Shelley

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Transcribed from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




SHELLEY: AN ESSAY


The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints,
during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief
glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for
her own. The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song,
grew together in her soil: she has retained the palm, but forgone the
laurel. Poetry in its widest sense, {1} and when not professedly
irreligious, has been too much and too long among many Catholics either
misprised or distrusted; too much and too generally the feeling has been
that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often
dangerous. Once poetry was, as she should be, the lesser sister and
helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the
soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly
reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of
her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not
been well for religion.

Fathers of the Church (we would say), pastors of the Church, pious laics
of the Church: you are taking from its walls the panoply of Aquinas--take
also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the precedents of
the Church's past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi was among
the precursors of Dante; that sworn to Poverty he forswore not Beauty,
but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was even
more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry clung round
the cowls of his Order. Follow his footsteps; you who have blessings for
men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your memory that, in
their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less honour on
Catholicism than did the great religious poem which is itself pivoted on
love; that in singing of heaven he sang of Beatrice--this supporting
angel was still carven on his harp even when he stirred its strings in
Paradise. What you theoretically know, vividly realise: that with many
the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, that it is
only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty. Poetry is
the preacher to men of the earthly as you of the Heavenly Fairness; of
that earthly fairness which God has fashioned to His own image and
likeness. You proclaim the day which the Lord has made, and Poetry
exults and rejoices in it. You praise the Creator for His works, and she
shows you that they are very good. Beware how you misprise this potent
ally, for hers is the art of Giotto and Dante: beware how you misprise
this insidious foe, for hers is the art of modern France and of Byron.
Her value, if you know it not, God knows, and know the enemies of God. If
you have no room for her beneath the wings of the Holy One, there is
place for her beneath the webs of the Evil One: whom you discard, he
embraces; whom you cast down from an honourable seat, he will advance to
a haughty throne; the brows you dislaurel of a just respect, he will bind
with baleful splendours; the stone which you builders reject, he will
make his head of the corner. May she not prophesy in the temple? then
there is ready for her the tripod of Delphi. Eye her not askance if she
seldom sing directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God though it
sings only of its innocent loves. Suspicion creates its own cause;
distrust begets reason for distrust. This beautiful, wild, feline
Poetry, wild because left to range the wilds, restore to the hearth of
your charity, shelter under the rafter of your Faith; discipline her to
the sweet restraints of your household, feed her with the meat from your
table, soften her with the amity of your children; tame her, fondle her,
cherish her--you will no longer then need to flee her. Suffer her to
wanton, suffer her to play, so she play round the foot of the Cross!

There is a change of late years: the Wanderer is being called to her
Father's house, but we would have the call yet louder, we would have the
proffered welcome more unstinted. There are still stray remnants of the
old intolerant distrust. It is still possible for even a French
historian of the Church to enumerate among the articles cast upon
Savonarola's famous pile, _poesies erotiques, tant des anciens que des
modernes, livres impies ou corrupteurs, Ovide, Tibulle, Properce, pour ne
nommer que les plus connus, Dante, Petrarque, Boccace, tous ces auteurs
Italiens qui deja souillaient les ames et ruinaient les moeurs, en creant
ou perfectionnant la langue_. {2} Blameworthy carelessness at the least,
which can class the _Vita Nuova_ with the _Ars Amandi_ and the
_Decameron_! And among many English Catholics the spirit of poetry is
still often received with a restricted Puritanical greeting, rather than
with the traditionally Catholic joyous openness.

We ask, therefore, for a larger interest, not in purely Catholic poetry,
but in poetry generally, poetry in its widest sense. With few
exceptions, whatsoever in our best poets is great and good to the non-
Catholic, is great and good also to the Catholic; and though Faber threw
his edition of Shelley into the fire and never regretted the act; though,
moreover, Shelley is so little read among us that we can still tolerate
in our Churches the religious parody which Faber should have thrown after
his three-volumed Shelley; {3}--in spite of this, we are not disposed to
number among such exceptions that straying spirit of light.

* * * * *

We have among us at the present day no lineal descendant, in the poetical
order, of Shelley; and any such offspring of the aboundingly spontaneous
Shelley is hardly possible, still less likely, on account of the defect
by which (we think) contemporary poetry in general, as compared with the
poetry of the early nineteenth century, is mildewed. That defect is the
predominance of art over inspiration, of body over soul. We do not say
the _defect_ of inspiration. The warrior is there, but he is hampered by
his armour. Writers of high aim in all branches of literature, even when
they are not--as Mr. Swinburne, for instance, is--lavish in expression,
are generally over-deliberate in expression. Mr. Henry James,
delineating a fictitious writer clearly intended to be the ideal of an
artist, makes him regret that he has sometimes allowed himself to take
the second-best word instead of searching for the best. Theoretically,
of course, one ought always to try for the best word. But practically,
the habit of excessive care in word-selection frequently results in loss
of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of always taking the best
word too easily becomes the habit of always taking the most ornate word,
the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this,
poetic diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief
curiosity is as to the precise combinations into which the pieces will be
shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian
cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to
the poetical purple, and without whose prescriptive aid none dares aspire
to the poetical purple; against these it is time some banner should be
raised. Perhaps it is almost impossible for a contemporary writer quite
to evade the services of the free-lances whom one encounters under so
many standards. {4} But it is at any rate curious to note that the
literary revolution against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing,
like political revolutions, in a despotism of its own making.

This, then, we cannot but think, distinguishes the literary period of
Shelley from our own. It distinguishes even the unquestionable treasures
and masterpieces of to-day from similar treasures and masterpieces of the
precedent day; even _the Lotus-Eaters_ from _Kubla-Khan_; even Rossetti's
ballads from _Christabel_. It is present in the restraint of Matthew
Arnold no less than in the exuberance of Swinburne, and affects our
writers who aim at simplicity no less than those who seek richness.
Indeed, nothing is so artificial as our simplicity. It is the simplicity
of the French stage _ingenue_. We are self-conscious to the finger-tips;
and this inherent quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of
spontaneity, ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be
born to us from the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among
us no reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce child-like
children cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was
essentially a child.

Yet, just as in the effete French society before the Revolution the Queen
played at Arcadia, the King played at being a mechanic, everyone played
at simplicity and universal philanthropy, leaving for most durable
outcome of their philanthropy the guillotine, as the most durable outcome
of ours may be execution by electricity;--so in our own society the talk
of benevolence and the cult of childhood are the very fashion of the
hour. We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise
our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special
capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at
being children. And the result is that we are not more child-like, but
our children are less child-like. It is so tiring to stoop to the child,
so much easier to lift the child up to you. Know you what it is to be a
child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It
is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to
believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to
be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to
turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness,
and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in
its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king
of infinite space; it is

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in
dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when we
become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but just
beginning. Now if Shelley was but too conscious of the dream, in other
respects Dryden's false and famous line might have been applied to him
with very much less than it's usual untruth. {5} To the last, in a
degree uncommon even among poets, he retained the idiosyncrasy of
childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last he
was the enchanted child.

This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is as really, though
perhaps less obviously, manifest in his poetry, the sincere effluence of
his life. And it may not, therefore, be amiss to consider whether it was
conditioned by anything beyond his congenital nature. For our part, we
believe it to have been equally largely the outcome of his early and long
isolation. Men given to retirement and abstract study are notoriously
liable to contract a certain degree of childlikeness: and if this be the
case when we segregate a man, how much more when we segregate a child! It
is when they are taken into the solution of school-life that children, by
the reciprocal interchange of influence with their fellows, undergo the
series of reactions which converts them from children into boys and from
boys into men. The intermediate stage must be traversed to reach the
final one.

Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy. And the
reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his school-days. Of that
persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in _The Revolt of Islam_,
a picture which to many or most people very probably seems a poetical
exaggeration; partly because Shelley appears to have escaped physical
brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile tenderly at
childish sorrows which are not caused by physical suffering. That he
escaped for the most part bodily violence is nothing to the purpose. It
is the petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour, day by day,
month by month, until its accumulation becomes an agony; it is this which
is the most terrible weapon that boys have against their fellow boy, who
is powerless to shun it because, unlike the man, he has virtually no
privacy. His is the torture which the ancients used, when they anointed
their victim with honey and exposed him naked to the restless fever of
the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian, sinking under the incessant
flight of shafts which skilfully avoid the vital parts.

We do not, therefore, suspect Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt,
in terrible misery. Those who think otherwise must forget their own
past. Most people, we suppose, _must_ forget what they were like when
they were children: otherwise they would know that the griefs of their
childhood were passionate abandonment, _dechirants_ (to use a
characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the
griefs of their maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but
so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while
its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of
relativity; the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to the
sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an amputation to another. Pour
a puddle into a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and
mountain overflow. Adult fools, would not the angels smile at our
griefs, were not angels too wise to smile at them?

So beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the
drawbridge. He threw out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to
maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of
others into the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until
it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in which Hogg
encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university,
it swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the
gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this
seclusion--lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of
youth--which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most
saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation, as the
seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry,
they must first be divided from the body of men. It is the severed head
that makes the seraph.

Shelley's life frequently exhibits in him the magnified child. It is
seen in his fondness for apparently futile amusements, such as the
sailing of paper boats. This was, in the truest sense of the word, child-
like; not, as it is frequently called and considered, childish. That is
to say, it was not a mindless triviality, but the genuine child's power
of investing little things with imaginative interest; the same power,
though differently devoted, which produced much of his poetry. Very
possibly in the paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon and Cythna, or

That thinnest boat
In which the mother of the months is borne
By ebbing night into her western cave.

In fact, if you mark how favourite an idea, under varying forms, is this
in his verse, you will perceive that all the charmed boats which glide
down the stream of his poetry are but glorified resurrections of the
little paper argosies which trembled down the Isis.

And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in
Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellent no less than in his
amiable weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made its goal
its starting-point, and firmly expected spiritual rest from each new
divinity, though it had found none from the divinities antecedent. For
we are clear that this was no mere straying of sensual appetite, but a
straying, strange and deplorable, of the spirit; that (contrary to what
Mr. Coventry Patmore has said) he left a woman not because he was tired
of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul. When he found Mary
Shelley wanting, he seems to have fallen into the mistake of Wordsworth,
who complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife's
love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:

Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

Wordsworth probably learned, what Shelley was incapable of learning, that
love can never permanently be a fountain. A living poet, in an article
{6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some of
the frail pastel-like bloom, has said the thing: "Love itself has tidal
moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior
heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an
affection, its display an emotion: love is the air, its display is the
wind. An affection may be constant; an emotion can no more be constant
than the wind can constantly blow. All, therefore, that a man can
reasonably ask of his wife is that her love should be indeed a well. A
well; but a Bethesda-well, into which from time to time the angel of
tenderness descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved.
Such a love Shelley's second wife appears unquestionably to have given
him. Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true;
she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his
aspirations, and yet--yet, even at the date of _Epipsychidion_ the
foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia
Viviani's sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain,
irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society. Yet few poets were
so mated before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning
stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of
tears.

In truth, his very unhappiness and discontent with life, in so far as it
was not the inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can only be
ascribed to this same child-like irrationality--though in such a form it
is irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley. Pity, if you will, his
spiritual ruins and the neglected early training which was largely their
cause; but the pity due to his outward circumstances has been strangely
exaggerated. The obloquy from which he suffered he deliberately and
wantonly courted. For the rest, his lot was one that many a young poet
might envy. He had faithful friends, a faithful wife, an income small
but assured. Poverty never dictated to his pen; the designs on his
bright imagination were never etched by the sharp fumes of necessity.

If, as has chanced to others--as chanced, for example, to Mangan--outcast
from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an
anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered without
self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated,
pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays
and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of
love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of
childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable
heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the
gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being,
tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept
across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was
Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats, half chewed in the
jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he
escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom
they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life. Shelley had
competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a
tired child and weep away his life of care. Is it ever so with you, sad
brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except
they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or
having it is satisfied?"

It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets
contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered
from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry
between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond
the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism,
who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established
canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to
believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by
want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that
senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity!
posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful
inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her
curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other
gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need
not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful
support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and
such support Shelley had:

La gloire
Ne compte pas toujours les voix;
Elle les pese quelquefois.

Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the
applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been
needful to him as motive: the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet's
singing is that expressed by Keats:

I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies.

Precisely so. The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling
the baby-song. No enmity of outward circumstances, therefore, but his
own nature, was responsible for Shelley's doom.

A being with so much about it of child-like unreasonableness, and yet
withal so much of the beautiful attraction luminous in a child's sweet
unreasonableness, would seem fore-fated by its very essence to the
transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair.
Did some shadow of this destiny bear part in his sadness? Certain it is
that, by a curious chance, he himself in _Julian and Maddalo_ jestingly
foretold the manner of his end. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said
Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); "If you can't swim, Beware of
Providence." Did no unearthly _dixisti_ sound in his ears as he wrote
it? But a brief while, and Shelley, who could not swim, was weltering on
the waters of Lerici. We know not how this may affect others, but over
us it is a coincidence which has long tyrannised with an absorbing
inveteracy of impression (strengthened rather than diminished by the
contrast between the levity of the utterance and its fatal
fulfilment)--thus to behold, heralding itself in warning mockery through
the very lips of its predestined victim, the Doom upon whose breath his
locks were lifting along the coasts of Campania. The death which he had
prophesied came upon him, and Spezzia enrolled another name among the
mournful Marcelli of our tongue; Venetian glasses which foamed and burst
before the poisoned wine of life had risen to their brims.

* * * * *

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.