The Art Of Letters Part 7

a.s.suredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appet.i.tes as Collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed."

This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as the saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751 only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of a copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ as far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, a.s.sisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is remarkable among English poets, not for having succ.u.mbed to poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the ma.s.s of eighteenth-century writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A.E." brought about a poetic revival in our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew Arnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems.

This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _The Bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is more than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his most famous lines:

Some village Cato (----) with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest; Some Caesar guiltless of his country's blood.

Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we find in the final shape of this verse?

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not a mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as near to one as one's breath and one's country. Not that the _Elegy_ would have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged deeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. But then does not _Hamlet_ owe a great part of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." But to make a mystery of the indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was blessed with more fastidiousness than pa.s.sion, is absurd. To say perfectly once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who said of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great." Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in him only a "mechanical poet." To most of us he seems the first natural poet in modern literature.

XI.--ASPECTS OF Sh.e.l.lEY

(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC

Sh.e.l.ley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is easy enough to attack him or defend him--to d.a.m.n him as an infidel or to praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He lived almost as much from doctrine as from pa.s.sion. He pursued theories as a child chases b.u.t.terflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct.

Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes. "Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. She made no answer, but on Sh.e.l.ley repeating the question she said, "He cannot speak." "But surely," exclaimed Sh.e.l.ley, "he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible." The woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "It is not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age." Sh.e.l.ley walked away with his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "How provokingly close are these new-born babes!" One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. But in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a piece of att.i.tudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the vulgar say, "a little above himself." In any event it almost invariably appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Sh.e.l.ley's life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents.

He was habitually "a bit above himself." In the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions were quite as comically extraordinary.

G.o.dwin is related to have said that "Sh.e.l.ley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked." I doubt if there is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Sh.e.l.ley. It is said that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for Sh.e.l.ley after reading the full story of his desertion of Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of 1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only 200 to a deserted wife and her two children. Sh.e.l.ley, however, had not married Harriet for love.

A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Sh.e.l.ley hated. Harriet's sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting Sh.e.l.ley's exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Sh.e.l.ley in England_, "foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon Sh.e.l.ley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same time, she was making a breach with Sh.e.l.ley inevitable. She wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was love, not matrimony," for which Sh.e.l.ley yearned. "Marriage," Sh.e.l.ley had once written, echoing G.o.dwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a time when he had found in Mary G.o.dwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Sh.e.l.ley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k: "Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a n.o.ble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said Peac.o.c.k, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Sh.e.l.ley replied: "But you did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a sc.r.a.p of paper. That Sh.e.l.ley did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with Mary G.o.dwin, he was writing to Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. "I write," his letter runs--

to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.

From none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined.

He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter):

With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately yours, S.

This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either base or priggish. Coming from Sh.e.l.ley, it is a miracle of what can only be called innocence.

The most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in Mr. Ingpen's book relate to Sh.e.l.ley's expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with Harriet, and to his father's att.i.tude on both these occasions. Sh.e.l.ley's father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort to understand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability.

He objected to Sh.e.l.ley's studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him a member of Parliament; and Sh.e.l.ley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke." How unpromising as a party politician Sh.e.l.ley was may be gathered from the fact that in 1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a satire on the Regent _a propos_ of a Carlton House fete, but "amused himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to Carlton House after the fete." Sh.e.l.ley's methods of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes.

His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation and repeal of the Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _An Address to the Irish People_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville Street, and threw copies to the pa.s.sers-by. "I stand," he wrote at the time, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man _who looks likely_; I throw a book to him." Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener--"the Brown Demon," as Sh.e.l.ley called her when he came to hate her--she said:

I'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pa.s.s in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we pa.s.sed her. I could hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated.

Sh.e.l.ley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in his _Address_ when he described the Act of Union as "the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland."

G.o.dwin, with whom Sh.e.l.ley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "Sh.e.l.ley, you are preparing a scene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the extent of G.o.dwin's influence over Sh.e.l.ley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the Irish people.

Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Sh.e.l.ley rather than a compilation of new material. The new doc.u.ments incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Sh.e.l.leys'

family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Sh.e.l.ley. They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Sh.e.l.ley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday,"

he wrote to Sh.e.l.ley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Sh.e.l.ley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare's plays, under the figured name of Cooks." "The character of Shakespeare's plays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Sh.e.l.ley was ever "an actor in Shakespearean drama." At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the Sh.e.l.ley library. I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of Sh.e.l.ley's life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of Sh.e.l.ley out of the facts he has brought together.

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Sh.e.l.ley--a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Sh.e.l.ley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Sh.e.l.ley again and again as "Bysshe." Sh.e.l.ley's family, it may be admitted, called him "Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Sh.e.l.ley. Sh.e.l.ley wrote _The Skylark_ and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peac.o.c.k's account of this characteristic illusion:

He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning.

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous.

After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Sh.e.l.ley.

(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice.

In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley_ he begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Last century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin's distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_ should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Sh.e.l.ley or Byron.

But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who "saw Sh.e.l.ley plain" in Browning's lyric. None the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A relative of Sh.e.l.ley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of English literature.

Sh.e.l.ley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth.

Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton." During his life at University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.

His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.

The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his pa.s.sion for kite-flying as a boy:

He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.

And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is revealed in his reflection:

What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply!

Sh.e.l.ley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which Sh.e.l.ley engaged in argument with a bishop "under the a.s.sumed name of a woman." It must have been in a somewhat similar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an a.s.sumed name, proposing to preach to his congregation."

Certainly, Sh.e.l.ley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in his childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in Sh.e.l.ley's own work--his forgotten novels, _Zastrossi_, and _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian_--but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the story of the "stranger in a military cloak," who, seeing him in a post-office at Pisa, said, "What! Are you that d--d atheist, Sh.e.l.ley?" and felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Sh.e.l.ley's story of his being attacked by a midnight a.s.sa.s.sin in Wales, after being disbelieved for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His imaginative appet.i.te, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish.

Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow Sh.e.l.ley was in his life. When he was in London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the Serpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water." He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Sh.e.l.ley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost 50."

Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the "stag eyes," so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race. "His figure," Hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature." And, in Medwin's book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of Sh.e.l.ley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have I dined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil pa.s.sions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a pa.s.sage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Sh.e.l.ley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Sh.e.l.ley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Th.o.r.eau's. He was always longing to give himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a _bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Sh.e.l.ley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circ.u.mstances. He was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Sh.e.l.ley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which

Like a thousand dawns on a single night The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Sh.e.l.ley who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous bulk. Sh.e.l.ley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and h.e.l.l. His cosmos is a constellation.

His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in literature like Sh.e.l.ley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned

... to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator. Sh.e.l.ley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of G.o.d.

In the great morning of the world, The Spirit of G.o.d with might unfurled The flag of Freedom over Chaos.