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 SHELLEY 
 
 
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 FROM THE 
 
 BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY 
 
 COLLECTED BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 
 1854-1919 
 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 5438.T47 1909 
 
 Shelley; an essay 
 
 3 1924 013 550 763 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013550763 
 
SHELLEY: AN ESSAY 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 AN ESSAY BY 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
 Portland, Maine : Printed for Thomas B Mosher 
 
 and published by him at ^5 Exchange Street 
 
 MDCCCCIX 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 
 THOMAS B. MOSHER 
 
 1909 
 
THE QUIET SINGER 
 
 ( AVE I FRANCIS THOMPSON ) 
 
 E had been singing — but I had not 
 heard his voice; 
 
 He had been weaving lovely dreams 
 of song, 
 O many a morning long. 
 But I, remote and far, 
 Under an alien star. 
 Listened to other singers, other birds. 
 And other silver words. 
 
 But does the skylark, singing sweet and clear. 
 Beg the cold world to hear ? 
 Rather he sings for very rapture of singing, 
 At dawn, or in the blue, mild Summer noon, 
 Knowing that, late or soon. 
 His wealth of beauty, and his high notes, ringing 
 Above the earth, will make some heart rejoice. 
 He sings, albeit alone. 
 Spendthrift of each pure tone. 
 Hoarding no single song. 
 No cadence wild and strong. 
 
THE QUIET SINGER 
 
 But one day, from a friend far overseas, 
 
 As if upon tlie breeze, 
 
 There came the teeming wonder of his words — 
 
 A golden troop of birds. 
 
 Caged in a little volume made to love ; 
 
 Singing, singing, 
 
 Flinging, flinging 
 
 Their breaking hearts on mine, and swiftly bringing 
 
 Tears, and the peace thereof. 
 
 How the world woke anew 1 
 
 How the days broke anew I 
 
 Before my tear -blind eyes a tapestry 
 
 I seemed to see, 
 
 Woven of all the dreams dead or to be. 
 
 Hills, hills of song, Springs of eternal bloom. 
 
 Autumns of golden pomp and purple gloom 
 
 Were hung upon his loom. 
 
 Winters of pain, roses with awful thorns. 
 
 Yet wondrous faith in God's dew -drenched morns — 
 
 These, all these I saw, 
 
 With that ecstatic awe 
 
 Wherewith one looks into Eternity. 
 
 And then I knew that, though I had not heard 
 
 His voice before. 
 
 His quiet singing, like some quiet bird 
 
THE QUIET SINGER 
 
 vu 
 
 At some one's distant door, 
 
 Had made my own more sweet ; had made it more 
 
 Lovely, in one of God's miraculous ways. 
 
 I knew then why the days 
 
 Had seemed to me more perfect when the Spring 
 
 Came with old burgeoning ; 
 
 For somewhere in the world his voice was raised. 
 
 And somewhere in the world his heart was breaking ; 
 
 And never a flower but knew it, sweetly taking 
 
 Beauty more high and noble for his sake, 
 
 As a whole wood grows lovelier for the wail 
 
 Of one sad nightingale. 
 
 Yet if the Springs long past 
 
 Seemed wonderful before I heard his voice, 
 
 I tremble at the beauty I shall see 
 
 In seasons still to be, 
 
 Now that his songs are mine while Life shall last. 
 
 O now for me 
 
 New floods of visions open suddenly. . . . 
 
 Rejoice, my heart I Rejoice 
 
 That you have heard the Quiet Singer's voice 1 
 
 CHARLES HANSON TOWNE 
 
For the privilege of reprinting the 
 foregoing poem, special acknowl- 
 edgment and thanks are due 
 Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Company, 
 publishers of The Quiet Singer and 
 Other Poems by Charles Hanson 
 Towne, New York, 1908. 
 
PREFACE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 HEN Francis Thompson's 
 essay on Shelley appeared 
 in The Dublin Review for 
 July, 1908, it had prefixed 
 the following note by Mr. Wilfrid Ward, editor of 
 that time-honoured Roman Catholic quarterly : 
 
 "The editor thinks that his readers will welcome 
 this very remarkable posthumous essay in the precise 
 form in which it was found among the papers of its 
 author, the late Mr. Francis Thompson. It lacks, of 
 course, the author's final revision, and may contain a 
 sentence here or there which Mr. Thompson himself 
 would not finally have endorsed without those omis- 
 sions of qualifying phrases which a writer makes or 
 adds before passing his work for publication. Such 
 modifications cannot, however, be satisfactorily made 
 by another hand, and only obvious corrections 
 
PREFACE 
 
 necessary for literary reasons have been made by the 
 author's literary executor, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, to 
 whose kindness The Dublin Review is indebted for the 
 offer of the article." 
 
 As a result, for the first time in a record of 
 seventy years, The Dublin Review found itself 
 in a second edition which was also speedily 
 exhausted although the demand was by no 
 means satisfied. The first edition in book 
 form with an Introduction by Mr. George 
 Wyndham (London, 1909) has since been 
 followed by several reissues proving that the 
 general public as well as the believers in a 
 special cult had come to a very genuine 
 appreciation of a piece of prose originally 
 prepared for publication in 1889. At that 
 time it was refused by the same Review which 
 twenty years later under the guidance of 
 another editor accepted it. It is possible that 
 our reprint of the essay as it appeared in The 
 Dublin Review would have been published 
 without prefatory remark as to the new edition 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 had it not been that some liberties were taken 
 when issued in book form which seemed with- 
 out sufficient warrant. The omitted passages 
 will be found inclosed in brackets, and while 
 they do not materially aifect the text leave it, 
 at least, as Francis Thompson wrote it. 
 
 On the other hand the Introduction by 
 Mr. Wyndham is open to debate : to say of 
 Thompson, " He is a meteor exhaled from the 
 miasma of mire," may be of interest from a 
 publisher's advertising view-point but can 
 hardly be thought other than mere literary 
 journalese. Whether or not the essay " is the 
 most important contribution to pure Letters 
 written in English during the last twenty 
 years," we may safely leave English critics to 
 decide. That the late Lionel Johnson as well 
 as the living Mr. W. B. Yeats, not to mention 
 Mr. Arthur Symons, are people of some criti- 
 cal importance in their day not yet passed, it 
 will do no harm to the rising fame of Francis 
 Thompson to remember. 
 
XIV 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Thompson's prose, when all reasonable 
 deductions have been made, can be left to 
 its own magnificent merits. His language if 
 fantastic and at times far-fetched possesses an 
 unforgettable quality even if one forms the 
 conclusion that thgre is rather too much made 
 of " the worm must wriggle his curt say to it 
 all." ■ In Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying there is 
 
 I It would seem from the following citation by Mr. 
 Meynell of a passage in An Anthem of Earth that the 
 closing paragraph in Shelley was levied upon to a fairly 
 recognizable extent : 
 
 "Ay, Mother 1 Mother! 
 What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed. 
 Thou lustingly engender'st. 
 To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, 
 Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness ? 
 From nightly towers 
 
 He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens. 
 Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust. 
 And yet is he successive unto nothing 
 But patrimony of a little mould, 
 
 And entaU of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth 
 Avid of all dominion and all mightiness. 
 All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs. 
 All beauty, and all starry majesties, 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 a passage which antedates and outranks any 
 other 'wormy' discourse in English literature. 
 It is our consolation to know that scientific 
 concepts have freed us from much of this mor- 
 tuary mouthing, however splendid, and that we 
 have within reach a method which the wiser 
 Greeks knew and practiced — the swift flame 
 that makes short shrift of our bodily dishonour 
 and a little urn that will gather up and conse- 
 crate the most beloved dust. 
 
 Another Thomson there was, whom some of 
 us still cherish, whose Shelley, a Poem : with 
 
 And dim transtellar things ; — even that it may, 
 
 Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, 
 
 Confess — 'It is enough.' The world left empty 
 
 What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded 
 
 For pride, for potency, infinity, 
 
 All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, 
 
 Arrased with purple like the house of kings, — 
 
 To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion- worm 
 
 Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries I 
 
 Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, 
 
 Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark 
 
 As we ourselves, thy darkest I " 
 
PREFACE 
 
 other Writings relating to Shelley, (London, 
 privately printed, 1884,) remains in evidence. 
 He, too,, was a poet and The City of Dreadful 
 Night is his passport to the land of the 
 Hereafter. It was James Thomson ("B. V.") 
 who wrote as early as 1865 : " Shelley has 
 been called The Eternal Child." And again, 
 "Shelley started from the time and place of 
 his birth to reach the old dominions of his 
 ancestry." (He was, as Thomson affirmed, 
 a young Greek of the race of the Gods born 
 three thousand years after his time, in Chris- 
 tian England.) 
 
 "In this enterprise he had to conquer and destroy 
 the terrible armies of fanaticism, asceticism, cant, 
 hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, lording it over England ; 
 and at the same time, the spirituality of the new 
 religion, the liberty and equality and fraternity of the 
 new political systems, all things lovely and true and 
 holy of the modern life he would bear with him for the 
 re-inspiration of the antique. He aspired not to a new 
 Jerusalem in the heavens, but to a new Hellenic 
 Metropolis on Earth ; he looked for redemption and 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xvii 
 
 victory, not to Christ on Calvary, but to Prometlieus 
 on Caucasus." 
 
 We cannot bring our Preface to an end 
 without citing that final passage from Notes on 
 the Text of Shelley which the last and greatest 
 of the Victorian masters saw fit to publish 
 forty years ago. It ends with a consideration 
 of the Epipsychidion ; and of him who wrote it 
 Swinburne used these undying words : 
 
 " That poet who has now for two generations ruled 
 and moulded the hearts and minds of all among his 
 countrymen to whom the love of poetry has been more 
 than a fancy or a fashion ; who has led them by the 
 light of hiS' faith, by the spell of his hope, by the fire 
 of his love, on the way of thought which he himself 
 had followed in the track of the greatest who had gone 
 before him — of ^schylus, of Lucretius, of Milton; 
 who has been more to us than ever was Byron to the 
 youth of his own brief day, than ever was Wordsworth 
 to the students of the day succeeding; and of whom, 
 whether we class him as second or as third among 
 English poets, it must be in either case conceded that 
 he holds the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in 
 
xvui 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 dramatic poetry — supreme, and without a second of 
 his race. I would not pit his name against the sacred 
 name of Milton ; to wrangle for the precedence of this 
 immortal or of that can be but futile and injurious ; it 
 is enough that our country may count among her sons 
 two of the greatest among those great poets who have 
 also been prophets and evangelists of personal and 
 national, social and spiritual freedom ; but it is equally 
 certain that of all forms or kinds of poetry the two 
 highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that as 
 Clearly as the first place in the one rank is held among 
 us by Shakespeare, the first place in the other is held 
 and will never be resigned by Shelley." 
 
 T. B. M. 
 
SHELLEY 
 
The poet beloved above all other 
 poets, being beyond all other poets — 
 in one word, and the only proper 
 word — divine. 
 
 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 ^tTF^^ he Church, which was once the 
 mother of poets no less than of 
 saints, during the last two cen- 
 turies 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. 
 [And for this if song is itself responsible, we 
 Catholics are not irresponsible.] Poetry in 
 its widest sense,' and when not professedly 
 irreligious, has been too much and too long 
 among many Catholics either misprized or 
 
 I That is to say, taken as the general animating 
 spirit of the Fine Arts. 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 minis- 
 ter to the mind, as the Church to the soul. 
 But poetry sinned, poetry fell ; and, in place of 
 lovingly reclaiming her, Cathohcism 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 pan- 
 oply 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; 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 Para- 
 dise. What you theoretically know, vividly 
 realize : 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 she exults and rejoices in it. You 
 praise the Creator for His works, and she 
 shows you that they are very good. Beware 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 how you misprize this potent ally, for hers is 
 the art of Giotto and Dante : beware how you 
 misprize 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 ; dis- 
 trust begets reason for distrust. This beau- 
 tiful, wild, feline poetry, wild because left to 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren ; 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, [we have said,] 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 rem- 
 nants 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., poisies krotiques, 
 tant des anciens que des modernes, livres impies 
 ou corrupteurs, Ovide, Tibulle, Proper ce,pourne 
 nommer que les plus connus, Dante, PHrarque, 
 Boccace, tous ces auteurs Italiens qui dkjd, souil- 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 latent Us dmes et ruinaient les mxurs, en crkant 
 ou perfectionnant la langue. ' Blameworthy 
 carelessness, at the least, which can class the 
 Vita Nuova with the Ars Amandi and the 
 Decameron I And among many English Cath- 
 olics 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 gener- 
 ally, poetry in its widest sense. [We ask for 
 it from the average instructed, morally hale 
 Catholic, who is not liable to spiritual cold 
 with every breath of outside air. We ask for 
 it specially in the case of verse, of poetry 
 proper, as a mere necessity, if Catholicism is 
 ever to make any impression on this branch 
 of English art.] With few exceptions, whatso- 
 ever in our best poets is great and good to 
 
 I The Abbe Bareille was not, of course, responsible 
 for Savonarola's taste, only for thus endorsing it. 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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;' — in spite of this, we are not dis- 
 posed 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 abound- 
 ingly 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 inspira- 
 tion, of body over soul. We do not say the 
 
 I We mean, of course, the hymn, " I rise from 
 dreams of time." 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 gener- 
 ally 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 kaleido- 
 scope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the 
 precise combinations into which the pieces 
 
SHELLEY II 
 
 will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain 
 band of words, the Prsetorian 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.' But it is at any rate curious to 
 
 I We are a little surprised at the fact, because so 
 many Victorian poets are, or have been, prose-writers 
 as well. Now, according to our theory, the practice 
 of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a 
 poet's diction, should save him from falling into the 
 hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It 
 should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its bene- 
 ficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic 
 circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the 
 great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is 
 with words as with men : constant intermarriage with - 
 in the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refine- 
 ment ; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be 
 replenished from hardy plebeian blood. 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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, distin- 
 guishes the literary period of Shelley from our 
 own. It distinguishes even the unquestion- 
 able treasures and masterpieces of to-day 
 from similar treasures and masterpieces of 
 the precedent day; even the Lotos-Eaters 
 from Kubla-Khan, even Rossetti's ballads 
 from Christabel. It is present in the restraint 
 of Matthew Arnold no less than in the exuber- 
 ance 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 ing'enue. 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 
 
SHELLEY 13 
 
 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, every 
 one played at simplicity and universal philan- 
 thropy, 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, sentimen- 
 talize our children, analyse our children, think 
 we are endowed with a special capacity to 
 sympathize and identify ourselves with chil- 
 dren; 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 
 
14 SHELLEY 
 
 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 diifer- 
 ent 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 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 com- 
 muted into death. When we become conscious 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 IS 
 
 in dreaming that we dream, the dream is on 
 the point of breaking ; when we become con- 
 scious 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 
 its usual untruth.' 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, there- 
 fore, be amiss to consider whether it was 
 conditioned by anything beyond his congenital 
 
 
 I Wordsworth's adaptation of it, however, is true. 
 Men are not "children of a larger growth," but the 
 child is father of the man, since the parent is only 
 partially reproduced in his offspring. 
 
i6 
 
 SHELLEY / 
 
 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 I 
 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. J^ow Shelley 
 never could have been a man, for he never 
 was a boy. And the reason lay in the perse- 
 cution which overclouded his schooldays. 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. 
 
SHELLEY 17 
 
 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 : 
 
i8 SHELLEY 
 
 otherwise they would know that the griefs of 
 their childhood were passionate abandonment, 
 d'echirants (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 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 seclu- 
 sion — 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 fre- 
 quently called and considered, childish. That 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 pro- 
 duced much of his poetry. Very possibly in 
 the paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon 
 and Cythna, or 
 
 That thinnest boat 
 On which the mother of the months is borne 
 By ebbing night into her lunar 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, 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 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 deplora- 
 ble, 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 unreason- 
 ableness 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 Catholic poet, 
 in an article which you almost fear to breathe 
 upon lest you should flutter some of the frail 
 
22 
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 
 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 reason- 
 ably 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 
 
 I The Rhythm of Life. By Alice Meynell. 
 
SHELLEY 23 
 
 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 discon- 
 tent with life, in so far as it was not the 
 inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can 
 only be ascribed to this same childlike irration- 
 ality—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 
 
24 SHELLEY 
 
 his pen ; the designs on his bright imagina- 
 tion 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 with- 
 out 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 
 
SHELLEY 25 
 
 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 por- 
 tion 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 1 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 hav- 
 ing 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 
 
26 SHELLEY 
 
 " 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 beau- 
 tiful inscriptions, over the tomb of Keats ; and 
 the worm must wriggle her curt say 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 p^se quelquefois. 
 
SHELLEY 27 
 
 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 thart; 
 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, there- 
 fore, but his own nature, was responsible for 
 Shelley's doom. 
 
 A being with so much about it of childlike 
 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, 
 
28 SHELLEY 
 
 by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and 
 Maddalo jestingly foretold the manner of his 
 end. "Oho I 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 tyrannized with an absorbing invet- 
 eracy 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 
 
SHELLEY 29 
 
 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 con- 
 spicuous, throughout his singing; it is the 
 child's faculty of make-believe raised to the 
 "n*" 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 
 amid the stars. He makes bright mischief 
 with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their 
 noses in his hand. He teases into growling 
 
30 SHELLEY 
 
 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 childlike quality 
 assimilated him to the childlike 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 
 
SHELLEY 31 
 
 clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad 
 nostril, all the elemental spirits of Nature, 
 take from his verse perpetual incarnation and 
 reincarnation, passing a thousand glorious 
 transmigrations through the radiant forms of 
 his imagery. Thus, but not in the Words- 
 worthian 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, recognizable scenery of Wordsworth, 
 but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat 
 and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. 
 
32 SHELLEY 
 
 The materials for such visionary Edens have 
 evidently been accumulated from direct expe- 
 rience, but they are recomposed by him into 
 such scenes as never 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 ebul- 
 lient heart," who 
 
 Sings as if the god of wine 
 Had iielped 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 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 33 
 
 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 range of images. The sources of his 
 figurative wealth are specialized, while the 
 sources of Shakespeare's are universal. It 
 would have been as conscious an effort for 
 him to speak without figure as it is idr most 
 men to speak with figure. Suspended in the 
 dripping well of his imagination the common- 
 est 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 
 adornmeijt ; 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 
 
34 SHELLEY 
 
 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) gener- 
 ally perceived, was Cowley systematized ; and 
 Cowley, who sank into the arms of Dryden, 
 rose from the lap of Donne. But the move- 
 ment was so abortive that few will thank us 
 for connecting with it the name of Shelley. 
 This is because to most people the Metaphys- 
 ical 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 
 
SHELLEY 35 
 
 Crashaw, and Crashaw was a Shelley manqui ; 
 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 Nesera's hair may be trivial idleness 
 or caressing tenderness, exactly as your rela- 
 tion to Nesera 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 Meta- 
 physical poets when they went astray cannot 
 
36 SHELLEY 
 
 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 passion- 
 ate 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. 
 It is this gift of not merely embodying 
 but apprehending everything in figure which 
 co-operates towards creating one of his rarest 
 characteristics, so almost preternaturally de- 
 veloped 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, noth- 
 ing is abstract. The dustiest abstractions 
 
SHELLEY 37 
 
 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 dim- 
 mest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and 
 scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. 
 The most wrinkled .^Eson of an abstruseness 
 leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a 
 more intensified signification than it is prob- 
 able that Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley 
 gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a 
 name. Here afresh he touches the Metaphy- 
 sical 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 difi&cult 
 to understand why a generation that worships 
 
38 SHELLEY 
 
 Shelley should be revivitig 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-lii^ering 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 // Penseroso. Crash aw, 
 Collins, Shelley — three ricochets of the one 
 pebble, three jets from three bounds of the 
 one Pegasus 1 Collins' 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, how- 
 ever, is personification, wherein both Collins 
 and Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying 
 
SHELLEY 39 
 
 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 Poetry, 
 
 From the skiey towers 
 
 Where Thought's crowned powers 
 Sit watching your flight, ye happy Hours. 
 
 Our feet now, every palm, 
 
 Are sandalled with calm, 
 And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm ; 
 
 And within 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 
 
40 SHELLEY 
 
 and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intui- 
 tion) 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 correspond- 
 ing 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 swift- 
 ness 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 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 41 
 
 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,' 
 
 The finest specimens of this faculty are 
 probably to be sought in that Shelleian treas- 
 ury, Prometheus Unbound. It is unquestion- 
 ably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition 
 of Shelley's powers, this amazing lyric world, 
 where immortal clarities sigh past in the per- 
 fumes 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. 
 
 
 ' "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even 
 as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is 
 shaken of a mighty wind " (Rev. vi, 13). 
 
42 SHELLEY 
 
 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 
 
SHELLEY 43 
 
 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 Lyci- 
 das 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 vitalized with daring 
 exquisiteness, from 
 
44 SHELLEY 
 
 Morning sought 
 Her eastern watch -tower, and her hair unbound, 
 Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground. 
 Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day, 
 
 to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead 
 shepherd, 
 
 Whom near the streams 
 Of his young spirit he kept ; 
 
 of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning 
 over him, 
 
 Upon the silken fringe of his fair eyes 
 
 A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain 1 
 
 Lost angel of a ruined Paradise I 
 
 She knew not 'twas her own, as with no stain 
 
 She faded like a cloud that 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. 
 
SHELLEY 4S 
 
 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 imnjortality. 
 
 He is a portion of tliat loveliness 
 Which once he made more lovely, etc. 
 
 What utter desolation can it be that discerns 
 comfort in this hope, whose wan countenance 
 is as the countenance of a despair? Nay, 
 was not indeed wanhope the Saxon for 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 
 
46 SHELLEY 
 
 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 parti- 
 tion 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 seats, built beyond mortal thought 
 
 Far in the unapparent. 
 
 And again the final stanza of the poem : 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 47 
 
 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 given : 
 
 The massy earth, the sphered skies are riven ; 
 
 I am borne darkly, fearfully afar. 
 
 Where, 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 that 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 
 
48 SHELLEY 
 
 but a poet, forgets sometimes that he is any- 
 thing 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,' 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 quintessentialized 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 
 
 I Such analogies between masters in sister -arts are 
 often interesting. In some respects, is not Brahms 
 the Browning of music ? 
 
SHELLEY 49 
 
 rich, or to obtrude itself at all ; it is imper- 
 ceptible ; 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 only feel the latter 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 ' 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 
 
 I Seek ^rst, not seek onfy. 
 
50 SHELLEY 
 
 rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied 
 metres are becoming as painfully over-pol- 
 ished 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 ? 
 
 It may be thought that in our casual com- 
 ments 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 
 
SHELLEY 
 
 SI 
 
 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 strug- 
 gling — 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 Athe- 
 ism; 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 noth- 
 ing, if we believed that, for it would be the 
 consecration of a lie. Poetry is a thermom- 
 eter: 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 
 
52 SHELLEY 
 
 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 enter- 
 prising company which may be speculating in 
 Liberty. When we see these things, we revert 
 
SHELLEY S3 
 
 to the old lines in which Persius tells how 
 you cannot turn Dama into a freeman by twirl- 
 ing him round with 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 
 organization of men. And the feeling is one 
 with which a Catholic must sympathize, in an 
 age where — if we may say so without irrev- 
 erence — the Almighty has been made a con- 
 stitutional 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 
 
54 SHELLEY 
 
 — can only result the era when the young 
 lady in reduced circumstances will no longer 
 turn governess, but will be open to engage- 
 ment as wife at a reasonable stipend. 
 
 We spoke of the purity of Shelley's poetry. 
 We know of but three passages to which 
 exception can be taken. One is happily 
 hidden under a heap of Shelleian rubbish. 
 Another is offensive because it presents his 
 theory of Free Love in its most odious form. 
 The third is very much a matter, we think, for 
 the individual conscience. Compare with this 
 the genuinely corrupt Byron, through the 
 cracks and fissures of whose heaving versifi- 
 cation steam up perpetually the sulphurous 
 vapours from his central iniquity. We cannot 
 credit that any Christian ever had his faith 
 shaken through reading Shelley, unless his 
 faith were shaken before he read Shelley. Is 
 any safely-havened bark likely to slip its cable, 
 and make for a flag planted on the very reef 
 where the planter himself was wrecked ? 
 
SHELLEY ss 
 
 Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in con- 
 cluding) should it be that the poets who have 
 written for us the poetry richest in skiey grain, 
 most free from admixture with the duller 
 things of earth — the Shelleys, the Coleridges, 
 the Keats — are the very poets whose lives 
 are among the saddest records in literature? 
 Is it that (by some subtile mystery of analogy), 
 sorrow, passion and fantasy are indissolubly 
 connected, like water, fire and cloud ; that as 
 from sun and dew are born the vapours, so 
 from fire and tears ascend the "visions of 
 aerial joy ; " that the harvest waves richest 
 over the battlefields of the soul; that the 
 heart, like the earth, smells sweetest after 
 rain ; that the spell' on which depend such 
 necromantic castles is some spirit of pain 
 charm-poisoned at their base ? " Such a poet, 
 it may be, mists with sighs the window of his 
 
 I We hope that we need not refer the reader, for 
 the methods of magic architecture, to Ariosto and that 
 Atlas among enchanters, Beckford. 
 
S6 SHELLEY 
 
 life until the tears run down it ; then some air 
 of searching poetry, like an air of searching 
 frost, turns it to a crystal wonder. The god of 
 golden song is the god, too, of the golden sun ; 
 so peradventure songlight is like sunlight, and 
 darkens the countenance of the soul. Perhaps 
 the rays are to the stars what thorns are to 
 the flowers ; and so the poet, after wandering 
 over heaven, returns with bleeding feet. Less 
 tragic in its merely temporal aspect than the 
 life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of Shelley 
 in its moral aspect is, perhaps, more tragical 
 than that of either ; his dying seems a myth, 
 a figure of his living ; the material shipwreck a 
 figure of the immaterial. 
 
 Enchanted child, born into a world unchild- 
 like ; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of 
 her elemental daughters ; " pard-like spirit, 
 beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning 
 fastnesses of his own fervid mind ; bold foot 
 along the verges of precipitous dream; light 
 leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fan- 
 
SHELLEY S7 
 
 cies ; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a 
 ladder between heaven and earth with the 
 angels of song ascending and descending it ; — 
 he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, 
 and sealed with the unshatterable seal of 
 doom, and cast down deep below the rolling 
 tides of Time. Mighty .meat for little guests, 
 when the heart of Shelley was laid in the 
 cemetery of Caius Cestius ! Beauty, music, 
 sweetness, tears, the mouth of the worm has 
 fed of them all. Into that sacred bridal-gloom 
 of death where he holds his nuptials with 
 eternity let not our rash speculations follow 
 him ; let us hope rather that as, amidst mate- 
 rial nature, where our dull eyes see only ruin, 
 the finer eye of science has discovered life in 
 putridity and vigour in decay, seeing dissolu- 
 tion even and disintegration, which in the 
 mouth of man symbolize disorder, to be in 
 the works of God undeviating order, and the 
 manner of our corruption to be no less won- 
 derful than the manner of our health, — so, 
 
58 SHELLEY 
 
 amidst the supernatural universe some tender 
 undreamed surprise of life in doom awaited 
 that wild nature, which, worn by warfare with 
 itself, its Maker, and all the world, now 
 
 Sleeps, and never palates more the dug, 
 The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's. 
 
NOTES 
 
In Shelley the heart of youth at last perceived a 
 vision of the being it so much desired. . . . Youth had 
 a vision of a spirit that could not be touched by the 
 defilement of earth. . . . And that spirit had once 
 been enclosed in a brilliant-eyed form of singular 
 beauty and attractiveness, had lived as though outside 
 the common ruts and puddles of this world, had loved 
 whoever was lovable with high and uncalculating 
 passion, and had died the fitting death, still young, 
 in Nature's arms, secure from the contagion of the 
 world's slow stain. Certainly the heart of youth was 
 right. It was the true Shelley of whom youth had a 
 vision which it would not willingly undo. ... It is 
 the same with that book *hich we said had recalled 
 us to Shelley this week — a brief, republished essay 
 by Francis Thompson, one of the few of Shelley's 
 successors who can be named beside him for a certain 
 assurance and splendour of symbolic thought — a 
 power of perceiving under the many-coloured dome of 
 life the white radiance of eternity. The whole essay is 
 of interest as a criticism on Shelley, but of far greater 
 interest as a criticism upon Francis Thompson him- 
 self. For in its few pages there are passages upon the 
 Church and sin and personal immortality which give 
 us true glimpses of the writer's soul. 
 
 The Nation (London, March 27, 1909) 
 
NOTES 
 
 A ENDED to the English edition of the 
 essay on Shelley in book form the 
 following "Stray Thoughts" have 
 been cited by Mr. Wilfrid Meynell 
 as " not lacking at least a ' correlated greatness ' in 
 association with the longer composition. Speaking 
 again of the close relation between the poet and the 
 poetry — that ' sincere effluence of life ' which his own 
 verse ever was — he protests against a writer who 
 had said that Shelley, though himself a wretch, could 
 write as an angel : '' 
 
 " Let me put it nakedly. That if Heliogabalus had 
 possessed Shelley's brain, he might have lived the life 
 of Heliogabalus, and yet have written the poetry of 
 Shelley. To those who believe this, there is nothing 
 to say. I will only remark, in passing, that I take it to 
 be the most Tartarian lie which ever spurted on paper 
 from the pen of a good man. For the writer was a 
 
62 
 
 NOTES 
 
 good man, and had no idea that he was offering a 
 poniard at the heart of truth." 
 
 Again, Francis Thompson says : 
 
 " The difference between the true poet in his poetry 
 and in his letters or personal intercourse, is just the 
 difference between two states of the one man ; between 
 the metal live from the forge and the metal chill. But, 
 chill or glowing, the metal is equally itself. If differ- 
 ence there be, it is the metal in glow that is the truer 
 to itself. For, cold, it may be overlaid with dirt, 
 obscured with dust; but afire, all these are scorched 
 away." 
 
 II 
 
 The last of these " Stray Thoughts " carries Shelley 
 with them into the far possibilities of an environment 
 other than that which was his own : 
 
 " The coupling of the names of two English poets 
 [Keats and Shelley] who have possessed in largest 
 measure that frail might of sensibility suggests another 
 problem which I should like to put forward, though I 
 cannot answer. What may be the effect of scenic and 
 climatic surroundings on the character and develop- 
 ment of genius such as theirs ? Had he drunk from 
 the cup of Italy before, not after, the cup of death, how 
 
NOTES 
 
 63 
 
 would it have wrought on the passionate sensitiveness 
 of Keats ? Would his poetry have changed in kind or 
 power ? Cooped in an English city, what would have 
 betided the dewy sensitiveness of Shelley ? Could he 
 have created The Revolt of Islam had he not risen 
 warm from the lap of the poets' land ? Could he have 
 waxed inebriate with the heady choruses of Prometheus 
 Unbound, 
 
 Like tipsy Joy, that reels with tossing head, 
 
 if for the Baths of Caracalla with their 'flowering 
 ruins,' the Italian spring and ' the new life with which 
 it drenches the spirits even to intoxication,' had been 
 substituted the blear streets of London, the Avernian 
 birds, the anaemic herbage of our parks, the saivel of 
 our catarrhal May, and the worthless lOU which a 
 sharping English spring annually presents to its con- 
 fiding creditors? Climate and surroundings must 
 needs influence vital energy ; and upon the storage of 
 this fuel, which the imaginative worker bums at a 
 fiercer heat than other workers, depends a poet's sus- 
 tained power. With waning health, the beauty of 
 Keats's poetry distinctly waned. Nor can it be, but 
 that beings of such susceptibility as these two should 
 transmute their colour, like the Ceylonese lizard, with 
 the shifting colour of their shifted station. I have 
 
64 
 
 NOTES 
 
 fancied, at times, a degree of atialogy between the 
 wandering sheep Shelley and the Beloved Disciple. 
 Both are usually represented with a certain feminine 
 beauty. Both made the constant burden of their 
 teaching, ' My little children, love one another.' Both 
 have similarities in their cast of genius. The Son of 
 Man walks amidst the golden candlesticks almost as 
 the profane poet would have seen Him walk : 
 
 His head and His hairs were white like wool, as 
 white as snow ; and His eyes were as a flame of fire ; 
 and His feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in 
 a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many 
 waters. 
 
 "Receive from Shelley, out of many kindred phan- 
 tasies, this : 
 
 White 
 Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow. . . . 
 Its hair is white, the brightness of white light 
 Scatter'd in strings. 
 
 "And, finally, with somewhat the same large elemen- 
 tal vision they take each their stand ; leaning athwart 
 the rampires of creation to watch the bursting of over- 
 seeded worlds, and the mown stars falling behind 
 Time, the scytheman, in broad swaths along the Milky 
 
NOTES 6s 
 
 Way. Now, it is shown that the inspired revelations 
 of the inspired Evangelist are tinged with imagery 
 by the scenery of Fatmos. If, instead of looking from 
 Patmos into the eyes of Nature, he had been girt 
 within the walls of a Roman dungeon, might not his 
 eagle have mewed a feather? We should have had 
 great Apocalyptic prophecy ; should we have had the 
 great Apocalyptic poem? For the poetical greatness 
 of a Biblical book has no necessary commensuration 
 with its religious importance; Job is greater than 
 Isaiah. Might even St. John have sung less highly, 
 though not less truly, from out the glooms of the 
 Tullianum? Perhaps so it is; and, perhaps, one 
 [E. A. Poe] who hymned the angel Israfel spoke 
 wider truth than he knew : 
 
 The ecstasies above 
 
 With thy burning measures suit 
 
 Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love. 
 With the fervour of thy lute : 
 Well may the stars be mute I 
 
 Yes, Heaven is thine ; but this 
 Is a world of sweets and sours ; 
 Our flowers are merely — flowers, 
 
 And the shadow of thy perfect bliss 
 Is the sunshine of ours. 
 
66 
 
 NOTES 
 
 If I could dwell 
 Where Israfel 
 
 Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
 He might not sing so wildly well 
 
 A mortal melody, — 
 While a bolder note than his might swell 
 
 From my lyre within the sky." 
 
 HI 
 
 In the Athenceum for July lo, 1909, the following 
 communication appeared, which may be taken as a 
 final utterance on Shelley : 
 
 BUONA NOTTE 
 
 Jane Williams, in her last letter to Shelley, wrote : 
 " Why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the 
 past ? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do 
 you expect I shall do so soon ? Buona notte." This 
 letter was dated July 6th — an anniversary passed this 
 week. Shelley was drowned on the 8th, and the 
 following reply made by him from another world was 
 imagined by the late Francis Thompson : — 
 
 "Ariel to Miranda:" — hear 
 This good -night the sea-winds bear; 
 And let thine unacquainted ear 
 Take grief for their interpreter. 
 
NOTES 67 
 
 Good-night ; I have risen so high 
 
 Into slumber's rarity, 
 
 Not a dream can beat its feather 
 
 Through the unsustaining ether. 
 
 Let the sea -winds make avouch 
 
 How thunder summoned me to couch, 
 
 Tempest curtained me about 
 
 And turned the sun with his own hand out : 
 
 And though I toss upon my bed 
 
 My sleep is not disquieted ; 
 
 Nay, deep I sleep upon the deep, 
 
 And my eyes are wet, but I do not weep ; 
 
 And I fell to sleep so suddenly 
 
 That my lips are moist yet — could'st thou see — 
 
 With the good-night draught I have drunk to thee. 
 
 Thou canst not wipe them ; for it was Death , 
 
 Damped my lips that has dried my breath. 
 
 A little while — it is not long — 
 
 The salt shall be dry on them like the song. 
 
 Now know'st thou, that voice desolate. 
 Mourning ruined joy's estate. 
 Reached thee through a closing gate : 
 « Go'st thou to Plato ? " Ah, girl, no I 
 It is to Pluto that I go. 
 
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