Part 8

A portion of the eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep— He hath awakened from the dream of life; 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And, in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings—_we_ decay Like corpses in a charnel, fear and grief Convulse and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

So, when Fichte has achieved his deliverance from scepticism, his mind is closed for ever against embarrassment and perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, grief, repentance, and desire. 'All that happens belongs to the plan of the eternal world and is good in itself.' If there are beings perverse enough to resist reason, he cannot be angry with them, for they are not free agents. They are what they are, and it is useless to be angry with 'blind and unconscious nature.' 'What they actually are does not deserve my anger; what might deserve it they are not, and they would not deserve it if they were. My displeasure would strike an impalpable nonentity,' an 'invulnerable nothing,' as Shelley puts it. They are, in short, parts of the unreal dream to which belong grief, and hope, and fear, and desire. Death is the last of evils, he goes on; for the hour of death is the hour of birth to a new and more excellent life. It is, as Shelley says, waking from a dream. And now, when we have no longer desire for earthly things, or any sense for the transitory and perishable, the universe appears clothed in a more glorious form. 'The dead heavy mass, which did but stop up space, has perished; and in its place there flows onward with the rushing music of mighty waves, an eternal stream of life, and power, and action, which issues from the original source of all life—from thy life, O Infinite One! for all life is thy life, and only the religious eye penetrates to the realm of true Beauty. In all the forms that surround me I behold the reflection of my own being, broken up into countless diversified shapes, as the morning sun, broken in a thousand dewdrops, sparkles towards itself,' a phrase which recalls Shelley's famous passage a little further on:—

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

The application, indeed, is there a little different; but Shelley has just the same thought of the disappearance of the 'dead heavy mass' of the world of space and time. Keats, too, is translated to the 'realm of true beauty.'

He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear The part, while the one spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear! Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven's light.

There are important differences, as the metaphysician would point out, between the two conceptions, and language of a similar kind might be found in innumerable writers before and since. I only infer that the two minds are proceeding, if one may say so, upon parallel lines. Fichte, like Shelley, was accused of atheism, and his language would, like Shelley's, be regarded by mere readers as an unfair appropriation of old words to new meanings. Shelley had of course no definite metaphysical system to set beside that of the German philosopher; and had learnt what system he had rather from Plato than from Kant. It may also be called significant that Fichte finds the ultimate point of support in conscience or duty; whereas, in Shelley's theory, duty seems to vanish, and the one ultimate reality to be rather love or the beautiful. But it would be pedantic to attempt the discovery of a definite system of opinion where there is really nothing but a certain intellectual tendency. One can only say that, somehow or other, Shelley sought comfort under his general sense that everything is but the baseless fabric of a vision, and moreover a very uncomfortable vision, made up of pain, grief, and the 'unrest which men miscall delight,' in the belief, or, if belief is too strong a word, the imagination of a transcendental and eternal world of absolute perfection, entirely beyond the influence of 'chance, and death, and mutability.' Intellectual beauty, to which he addresses one of his finest poems, is the most distinct name of the power which he worships. Thy light alone, he exclaims—

Thy light alone, like mist on mountains driven, Or music by the night wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives peace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

In presence of such speculations, the ordinary mass of mankind will be content with declaring that the doctrine, if it can be called a doctrine, is totally unintelligible. The ideal world is upon this vein so hopelessly dissevered from the real, that it can give us no consolation. If life is a dream, the dream is the basis of all we know, and it is small comfort to proclaim its unreality. A truth existing all by itself in a transcendental vacuum entirely unrelated to all that we call fact, is a truth in which we can find very small comfort. And upon this matter I have no desire to differ from the ordinary mass of mankind. In truth, Shelley's creed means only a vague longing, and must be passed through some more philosophical brain before it can become a fit topic for discussion.

But the fact of this unintelligibility is by itself an explanation of much of Shelley's poetical significance. When the excellent Godwin talked about perfectibility and the ultimate triumph of truth and justice, he was in no sort of hurry about it. He was a good deal annoyed when Malthus crushed his dreams, by recalling him to certain very essential conditions of earthly life. Godwin, he said in substance, had forgotten that human beings have got to find food and standing-room on a very limited planet, and to rear children to succeed them. Remove all restraints after the fashion proposed by Godwin, and they will be very soon brought to their senses by the hard pressure of starvation, misery, and vice. Godwin made a feeble ostensible reply, but, in practice, he was content to adjourn the realisation of his hopes for an indefinite period. Reason, he reflected, might be omnipotent, but he could not deny that it would take a long time to put forth its power. He had the strongest possible objections to any of those rough and ready modes of forcing men to be reasonable which had culminated in the revolution. So he gave up the trade of philosophising, and devoted himself to historical pursuits, and the preparation of wholesome literature for the infantile mind. To Shelley no such calm abnegation of his old aims was possible. He continued to assert passionately his belief in the creed of his early youth; but it became daily more difficult to see how it was to be applied to the actual men of existence. He might hold in his poetic raptures that the dreams were the only realities, and the reality nothing but a dream; but he, like other people, was forced to become sensible to the ordinary conditions of mundane existence.

The really exquisite strain in Shelley's poetry is precisely that which corresponds to his dissatisfaction with his master's teaching. So long as Shelley is speaking simply as a disciple of Godwin, we may admire the melodious versification, the purity and fineness of his language, and the unfailing and, in its way, unrivalled beauty of his aerial pictures. But it is impossible to find much real satisfaction in the informing sentiment. The enthusiasm rings hollow, not as suggestive of insincerity, but of deficient substance and reality. Shelley was, in one aspect, a typical though a superlative example of a race of human beings, which has, it may be, no fault except the fault of being intolerable. Had he not been a poet (rather a bold hypothesis, it must be admitted), he would have been a most insufferable bore. He had a terrible affinity for the race of crotchet-mongers, the people who believe that the world is to be saved out of hand by vegetarianism, or female suffrage, or representation of minorities, the one-sided, one-ideaed, shrill-voiced and irrepressible revolutionists. I say nothing against these particular nostrums, and still less against their advocates. I believe that bores are often the very salt of the earth, though I confess that the undiluted salt has for me a disagreeable and acrid savour. The devotees of some of Shelley's pet theories have become much noisier than they were when the excellent Godwin ruled his little clique. It is impossible not to catch in Shelley's earlier poetry, in 'Queen Mab' and in the 'Revolt of Islam,' the apparent echo of much inexpressibly dreary rant which has deafened us from a thousand platforms. The language may be better; the substance is much the same.

This, which to some readers is annoyance, is to others a topic of extravagant eulogy. Not content with urging the undeniable truth that Shelley was a man of wide and generous sympathy, a detester of tyranny and a contemner of superstition, they speak of him as though he were both a leader of thought and a practical philanthropist. To make such a claim is virtually to expose him to an unfair test. It is simply ridiculous to demand from Shelley the kind of praise which we bestow upon the apostles of great principles in active life. What are we to say upon this hypothesis to the young gentleman who is amazed because vice and misery survive the revelations of Godwin, and whose reforming ardours are quenched—so far as any practical application goes—by the surprising experience that animosities fostered by the wrongs of centuries are not to be pacified by publishing a pamphlet or two about Equality, Justice, and Freedom, or by a month's speechification in Dublin? If these were Shelley's claims upon our admiration, we should be justified in rejecting them with simple contempt, or we should have to give the sacred name of philanthropist to any reckless impulsive schoolboy who thinks his elders fools and proclaims as a discovery the most vapid rant of his time. Admit that Shelley's zeal was as pure as you please, and that he cared less than nothing for money or vulgar comfort; but it is absurd to bestow upon him the praise properly reserved for men whose whole lives have been a continuous sacrifice for the good of their fellows. Nor can I recognise anything really elevating in those portions of Shelley's poetry which embody this shallow declamation. It is not the passionate war-cry of a combatant in a deadly grapple with the forces of evil, but the wail of a dreamer who has never troubled himself to translate the phrases into the language of fact. Measured by this—utterly inappropriate—standard, we should be apt to call Shelley a slight and feverish rebel against the inevitable, whose wrath is little more than the futile, though strangely melodious, crackling of thorns.

To judge of Shelley in this mode would be to leave out of account precisely those qualities in which his unique excellence is most strikingly manifested. Shelley speaks, it is true, as a prophet; but when he has reached his Pisgah, it turns out that the land of promise is by no means to be found upon this solid earth of ours, or definable by degrees of latitude and longitude, but is an unsubstantial phantasmagoria in the clouds. It is vain, too, that he declares that it is the true reality, and that what we call a reality is a dream. The transcendental world is—if we may say so—not really the world of archetypal ideas, but a fabric spun from empty phrases. The more we look at it the more clearly we recognise its origin; it is the refracted vision of Godwin's prosaic system seen through an imaginative atmosphere. But that which is really admirable is, not the vision itself, but the pathetic sentiment caused by Shelley's faint recognition of its obstinate unsubstantiality. It is with this emotion that every man must sympathise in proportion as his intellectual aspirations dominate his lower passions. Forgetting all tiresome crotchets and vapid platitudes, we may be touched, almost in proportion to our own elevation of mind, by the unsatisfied yearning for which Shelley has found such manifold and harmonious utterance. There are moods in which every sensitive and philanthropic nature groans under the

heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world.

Whatever our ideal may be, whatever the goal to which we hope to see mankind approximate, our spirits must often flag with a sense of our personal insignificance, and of the appalling dead weight of multiform impediments which crushes the vital energies of the world, like Etna lying upon the Titan. This despair of finding any embodiment for his own ideal, of bridging over the great gulf fixed between the actual world of sin, and sorrow, and stupidity, and the transcendental world of joy, love, and pure reason, represents the final outcome of Shelley's imperfect philosophy, and gives the theme of his most exquisite poetry. The doctrine symbolised in the 'Alastor' by the history of the poet who has seen in vision a form of perfect beauty, and dies in despair of ever finding it upon earth (he seems, poor man! to have looked for it somewhere in the neighbourhood of Afghanistan), is the clue to the history of his own intellectual life. He is happiest when he can get away from the world altogether into a vague region, having no particular relation to time or space; to the valleys haunted by the nymphs in the 'Prometheus;' or the mystic island in the 'Epipsychidion,' where all sights and sounds are as the background of a happy dream, fitting symbols of sentiments too impalpable to be fairly grasped in language: or that 'calm and blooming cove' of the lines in the Euganean hills.

The lyrics which we all know more or less by heart are but so many different modes of giving utterance to—

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.

He is always dwelling upon the melancholy doctrine expressed in his last poem by the phrase that God has made good and the means of good irreconcilable. The song of the skylark suggests to him that we are doomed to 'look before and after,' and to 'pine for what is not.' Our sweetest songs (how should it be otherwise?) are those which tell of saddest thought. The wild commotion in sea, sky, and earth, which heralds the approach of the south-west wind, harmonises with his dispirited restlessness, and he has to seek refuge in the vague hope that his thoughts, cast abroad at random like the leaves and clouds, may somehow be prophetic of a magical transformation of the world. His most enduring poetry is, in one way or other, a continuous comment upon the famous saying in 'Julian and Maddalo,' suggested by the sight of his fellow-Utopian, whose mind has been driven into madness by an uncongenial world.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Some poets suffer under evils of a more tangible kind than those which tormented Shelley; and some find a more satisfactory mode of escape from the sorrows which beset a sensitive nature. But the special beauty of Shelley's poetry is so far due to the fact that we feel it to be the voice of a pure and lofty nature, however crude may have been the form taken by some of his unreal inspiration.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Hume's biographer, Mr. Hill Burton, gives some other verses attributed to Hume; but the impartial critic must admit that they are of inferior merit.

_GRAY AND HIS SCHOOL_

A remark is every now and then made about Gray by somebody who has just been reading his charming letters. Gray, it is announced, was one of the first prophets of the true faith, or, as others call it, the modern superstition, of which mountains are the temples and Alpine clubs form the congregations. Their creed may be compressed into the single article that a love of mountains is the first of the cardinal virtues. To that doctrine, with some slight reservations, I yield a very hearty assent and consent; and I am glad to reckon Gray amongst its sound adherents. A mountainous country alone, he says, can furnish truly picturesque scenery. His early enthusiasm for the Chartreuse, his admiration in later years of the Vale of Keswick and the Pass of Killiecrankie, are symptoms of an orthodoxy creditable, because rarer in his time than our own. But, though Gray shared the sentiment which was then growing up, it would be absurd to attribute to him any influence in its propagation. His descriptive letters are admirable, and show that he had a true eye for scenery; but they were not published till after his death, and certainly his 'Life and Writings,' clipped and docked by the precise Mason, was not the kind of book to generate a new enthusiasm. The real glory of revealing to mankind the new pleasure must be given—so far as it can be given to any individual writers—to men like Rousseau, whose passionate rhetoric made the love of nature a popular watchword, and Saussure, who first showed a thorough appreciation of the glories of the Alps. But in England, and not in England alone, even Rousseau was, in this respect, eclipsed by Ossian. The general estimate of those singular poems, considered as descriptive of a mountainous region, coincides, I imagine, with that of Wordsworth. The mountains of Ossian are mere daubs, vague abstractions of mist and gloom, gigantesque unrealities which speak of anything but first-hand impressions of actual scenery. You may read through Ossian—if you can read through it at all—without gaining any more distinct impressions of Highland scenery than you would have received in the Highlands themselves any time since last November. But the extraordinary influence of Ossian upon the minds of MacPherson's contemporaries is a matter of history. When Goethe went to Switzerland, he evidently considered it the correct thing to have passages from Ossian at his fingers' ends for application to the Alps; it was the mountaineer's text-book, to be quoted in Switzerland as a later generation quoted Byron or the present the writings of Mr. Ruskin. Gray was one of the earliest enthusiasts, and, though he had a critical qualm or two, was apparently more moved by the new poems than by any literary event of his time. He is '_extasié_ with their infinite beauty,' makes 'a thousand inquiries' about their authenticity, and in one letter declares himself to be 'cruelly disappointed' with the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' and able to admire nothing but Fingal. He studies Croma (who now knows Croma even by name?), and picks out the finest phrase in it as though he were criticising a book of the 'Iliad.'

The Ossian fever was symptomatic of a widely-spread sentiment or fashion, due to causes far more general than the influence of any individual. It would be easy enough to show that worshippers of the picturesque had discovered the chief beauties of England before Gray wrote his letters. The tourist was already abroad. When Gray visited Gordale Scar, in Craven, he already found landscape-painters settled at the neighbouring inn and preparing views for the engraver. The reader of that maddest of books, 'John Buncle,' may remember that the hero contrives at one place to emerge out of a mysterious cavern in the mountains of Westmoreland. He observes on the occasion that the Vale of Keswick is considered to offer the finest views in England, and that they were, in truth, finer than even the Rev. Dr. Dalton had been able to make them appear in his descriptive poem. Yet Buncle thinks that Keswick is surpassed by the 'shaded fells' in the neighbourhood (apparently) of Ambleside, and that the cascades there are superior to 'dread Lodore.' The 'Rev. Dr. Dalton' appears to have published his poem—a poem, I am sorry to say, unfamiliar to me—in 1755, some years before Gray's visit. But it is needless to enlarge upon this point. It is clear enough, from many symptoms, that the love of picturesque scenery was becoming fashionable in the middle of the century, and that Gray, as a man of taste, was amongst the first to feel the impulse.

The whole matter is, perhaps, of less importance than is sometimes attached to it. There is, after all, a good deal in Macaulay's common-sense explanation of the phenomenon—that a love of mountain scenery means simply the formation of good roads and comfortable inns in mountain districts. But Gray's taste in this respect is at least significant as to Gray's own position. His contempt for Rousseau and his love of Ossian are inversions of the judgment of later times; for no one would now deny the power of Rousseau, or find much pleasure—unless possessed by some antiquarian or patriotic mania—in the epics of the mythical bard. And yet we can see that Gray represents a vein of sentiment allied to some modern modes of thought, and generally regarded as antipathetic to the spirit of his own time. With all his popularity, he appears to be an isolated phenomenon. Everybody knows his poetry by heart. The 'Elegy' has so worked itself into the popular imagination that it includes more familiar phrases than almost any poem of equal length in the language. The 'Bard' and the lines upon Eton have become so hackneyed as perhaps to acquire a certain tinge of banality. If few English poets have written so little, none certainly has written so little that has fallen into oblivion. And yet, though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet of his day, though he is more read than Young, or Thomson, or Collins, or Goldsmith, or many others, we do not think of him as stamping his image upon the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken to be like an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden spring of perennial freshness gushing out in the midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative, monotonous current of versification poured forth by the imitators of Pope. He never used Pope's measure for serious purposes, except in one fine fragment—the least read of his poems—and is, as it were, an outsider in the literature of the time. And yet, again, it must be remembered that Wordsworth picked him out for special condemnation as the worst offender in the use of conventional language. He definitely accepted and has enlarged upon the theory which Wordsworth attempted to upset—that poetry should use a language differing from that of common life. Indeed, he gets upon stilts as deliberately and consciously as any poet of the day, and is nervously sensitive to the risk of a lapse into the vernacular.