley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhere is his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact, yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. He conceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for the liberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Sh.e.l.ley's circle at Pisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him as crude facts in the newspaper. The historians of cla.s.sical Greece were his continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of ideal forms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, as actual as the newspapers. _h.e.l.las_ is the vision of a mind which touches fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one glowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the golden consummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as the Age of Pericles. For Sh.e.l.ley, this denial of time had become a conscious doctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later years influences as intimate as G.o.dwin. Again and again in his later poems, he turns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from death and decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with a serene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearance of mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in _h.e.l.las_:

The future and the past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight.

The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almost conversational simplicity;