Chapter 2

Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than _The Cloud_, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of make- believe raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.

This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of _Prometheus Unbound_, for it made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet. This child-like quality assimilated him to the child-like peoples among whom mythologies have their rise. Those Nature myths which, according to many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very basis of Shelley's poetry. The lark that is the gossip of heaven, the winds that pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad nostril, all the elemental spirits of Nature, take from his verse perpetual incarnation and reincarnation, pass in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms of his imagery.

Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of Nature. For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering: they exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the poet should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such following of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. The materials for such visionary Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld. "Don't you wish you had?" as Turner said. The one justification for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even more passionate, though perhaps less profound. Wordsworth's _Nightingale and Stockdove_ sums up the contrast between the two, as though it had been written for such a purpose. Shelley is the "creature of ebullient heart," who

Sings as if the god of wine Had helped him to a valentine.

Wordsworth's is the

--Love with quiet blending, Slow to begin and never ending,

the "serious faith and inward glee."

But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in images. The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure. Suspended in the dripping well of his imagination the commonest object becomes encrusted with imagery. Herein again he deviates from the true Nature poet, the normal Wordsworth type of Nature poet: imagery was to him not a mere means of expression, not even a mere means of adornment; it was a delight for its own sake.

And herein we find the trail by which we would classify him. He belongs to a school of which not impossibly he may hardly have read a line--the Metaphysical School. To a large extent he _is_ what the Metaphysical School should have been. That school was a certain kind of poetry trying for a range. Shelley is the range found. Crashaw and Shelley sprang from the same seed; but in the one case the seed was choked with thorns, in the other case it fell on good ground. The Metaphysical School was in its direct results an abortive movement, though indirectly much came of it--for Dryden came of it. Dryden, to a greater extent than is (we imagine) generally perceived, was Cowley systematised; and Cowley, who sank into the arms of Dryden, rose from the lap of Donne.

But the movement was so abortive that few will thank us for connecting with it the name of Shelley. This is because to most people the Metaphysical School means Donne, whereas it ought to mean Crashaw. We judge the direction of a development by its highest form, though that form may have been produced but once, and produced imperfectly. Now the highest product of the Metaphysical School was Crashaw, and Crashaw was a Shelley _manque_; he never reached the Promised Land, but he had fervid visions of it. The Metaphysical School, like Shelley, loved imagery for its own sake: and how beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery may be, let _The Skylark_ and _The Cloud_ witness. It is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to a fixed object, lags continually from the path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a _Sensitive Plant_. In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they went astray cannot be said to have done anything so dainty as is implied by _toying_ with imagery. They cut it into shapes with a pair of scissors. From all such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate spontaneity. No trappings are too splendid for the swift steeds of sunrise. His sword-hilt may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of an Excalibur. His thoughts scorch through all the folds of expression. His cloth of gold bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked poetry.

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It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract. The dustiest abstractions

Start, and tremble under his feet, And blossom in purple and red.

The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge. They laid their fancies chill on the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his _Ode on the Passions_. In this, despite its beauty, there is still a _soupcon_ of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the _Ode to Evening_, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the language comparable to the miniatures of _Il Penseroso_. Crashaw, Collins, Shelley--three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy light," is near of kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmy-eyed"; and the "shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of "Thought's crowned powers." This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions. Take the passage (already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come

From the temples high Of man's ear and eye Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,

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From those skiey towers Where Thought's crowned powers Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours! Our feet now, every palm, Are sandalled with calm, And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm; And beyond our eyes The human love lies Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the root of such a power. The root, we take it, is this. He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation. Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress, whose constant changes of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her parts.

To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things. He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse. He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other. Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and shake down the golden leaves. {7}

The finest specimens of this faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, _Prometheus Unbound_. It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and a weeping mist of music fills the air. The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic reel and rout and revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to drunken waste. The choruses sweep down the wind, tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost cries for respite from the unrolling splendours. Yet these scenes, so wonderful from a purely poetical standpoint that no one could wish them away, are (to our humble thinking) nevertheless the artistic error of the poem. Abstractedly, the development of Shelley's idea required that he should show the earthly paradise which was to follow the fall of Zeus. But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should have ceased with it. A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings (such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the scene) would have been legitimate enough. Instead, however, the bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there is no longer an action to advance. It is as if the choral _finale_ of an opera were prolonged through two acts.

We have, nevertheless, called _Prometheus_ Shelley's greatest poem because it is the most comprehensive storehouse of his power. Were we asked to name the most _perfect_ among his longer efforts, we should name the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely fancy giving the slain bird a silken burial. Seldom is the death of a poet mourned in true poetry. Not often is the singer coffined in laurel- wood. Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is _Adonais_. In the English language only _Lycidas_ competes with it; and when we prefer _Adonais_ to _Lycidas_, we are following the precedent set in the case of Cicero: _Adonais_ is the longer. As regards command over abstraction, it is no less characteristically Shelleian than _Prometheus_. It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with daring exquisiteness, from Morning who sought:

Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,

and who

Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day,

to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead shepherd, the Dreams

Whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed; and whom he taught The love that was its music;

of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning over him,

Upon the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some dream has loosened from his brain! Lost angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain She faded like a cloud which hath outwept its rain.

In the solar spectrum, beyond the extreme red and extreme violet rays, are whole series of colours, demonstrable, but imperceptible to gross human vision. Such writing as this we have quoted renders visible the invisibilities of imaginative colour.

One thing prevents _Adonais_ from being ideally perfect: its lack of Christian hope. Yet we remember well the writer of a popular memoir on Keats proposing as "the best consolation for the mind pained by this sad record" Shelley's inexpressibly sad exposition of Pantheistic immortality:

He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely, _etc_.

What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan countenance is as the countenance of a despair? What deepest depth of agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality which thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved elements may circulate through her veins?

Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am as the vocal breath floating from an organ. I too shall fade on the winds, a cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in the ears of men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour, Pessimism. Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery that hiss against his tears.

With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, _Adonais_ is lighted; but they are obtained by implicitly assuming the personal immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to greet the dead youth,

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought Far in the unapparent.

And again the final stanza of the poem:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest riven; The massy earth, the sphered skies are given: I am borne darkly, fearfully afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais like a star Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.

The Soul of Adonais?--Adonais, who is but

A portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely.

After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the lover of Shelley leans most lovingly, which he has oftenest in his mind, which best represent Shelley to him and which he instinctively reverts to when Shelley's name is mentioned are some of the shorter poems and detached lyrics. Here Shelley forgets for a while all that ever makes his verse turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he is anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the clouds. He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy into heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that absolute virgin-gold of song which is the scarcest among human products, and for which we can go to but three poets--Coleridge, Shelley, Chopin, {8} and perhaps we should add Keats. _Christabel_ and _Kubla-Khan_; _The Skylark_, _The Cloud_, and _The Sensitive Plant_ (in its first two parts). _The Eve of Saint Agnes_ and _The Nightingale_; certain of the Nocturnes;--these things make very quintessentialised loveliness. It is attar of poetry.

Remark, as a thing worth remarking, that, although Shelley's diction is at other times singularly rich, it ceases in these poems to be rich, or to obtrude itself at all; it is imperceptible; his Muse has become a veritable Echo, whose body has dissolved from about her voice. Indeed, when his diction is richest, nevertheless the poetry so dominates the expression that we feel the latter only as an atmosphere until we are satiated with the former; then we discover with surprise to how imperial a vesture we had been blinded by gazing on the face of his song. A lesson, this, deserving to be conned by a generation so opposite in tendency as our own: a lesson that in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God, we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall be clothed, but seek first {9} the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us.

On the marvellous music of Shelley's verse we need not dwell, except to note that he avoids that metronomic beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully over-polished as Pope's one metre. Shelley could at need sacrifice smoothness to fitness. He could write an anapaest that would send Mr. Swinburne into strong shudders (e.g., "stream did glide") when he instinctively felt that by so forgoing the more obvious music of melody he would better secure the higher music of harmony. If we have to add that in other ways he was far from escaping the defects of his merits, and would sometimes have to acknowledge that his Nilotic flood too often overflowed its banks, what is this but saying that he died young?

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It may be thought that in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have been blind to its evil side. That, however, is not the case. We see clearly that he committed grave sins, and one cruel crime; but we remember also that he was an Atheist from his boyhood; we reflect how gross must have been the moral neglect in the training of a child who _could_ be an Atheist from his boyhood: and we decline to judge so unhappy a being by the rules which we should apply to a Catholic. It seems to us that Shelley was struggling--blindly, weakly, stumblingly, but still struggling--towards higher things. His Pantheism is an indication of it. Pantheism is a half-way house, and marks ascent or descent according to the direction from which it is approached. Now Shelley came to it from absolute Atheism; therefore in his case it meant rise. Again, his poetry alone would lead us to the same conclusion, for we do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can write consistently ethereal poetry. We should believe in nothing, if we believed that, for it would be the consecration of a lie. Poetry is a thermometer: by taking its average height you can estimate the normal temperature of its writer's mind. The devil can do many things. But the devil cannot write poetry. He may mar a poet, but he cannot make a poet. Among all the temptations wherewith he tempted St. Anthony, though we have often seen it stated that he howled, we have never seen it stated that he sang.

Shelley's anarchic principles were as a rule held by him with some misdirected view to truth. He disbelieved in kings. And is it not a mere fact--regret it if you will--that in all European countries, except two, monarchs are a mere survival, the obsolete buttons on the coat-tails of rule, which serve no purpose but to be continually coming off? It is a miserable thing to note how every little Balkan State, having obtained liberty (save the mark!) by Act of Congress, straightway proceeds to secure the service of a professional king. These gentlemen are plentiful in Europe. They are the "noble Chairmen" who lend their names for a consideration to any enterprising company which may be speculating in Liberty. When we see these things, we revert to the old lines in which Persius tells how you cannot turn Dama into a freeman by twirling him round your finger and calling him Marcus Dama.

Again, Shelley desired a religion of humanity, and that meant, to him, a religion for humanity, a religion which, unlike the spectral Christianity about him, should permeate and regulate the whole organisation of men. And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age when--if we may say so without irreverence--the Almighty has been made a constitutional Deity, with certain state-grants of worship, but no influence over political affairs. In these matters his aims were generous, if his methods were perniciously mistaken. In his theory of Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim was as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical. His theory was repulsive, but comprehensible. Whereas from our present _via media_--facilitation of divorce--can only result the era when the young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but will be open to engagement as wife at a reasonable stipend.