Book: Shelley
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Sydney Waterlow >> Shelley
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity."
But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is best in
his poetry is this expression of frustrated hope. He has
indeed, when he is moved simply by public passion, some
wonderful trumpet-notes; what hate and indignation can do, he
sometimes does. And his rapturous dreams of freedom can stir
the intellect, if not the blood. But it must be remarked that
poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm is liable to
one fatal weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric.
To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown
abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the
rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner.
They appear now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of
one another; the task of unravelling their genealogy would be
as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely
the singer of revolution, the intensity and sincerity of his
feeling would still have made him a better poet than Byron; but
he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the
inherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because of his
strained and false view of "the moral universe" and of himself.
His song, in treating of men as citizens, as governors and
governed, could never have touched such a height as Burns' "A
man's a man for a' that."
Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign
tyrants. The Romantic Movement was not merely a new way of
considering human beings in their public capacity; it meant
also a new kind of sensitiveness to their environment. If we
turn, say, from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's
'The Prelude', it is as if we have passed from a saloon crowded
with a bewigged and painted company, wittily conversing in an
atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, into the freshness of
a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the open air,
the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our
feelings with wonder and delight, so a corresponding change may
occur in our emotions towards one another; in this setting of a
universe with which we feel ourselves now rapturously, now
calmly, united, we love with less artifice, with greater
impetuosity and self-abandonment. "Thomson and Cowper," says
Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills which so many ingenious
gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them, and
the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of
a new world." The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in
their trees and hills, but when they also looked in the same
spirit on their own hearts, that operation added yet another
world to poetry. In Shelley the absorption of the self in
nature is carried to its furthest point. If the passion to
which nature moved him is less deeply meditated than in
Wordsworth and Coleridge, its exuberance is wilder; and in his
best lyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which
puts him among the world's two or three greatest writers of
love-poems.
Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and love that
every one knows and likes best. And, in fact, many of them
seem to satisfy what is perhaps the ultimate test of true
poetry: they sometimes have the power, which makes poetry akin
to music, of suggesting by means of words something which
cannot possibly be expressed in words. Obviously the test is
impossible to use with any objective certainty, but, for a
reason which will appear, it seems capable of a fairly
straightforward application to Shelley's work.
First we may observe that, just as the sight of some real
scene-- not necessarily a sunset or a glacier, but a ploughed
field or a street-corner--may call up emotions which "lie too
deep for tears" and cannot be put into words, this same effect
can be produced by unstudied descriptions. Wordsworth often
produces it:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils."
Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind of effect
is beyond Shelley's reach, though he has many pictures which
are both detailed and emotional. Consider, for instance, these
lines from 'The Invitation' (1822). He calls to Jane Williams
to come away "to the wild woods and the plains,"
"Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sandhills of the sea;--
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue moon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun."
This has a wonderful lightness and radiance. And here is a
passage of careful description from 'Evening: Ponte a Mare,
Pisa':
"The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Walkes not one ripple from its summer dream.
There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town."
Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense that he saw
details clearly--unlike Byron, who had for nature but a vague
and a preoccupied eye--and evidently, too, his observation is
steeped in strong feeling, and is expressed in most melodious
language. Yet we get the impression that he neither saw nor
felt anything beyond exactly what he has expressed; there is no
suggestion, as there should be in great poetry, of something
beyond all expression. And, curiously enough, this seems to be
true even of those fanciful poems so especially characteristic
of him, such as 'The Cloud' and 'Arethusa', where he has dashed
together on his palette the most startling colours in nature,
and composed out of them an extravagantly imaginative whole:
"The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead,
As on the jag of a mountain crag
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depths of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove."
Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and
rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and
lightning? We hold our breath; it is superhuman, miraculous;
but he never falters, so vehement is the impulse of his
delight. It is only afterwards that we ask ourselves whether
there is anything beyond the mere delight; and realising that,
though we have been rapt far above the earth, we have had no
disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slight
flatness of disappointment.
But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which
ecstasy is shot through with that strain of melancholy which we
have already noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so
much to exult impersonally in the force that chariots the
decaying leaves, spreads the seeds abroad, wakes the
Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves the Atlantic, as to
cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and failure:
"Oh life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud."
Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing from misty
morning through blue noon to twilight, brings, as he looks over
"the waveless plain of Lombardy," a short respite:
"Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery;
Or the Mariner, worn and wan,
Ne'er thus could voyage on."
The contrast between the peaceful loveliness of nature and his
own misery is a piteous puzzle. On the beach near Naples
"The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might."
But
"Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned--
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;--
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure";
so that
"I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care."
The aching weariness that throbs in the music of these verses
is not mere sentimental self-pity; it is the cry of a soul that
has known moments of bliss when it has been absorbed in the sea
of beauty that surrounds it, only the moments pass, and the
reunion, ever sought, seems ever more hopeless. Over and over
again Shelley's song gives us both the fugitive glimpses and
the mystery of frustration.
"I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven--and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,--
And then I changed my pipings,--
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasp'd a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."
Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in
these sad 'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is
one poem-- perhaps his greatest poem--which may suggest the
answer. In the 'Sensitive Plant' (1820) a garden is first
described on which are lavished all his powers of weaving an
imaginary landscape out of flowers and light and odour. All
the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except the
Sensitive Plant,
"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this
Eden." "A Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended the flowers
from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first
leaf looked brown, she died!" The last part of the poem, a
pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corruption and
decay when the power of good has vanished and the power of evil
is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow,
"And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels."
Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we
may console ourselves by believing that
"In this life Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs which endure
No light, being themselves obscure."
The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected
with his philosophical ideas. It is the creed of the student
of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging
is the one spirit which interpenetrates and upholds the world
with "love and beauty and delight," and this spirit--the vision
which Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" of the 'Ode
to Intellectual Beauty'--is what is always suggested by his
poetry at its highest moments. The suggestion, in its fulness,
is of course ineffable; only in the case of Shelley some
approach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be
steeped in philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which
he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because
this kind of idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of
evil, is the recoil from life of an unsatisfied and
disappointed soul.
His philosophy of love is but a special case of this
all-embracing doctrine. We saw how in 'Epipsychidion' he
rejected monogamic principles on the ground that true love is
increased, not diminished, by division, and we can now
understand why he calls this theory an "eternal law." For, in
this life of illusion, it is in passionate love that we most
nearly attain to communion with the eternal reality. Hence the
more of it the better. The more we divide and spread our love,
the more nearly will the fragments of goodness and beauty that
are in each of us find their true fruition. This doctrine may
be inconvenient in practice, but it is far removed from vulgar
sensualism, of which Shelley had not a trace. Hogg says that
he was "pre-eminently a ladies' man," meaning that he had that
childlike helplessness and sincerity which go straight to the
hearts of women. To this youth, preaching sublime mysteries,
and needing to be mothered into the bargain, they were as iron
to the magnet. There was always an Eve in his Eden, and each
was the "wonder of her kind"; but whoever she was--Harriet
Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Turner,
Mary Godwin, Emilia Viviani, or Jane Williams--she was never a
Don Juan's mistress; she was an incarnation of the soul of the
world, a momentary mirror of the eternal. Such an attitude
towards the least controllable of passions has several
drawbacks: it involves a certain inhumanity, and it is only
possible for long to one who remains ignorant of himself and
cannot see that part of the force impelling him is blind
attraction towards a pretty face. It also has the result that,
if the lover is a poet, his love-songs will be sad. Obsessed
by the idea of communion with some divine perfection, he must
needs be often cast down, not only by finding that, Ixion-like,
he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said of himself and
Emilia), but because, even when the object of his affection is
worthy, complete communion is easier to desire than to attain.
Thus Shelley's love-songs are just what might be expected. If
he does strain to the moment of ingress into the divine being,
it is to swoon with excess of bliss, as at the end of
'Epipsychidion', or as in the 'Indian Serenade':
"Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!"
More often he exhales pure melancholy:
"See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother.
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?"
Here the failure is foreseen; he knows she will not kiss him.
Sometimes his sadness is faint and restrained:
"I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine."
At other times it flows with the fulness of despair, as in
"I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?"
or in
"When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead--
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot."
The very rapture of the skylark opens, as he listens, the wound
at his heart:
"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
Is the assertion contained in this last line universally true?
Perhaps. At any rate it is true of Shelley. His saddest songs
are the sweetest, and the reason is that in them, rather than
in those verses where he merely utters ecstatic delight, or
calm pleasure, or bitter indignation, he conveys ineffable
suggestions beyond what the bare words express.
It remains to point out that there is one means of conveying
such suggestions which was outside the scope of his genius.
One of the methods which poetry most often uses to suggest the
ineffable is by the artful choice and arrangement of words. A
word, simply by being cunningly placed and given a certain
colour, can, in the hands of a good craftsman, open up
indescribable vistas. But Keats, when, in reply to a letter of
criticism, he wrote to him, "You might curb your magnanimity,
and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject
with ore," was giving him advice which, though admirable, it
was impossible that he should follow. Shelley was not merely
not a craftsman by nature, he was not the least interested in
those matters which are covered by the clumsy name of
"technique." It is characteristic of him that, while most
great poets have been fertile coiners of new words, his only
addition to the language is the ugly "idealism" in the sense of
"ideal object." He seems to have strayed from the current
vocabulary only in two other cases, both infelicitous--"glode"
for "glided," and "blosmy" for "blossomy." He did not, like
Keats, look on fine phrases with the eye of a lover. His taste
was the conventional taste of the time. Thus he said of Byron's
'Cain', "It is apocalyptic, it is a revelation not before
communicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better
poets than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael
Angelo, and the only things about which he was enthusiastic in
Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for
their associations, were the paintings of Raphael and Guido
Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects,
those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great
masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this
respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless.
Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of
complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, indeed, in
simple outbursts where there is no question of form, but in
efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he
too often sprawls and fumbles before the inspiration comes.
Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms
vain. We may trace in it all kinds of 'arrieres pensees',
philosophical and sociological, that an artist ought not to
have, and we may even dislike its dominating conception of a
vague spirit that pervades the universe; but we must admit that
when he wrote it was as if seized and swept away by some
"unseen power" that fell upon him unpremeditated. His emotions
were of that fatal violence which distinguishes so many
illustrious but unhappy souls from the mass of peaceable
mankind. In the early part of last century a set of
illustrations to Faust by Retzch used to be greatly admired;
about one of them, a picture of Faust and Margaret in the
arbour, Shelley says in a letter to a friend: "The artist makes
one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with
calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and which made my
brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of
which I knew that it was figured." So slight were the
occasions that could affect him even to vertigo. When, from
whatever cause, the frenzy took him, he would write hastily,
leaving gaps, not caring about the sense. Afterwards he would
work conscientiously over what he had written, but there was
nothing left for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make
plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could.
One result of this method was that his verse preserved an
unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which is perhaps as great a
quality as anything attained by the more bee-like toil of
better artists.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense,
and no attempt will be made even to summarise it here. A
convenient one-volume edition of the poems is that edited by
Professor Edward Dowden for Messrs. Macmillan (1896); it
includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There is a good
selection of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series,"
compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been
collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes
(1876-1880). Of the letters there is an edition by Mr. Roger
Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A number of letters to Elizabeth
Hitchener were published by Mr. Bertram Dobell in 1909.
For a first-hand knowledge of a poet's life and character the
student must always go to the accounts of contemporaries. In
Shelley's case these are copious. There are T. L. Peacock,s
'Memoirs' (edited by E. F. B. Brett-Smith, 1909); Peacock's
'Nightmare Abbey' contains an amusing caricature of Shelley in
the person of Scythrops; and in at least two of her novels Mary
Shelley has left descriptions of her husband: Adrian Earl of
Windsor, in 'The Last Man', is a portrait of Shelley, and
'Lodore' contains an account of his estrangement from Harriet.
His cousin Tom Medwin's 'Life' (1847) is a bad book, full of
inaccuracies. But Shelley had one unique piece of good
fortune: two friends wrote books about him that are
masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's 'Life' is especially valuable for
the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's 'Records of Shelley,
Byron, and the Author', describes him in the last year before
his death. Hogg's 'Life' has been republished in a cheap
edition by Messrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of
Trelawny's 'Records' in Messrs. Routledge's "New Universal
Library." But both these books, while they give incomparably
vivid pictures of the poet, are rambling and unconventional,
and should be supplemented by Professor Dowden's 'Life of
Shelley' (2 vols., 1886), which will always remain the standard
biography. Of other recent lives, Mr. A. Clutton-Brock's
'Shelley: the Man and the Poet' (1910) may be recommended.
Of the innumerable critical estimates of Shelley and his place
in literature, the most noteworthy are perhaps Matthew Arnold's
Essay in his 'Essays in Criticism', and Francis Thompson's
'Shelley' (1909). Vol. iv. "Naturalism in England," of Dr.
George Brandes' 'Main Currents in Nineteenth Century
Literature' (1905), may be read with interest, though it is not
very reliable; and Prof. Oliver Elton's 'A Survey of English
Literature', 1780-1830 (1912), should be consulted.
Whoever wishes to follow the fortunes, after the fire of their
lives was extinguished by Shelley's death, of Mary Shelley,
Claire Clairmont, and the rest, should read, besides Trelawny's
'Records' already mentioned, 'The Life and Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley', by Mrs. Julian Marshall (2 vols.,
1889), and 'The Letters of E. J. Trelawny_, edited by Mr. H.
Buxton Forman (1910).