Book: Shelley
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Sydney Waterlow >> Shelley
An early manifestation of this impulse was the Irish enterprise
already mentioned. Public affairs always stirred him, but, as
time went on, it was more and more to verse and less to
practical intervention, and after 1817 he abandoned argument
altogether for song. But one pamphlet, 'A Proposal for putting
Reform to the Vote' (1817), is characteristic of the way in
which he was always labouring to do something, not merely to
ventilate existing evils, but to promote some practical scheme
for abolishing them. Let a national referendum, he says, be
held on the question of reform, and let it be agreed that the
result shall be binding on Parliament; he himself will
contribute 100 pounds a year (one-tenth of his income) to the
expenses of organisation. He is in favour of annual
Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he
prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolish
aristocracy and monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into
the hands of men rendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery;
and he proposes that the payment of a small sum in direct taxes
should be the qualification for the parliamentary franchise.
The idea, of course, was not in the sphere of practical
politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how far Shelley
was from being a vulgar theory-ridden crank to whom the years
bring no wisdom.
Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that "intolerance" was
the cause of all evil, and, in the same flash, that it could be
destroyed by clear and simple reasoning. Apply the acid of
enlightened argument, and religious beliefs will melt away, and
with them the whole rotten fabric which they support--crowns
and churches, lust and cruelty, war and crime, the inequality
of women to men, and the inequality of one man to another.
With Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it
at once. The first thing, since religion is at the bottom of
all force and fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason
for believing in Christianity. This was easy enough, and a
number of impatient argumentative pamphlets were dashed off.
One of these, 'The Necessity of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a
revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the
heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might
also be usefully attacked:--there were alcohol and meat, the
causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were
despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there
was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual
relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These
threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first
serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody,
partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of
Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the
confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future
of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants
writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is
introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is
described. In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back
to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find
"Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone."
Though many poets have begun their careers with something
better than this, 'Queen Mab' will always be read, because it
gives us, in embryo, the whole of Shelley at a stroke. The
melody of the verse is thin and loose, but it soars from the
ground and spins itself into a series of etherial visions. And
these visions, though they look utterly disconnected from
reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate interest
in science. In this respect the sole difference between 'Queen
Mab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that,
in the prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their
disquisitions on physiology and astronomy, determinism and
utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is explicit. These
notes are a queer medley. We may laugh at their crudity--their
certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument,
the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to
recognise that here is something more than the ordinary
dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous
language, vividness of imagination, and, above all, much
conscientious reasoning and a passion for hard facts. His wife
was not far wrong when she praised him for a 'logical exactness
of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all
second-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively
something which is for ever hidden from the mass of
mankind--the difference between an argument and a confused
stirring of prejudices. Then, again, he was not content with
abstract generalities: he was always trying to enforce his
views by facts industriously collected from such books of
medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and history
as he could get hold of. For instance, he does not preach
abstinence from flesh on pure a priori grounds, but because
"the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and
number of his teeth." We catch here what is perhaps the
fundamental paradox of his character--the combination of a
curious rational hardness with the wildest and most romantic
idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a
mind no stranger to thought and research.
We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic achievement,
and it will be well before going further to underline the
connection, which persists all through his work and is already
so striking in 'Queen Mab', between his poetry and his
philosophical and religious ideas.
Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet. But his
philosophy was much more definite than Coleridge's; it gave
substance to his character and edge to his intellect, and, in
the end, can scarcely be distinguished from the emotion
generating his verse. There is, however, no trace of
originality in his speculative writing, and we need not regret
that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet,
he decided against philosophy. Before finally settling to
poetry, he at one time projected a complete and systematic
account of the operations of the human mind. It was to be
divided into sections--childhood, youth, and so on. One of the
first things to be done was to ascertain the real nature of
dreams, and accordingly, with characteristic passion for a
foundation of fact, he turned to the only facts accessible to
him, and tried to describe exactly his own experiences in
dreaming. The result showed that, along with the scientific
impulse, there was working in him a more powerful antagonistic
force. He got no further than telling how once, when walking
with Hogg near Oxford, he suddenly turned the corner of a lane,
and a scene presented itself which, though commonplace, was yet
mysteriously connected with the obscurer parts of his nature.
A windmill stood in a plashy meadow; behind it was a long low
hill, and "a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the
evening sky. It was the season of the year when the last leaf
had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash." The
manuscript concludes: "I suddenly remembered to have seen that
exact scene in some dream of long--Here I was obliged to leave
off, overcome with thrilling horror." And, apart from such
overwhelming surges of emotion from the depths of
sub-consciousness, he does not seem ever to have taken that
sort of interest in the problems of the universe which is
distinctive of the philosopher; in so far as he speculated on
the nature and destiny of the world or the soul, it was not
from curiosity about the truth, but rather because correct
views on these matters seemed to him especially in early years,
an infallible method of regenerating society. As his
expectation of heaven on earth became less confident, so the
speculative impulse waned. Not long before his death he told
Trelawny that he was not inquisitive about the system of the
universe, that his mind was tranquil on these high questions.
He seems, for instance, to have oscillated vaguely between
belief and disbelief in personal life after death, and on the
whole to have concluded that there was no evidence for it.
At the same time, it is essential to a just appreciation of
him, either as man or poet, to see how all his opinions and
feelings were shaped by philosophy, and by the influence of one
particular doctrine. This doctrine was Platonism. He first
went through a stage of devotion to what he calls "the
sceptical philosophy," when his writings were full of schoolboy
echoes of Locke and Hume. At this time he avowed himself a
materialist. Then he succumbed to Bishop Berkeley, who
convinced him that the nature of everything that exists is
spiritual. We find him saying, with charming pompousness, "I
confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse their
assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that
nothing exists but as it is perceived." This "intellectual
system," he rightly sees, leads to the view that nothing
whatever exists except a single mind; and that is the view
which he found, or thought that he found, in the dialogues of
Plato, and which gave to his whole being a bent it was never to
lose. He liked to call himself an atheist; and, if pantheism
is atheism, an atheist no doubt he was. But, whatever the
correct label, he was eminently religious. In the notes to
'Queen Mab' he announces his belief in "a pervading Spirit
co-eternal with the universe," and religion meant for him a
"perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle
of the universe"--a perception which, in his case, was
accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus grasped the notion
that the whole universe is one spirit, he absorbed from Plato a
theory which accorded perfectly with his predisposition--the
theory that all the good and beautiful things that we love on
earth are partial manifestations of an absolute beauty or
goodness, which exists eternal and unchanging, and from which
everything that becomes and perishes in time derives such
reality as it has. Hence our human life is good only in so far
as we participate in the eternal reality; and the communion is
effected whenever we adore beauty, whether in nature, or in
passionate love, or in the inspiration of poetry. We shall
have to say something presently about the effects of this
Platonic idealism on Shelley's conception of love; here we need
only notice that it inspired him to translate Plato's
'Symposium', a dialogue occupied almost entirely with theories
about love. He was not, however, well equipped for this task.
His version, or rather adaptation (for much is omitted and much
is paraphrased), is fluent, but he had not enough Greek to
reproduce the finer shades of the original, or, indeed, to
avoid gross mistakes.
A poet who is also a Platonist is likely to exalt his office;
it is his not merely to amuse or to please, but to lead mankind
nearer to the eternal ideal--Shelley called it Intellectual
Beauty--which is the only abiding reality. This is the real
theme of his 'Defence of Poetry' (1821), the best piece of
prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love Peacock, scholar, novelist,
and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one of
Shelley's most admired friends, had published a wittily
perverse and paradoxical article, not without much good sense,
on 'The Four Ages of Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine
poetry is only possible in half-civilised times, such as the
Homeric or Elizabethan ages, which, after the interval of a
learned period, like that of Pope in England, are inevitably
succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mind was,
of course, the movement represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and
Coleridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he
describes as a "modern-antique compound of frippery and
barbarism." He must have greatly enjoyed writing such a
paragraph as this: "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in
a civilised community. . . . The march of his intellect is
like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused
around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the
darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself
like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian
labours." These gay shafts had at any rate the merit of
stinging Shelley to action. 'The Defence of Poetry' was his
reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as
an adventitious seasoning of life--ornamental perhaps, but
rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelley
undermines the whole position by asserting that poetry--a name
which includes for him all serious art--is the very stuff out
of which all that is valuable and real in life is made. "A
poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."
"The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others;
the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination." And it
is on the imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as
exercises strengthen a limb. Historically, he argues, good
poetry always coexists with good morals; for instance, when
social life decays, drama decays. Peacock had said that
reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful than poets.
The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the
world worse, while it is poets and "poetical philosophers" who
produce "true utility," or pleasure in the highest sense.
Without poetry, the progress of science and of the mechanical
arts results in mental and moral indigestion, merely
exasperating the inequality of mankind. "Poetry and the
principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation,
are the God and mammon of the world." While the emotions
penetrated by poetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an atom
to a universe." Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold
the poisonous waters which flow from death through life." It
makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew.
"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the
present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;
the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Other poets besides Shelley have seen
"Through all that earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness,"
and others have felt that the freedom from self, which is
attained in the vision, is supremely good. What is peculiar to
him, and distinguishes him from the poets of religious
mysticism, is that he reflected rationally on his vision,
brought it more or less into harmony with a philosophical
system, and, in embracing it, always had in view the
improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it be
imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of the
eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first
impulse of the Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to
become the theory of the nineteenth century, that the obJect of
poetry is to inculcate correct principles of morals and
religion. Poetry, with its power of pleasing, was the jam
which should make us swallow the powder unawares. This
conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought
not to do what can be done better by prose, and also because,
for him, the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably
one. The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a moral,
but by communicating to others something of that ecstasy with
which he himself burns in contemplating eternal truth and
beauty and goodness.
Hitherto all the writings mentioned have been, except 'The
Defence of Poetry', those of a young and enthusiastic
revolutionary, which might have some interest in their proper
historical and biographical setting, but otherwise would only
be read as curiosities. We have seen that beneath Shelley's
twofold drift towards practical politics and speculative
philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it is
characteristic of him that he always tended to regard the
writing of verse as a 'pis aller'. In 1819, when he was
actually working on 'Prometheus', he wrote to Peacock, "I
consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political
science," adding that he only wrote it because his feeble
health made it hopeless to attempt anything more useful. We
need not take this too seriously; he was often wrong about the
reasons for his own actions. From whatever motive, write
poetry he did. We will now consider some of the more
voluminous, if not the most valuable, results.
'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,' [4] is a long poem,
written in 1815, which seems to shadow forth the emotional
history of a young and beautiful poet. As a child he drank
deep of the beauties of nature and the sublimest creations of
the intellect, until,
"When early youth had past, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home,
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands."
He wandered through many wildernesses, and visited the ruins of
Egypt and the East, where an Arab maiden fell in love with him
and tended him. But he passes on, "through Arabie, and Persia,
and the wild Carmanian waste," and, arrived at the vale of
Cashmire, lies down to sleep in a dell. Here he has a vision.
A "veiled maid" sits by him, and, after singing first of
knowledge and truth and virtue, then of love, embraces him.
When he awakes, all the beauty of the world that enchanted and
satisfied him before has faded:
"The Spirit of Sweet Human Love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts,"
and he rushes on, wildly pursuing the beautiful shape, like an
eagle enfolded by a serpent and feeling the poison in his
breast. His limbs grow lean, his hair thin and pale. Does
death contain the secret of his happiness? At last he pauses
"on the lone Chorasmian shore," and sees a frail shallop in
which he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night the boat
fiies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus,
where it is engulfed in a cavern. Following the twists of the
cavern, after a narrow escape from a maelstrom, he floats into
a calm pool, and lands. Elaborate descriptions of forest and
mountain scenery bring us, as the moon sets, to the death of
the worn-out poet--
"The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius! Heartless things
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on . . . but thou art fled."
[4 "Alastor" is a Greek word meaning "the victim of an Avenging
Spirit."]
In 'Alastor' he melted with pity over what he felt to be his
own destiny; in 'The Revolt of Islam' (1817) he was "a trumpet
that sings to battle." This, the longest of Shelley's poems
(there are 4176 lines of it, exclusive of certain lyrical
passages), is a versified novel with a more or less coherent
plot, though the mechanism is cumbrous, and any one who expects
from the title a story of some actual rebellion against the
Turks will be disappointed. Its theme, typified by an
introductory vision of an eagle and serpent battling in
mid-sky, is the cosmic struggle between evil and good, or, what
for Shelley is the same thing, between the forces of
established authority and of man's aspiration for liberty, the
eagle standing for the powerful oppressor, and the snake for
the oppressed.
"When round pure hearts a host of hopes assemble
The Snake and Eagle meet--the world's foundations tremble."
This piece of symbolism became a sort of fixed language with
him; "the Snake" was a name by which it amused him to be known
among his friends. The clash of the two opposites is crudely
and narrowly conceived, with no suggestion yet of some more
tremendous force behind both, such as later on was to give
depth to his view of the world conflict. The loves and the
virtues of Laon and Cythna, the gifted beings who overthrow the
tyrant and perish tragically in a counter-revolution, are too
bright against a background that is too black; but even so they
were a good opportunity for displaying the various phases
through which humanitarian passion may run--the first whispers
of hope, the devotion of the pioneer, the joy of freedom and
love, in triumph exultation tempered by clemency, in defeat
despair ennobled by firmness. And although in this
extraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found
himself, the technical power displayed is great. The poem is
in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the long breaking wave of
that measure with sureness and ease, imparting to it a rapidity
of onset that is all his own. But there are small blemishes
such as, even when allowance is made for haste of composition
(it was written in a single summer), a naturally delicate ear
would never have passed; he apologises in the preface for one
alexandrine (the long last line which should exceed the rest by
a foot) left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there
are some eight places where obviously redundant syllables have
crept in. A more serious defect is the persistence, still
unassimilated, of the element of the romantic-horrible. When
Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnaws corpses, we feel
that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightly ridiculous,
magnificent though his writing has become. It is hard, again,
not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of
young eleutherarchs have only to sound for the crouching slave
to recover his manhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn
pale. The poet knows, as he wrote in answer to a criticism,
that his mission is "to apprehend minute and remote
distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions
which result from considering either the moral or the material
universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of
both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly
because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the
other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in
many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer through
a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material
universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as a whole; and
he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in a
picture of all the good impulses of the human heart, that
should be so fruitful, poisoned by the pressure of religious
and political authority. It was natural that the method which
he chose should be that of the romantic narrative--we have
noticed how he began by trying to write novels--nor is that
method essentially unfitted to represent the conflict between
good and evil, with the whole universe for a stage; instances
of great novels that are epics in this sense will occur to
every one. But realism is required, and Shelley was
constitutionally incapable of realism The personages of the
story, Laon and the Hermit, the Tyrant and Cythna, are pale
projections of Shelley himself; of Dr. Lind, an enlightened old
gentleman with whom he made friends at Eton; of His Majesty's
Government; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife's illustrious
mother. They are neither of the world nor out of it, and
consequently, in so far as they are localised and incarnate and
their actions woven into a tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a
failure. In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely the
same aims, but with more success, because he had now hit upon a
figure of more appropriate vagueness and sublimity. The scheme
of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) is drawn from the immortal
creations of Greek tragedy.
He had experimented with Tasso and had thought of Job; but the
rebellious Titan, Prometheus, the benefactor of mankind whom
Aeschylus had represented as chained by Zeus to Caucasus, with
a vulture gnawing his liver, offered a perfect embodiment of
Shelley's favourite subject, "the image," to borrow the words
of his wife, "of one warring with the Evil Principle, oppressed
not only by it, but by all--even the good, who are deluded into
considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a victim full
of fortitude and hope and the Spirit of triumph, emanating from
a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good." In the Greek
play, Zeus is an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older
and milder dynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited in his
punishment by the nymphs of ocean, knows a secret on which the
rule of Zeus depends. Shelley took over these features, and
grafted on them his own peculiar confidence in the ultimate
perfection of mankind. His Prometheus knows that Jupiter (the
Evil Principle) will some day be overthrown, though he does not
know when, and that he himself will then be released; and this
event is shown as actually taking place. It may be doubted
whether this treatment, while it allows the poet to describe
what the world will be like when freed from evil, does not
diminish the impressiveness of the suffering Titan; for if
Prometheus knows that a term is set to his punishment, his
defiance of the oppressor is easier, and, so far, less sublime.
However that may be, his opening cries of pain have much
romantic beauty: