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Cornell University Library 
 PR 824.B58 
 
 The English novel; its art value. 
 
 3 1924 013 275 494 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013275494 
 
The Western. 
 
 MAY, 18 7 6. 
 
 THE ENGLISH NOVEL-ITS ART VALUE. 
 
 IP all art attempts to seize spirit, it attempts no less to repre- 
 sent that which it has seized ; in the adequacy of the repre- 
 sentation lies the measure of its value. The English Novel 
 if a work of art must be tried by the canons of art ; if thus tried 
 it shall seem to possess real worth as an expression of 
 spirit, and if its final cause shall seem to be man's recognition 
 of himself, we shall have established a criterion of excellence ; 
 that will be the best novel which shall most perfee^y inter- 
 pret to man the problem of his spiritual life. 
 
 The germ of the novel is to be sought in the traditions of 
 illiterate peoples and in the mythologic ages. In those earlier 
 times semi-historic legends chanted in monotonous recitative 
 roused the passions of warriors or soothed the fatigues of the 
 chase ; afterward it is probable that a certain decay of intel- 
 lectual vigor not inconsistent with a somewhat more cultured 
 age led to the substitution of the prose style for the lyric form. 
 With greater diversity in the interests of the people and with 
 increasing complexity in the conditions of life the change be- 
 came more general ; when other things than war claimed the 
 attention of nations, other themes than war found a place 
 even if subordinate in the chronicles of the time. Thus was 
 VOL. it. NO. 5 — 17. 
 
258 The Western. 
 
 introduced the element of variety. Later a natural desire, on 
 the part of its narrator to make his story as effective as might 
 be led to the effort more or less conscious to bring out into 
 stronger light the crises of the tale, to withdraw more and 
 more into shade its subordinate incidents. Still later^ in the 
 rivalry of authors, which no doubt existed, skilful arrange- 
 ment was of course supplemented by fictitious adornment, 
 while such circumstances as impeded the progress of the ac- 
 tion were lightly touched upon or wholly ignored. In these 
 stories we must expect to find little discrimination of char- 
 acter ; the thought of the time was busy with the material 
 world, it had enough to do to support life, to gain food and 
 shelter and comparative security ; it could spend no time in 
 introspection. Its heroes are, therefore, the men who stand for 
 most when placed over against hunger and cold and the at- 
 tacks of brute force; they are impersonations of courage, en- 
 durance, physical power ; they illustrate the attitude of early 
 peoples toward the existing order. 
 
 In time the romance proper follows tradition and pre- 
 cedes the novel. Its place of origin is probably Persia, 
 whence through the Milesians it spread into Greece, having 
 earlier found entrance into Italy. Yet it was adopted by the 
 Greeks only when their truer literature had perished and 
 when their liberties, no longer thought worthy of effectual 
 defense, were about to be crushed by the Macedonian con- 
 queror. Eome, too, amused herself with the stories of the East 
 only when the causes of her ultimate downfall had begun to 
 work out their legitimate results. The romance grew into 
 power with the height and decline of the Empire. Among 
 its representative authors are the Greeks, Antonius Diogenes, 
 Heliodorus, Tatius and Longus, with some others. Heliodo- 
 rus in Theogenes and Chariclea has furnished incident for the 
 Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso. Some writers, too, we are told 
 
The English Novel. 259 
 
 by Dunlop, in his history of Fiction, trace a resemblance be- 
 tween the great work of Heliodorus and the modern novel 
 as represented by Eichardson. Perhaps there is no other 
 point of similarity than that in both stories it is the heroine 
 who is the chief personage. Indeed it is stated as a curious 
 fact of all Classical Eomances that in them woman is assigned 
 an ideal elevation and prominence glaringly in contrast with her 
 real position in the society of the time. Probably of all these 
 stories we know best the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, 
 which is of more historical interest because it is so nearly al- 
 lied to the pastoral romance of the age of Louis the Four- 
 teenth. The Latin Eomance is illustrated in the Golden Ass 
 of Apuleius, which sets forth in fable a process of return from 
 sin into purity of life — it contains the beautiful episode of 
 Cupid and Psyche, and shows perhaps the highest art form 
 which the early romance exhibits. 
 
 The immediate source of the Eomance of the Middle Ages 
 is in much dispute and probably it is not to be at all regarded 
 as a direct importation. Its elements are derived from var- 
 ious languages ; these elements the spirit of the time grasps 
 and incorporates into a new whole. So, founded on the litera- 
 ture of other nations and introducing under various guises 
 different heroes of Gothic, Saracen and Classic Mythology, 
 the Mediaeval Eomance is still to be considered as the out- 
 growth of its age — an age when the Feudal System was yet 
 established and when Chivalry was at its height. The incon- 
 gruities of the time, its ignorance and consequent preju- 
 dice manifest themselves, for while man had certainly learned 
 that he was something other than his corporeal substance, he 
 had yet arrived at no real recognition of his spiritual self. 
 Of these Eomances there seem to be two classes, to the 
 Northern and purer of which belong the Story of Arthur and 
 the Knights of the Bound Table from the history of Geoffrey 
 
260 The Western. 
 
 of Monmouth, and those other chronicles which have Charle- 
 magne for their hero. These narrate the adventures of Knights 
 who sworn to loyalty and truth are eager for adventure. The 
 basis of story is usually historical. Kings are introduced 
 into them but it is the Knight who holds in his hand the 
 thread of the story ; who with power superior to that of his 
 feudal lord wanders in quest of adventures. It is now Ar- 
 thur's Knights who kill the giants and out-wit the enchant- 
 ers ; it is now Charlemagne's Paladins who vanquish the ogres 
 and destroy the emissaries of the invisible world. Neither in 
 its representative nor in its subordinate fictions however is to 
 be found the moral tone which might naturally be looked for 
 in the age of a purity professedly so great; obligations of 
 honor and regard for the sancity of human life are of as little 
 recognized power in literature as they are of real power in 
 society, yet modernized in diction and clothed with the garb 
 of poesy these stories are of interest as deep to-day as five 
 hundred years ago, and Arthur healed in the island valleys of 
 Avilion of his grievous hurts has in fulfillment of prophecy 
 reunited the " Table Bound." 
 
 The Southern form of the Middle Age Romance as shown 
 in Amadis de Gaul differs little from the type just alluded to, 
 except that it deals rather with gallantry than with chivalry 
 and that its moral tone is lower. With its cptemporary of 
 Italy it may, however, be regarded justly as one of the store- 
 houses of our literature, since to it both Sidney and Shakes- 
 peare owe characters as well as incidents. In the Gesta 
 Eomanorum, a curious compound of classical and of Rabbini- 
 cal lore, Gower and Chaucer as well as our great dramatist, 
 together with many authors of less repute find Rubject and, 
 perhaps, in a degree, inspiration. To it the later Italian writ- 
 ers, notably Boccaccio, are under direct obligation, and we 
 through them, for the Decameron has furnished to Shake- 
 
The English Novel. 261 
 
 speare the plots of Cymbeline, of 'All's Well That Ends Well,' 
 if not for other plays, while Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are 
 constructed upon its plan and owe to it some, at least, of 
 their material. In short the Decameron of Boccaccio has 
 had upon our literature a remarkably strong influence. The 
 first English translation, incomplete, however, and supple- 
 mented by a second volume soon became very popular and gave 
 direction, perhaps expression, to the public taste even where 
 it failed to produce direct imitation. 
 
 The spiritual gloom of the dark ages as well as their intel- 
 lectual blindness made it necessary that the truths of relig- 
 ion as understood by the monks should be presented in some 
 readily appreciable form, and the same causes which led the 
 church to the adoption of the Mysteries had influenced it al 
 a somewhat earlier time to set forth in pious fable the lives 
 of the Saints, the miraculous interpositions of Providence on 
 behalf of persecuted innocence, the dire temptations of malign 
 spirits, the final triumph of the ,just through the medium of 
 the Vies des Peres or the Legenda Aurea. 
 
 At a later period out of the tales of the Trouvdres and 
 Troubadours grew, naturally, the fiction peculiar to the times 
 of Louis XIV. and pf his immediate predecessors. The spirit- 
 ual element which has been incorporated into the literature 
 of the Middle Ages disappears, and prose fiction attempts a 
 return to the pastoral style of a much earlier time. Its ulti- 
 mate aim seems, however, to be merely the portrayal of the 
 vagaries of the court-life of the period — its beauties and de- 
 fects may all be found in the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, a 
 work of genius truly, yet disfigured by extra poetic license 
 and by Italian conceits of style. Out of this revived pasto- 
 ral grows a new school which, founded like its predecessor 
 on classic models, prefers to the Bucolic Era the Heroic Age 
 and in which many features of the Eomance of Chivalry are 
 
262 The Western. 
 
 retained. Attacked by Moliere in 1659 this school was effec- 
 tually shaken by Les Heros de Eoman of Boileau and at the 
 beginning of the 18th century had lost almost wholly its pres- 
 tige ; its visionary characters and unreal issues were as power- 
 less before the weapons of satire as had been the Soldans 
 and Paladins of Chivalry when attacked by the sword-like 
 pen of Eabelais, of Cervantes or of Le Sage. 
 
 There survived a class of works in which we recognize the 
 prophetic forerunners of the modern novel, of this class the 
 Princess of Cleves may be taken as representative ; while this 
 work has claim to historical value as a faithful transcript of 
 the time, its essential worth lies in this, that it deals with 
 real human nature and recognizes the real issues of human 
 life ; influenced of course by the false sentiment of the earlier 
 time and faculty in many particulars, it yet marks the trans- 
 ition to an age of reason — a transition the more remarkable 
 since it occurs in an era when the splendors of the Grand 
 Monarch's Court had so dazzled the world that magnificent 
 vice seemed indistinguishable from rigid virtue. 
 
 If imaginative writing gives final utterance to the fears, the 
 questionings, the aspirations of the soul of man, it may be 
 possible to trace some connexion between the development of . 
 fictitious literature and the growth of the world's thought. 
 Going back to the Eomance of Chivalry or still farther, we 
 find the idea of the purpose of life, or the religious idea, to 
 consist merely in this, that man created he knows not for 
 what, beholding the coming and going of human life accord- 
 ing to no purpose that he can recognize, stands awe-struck by 
 a power he can neither comprehend nor withstand and be- 
 lieves himself the plaything of the Fates — the creature of 
 gods benevolent or malignant who speak to him in the wind 
 or in the storm. So we discover a hero whose efforts hardly 
 even directed by himself are constantly thwarted by interpo- 
 
The English Novel. 263 
 
 sition of supernatural j^HVal a later period man becomes 
 better informed and begins, in some degree, to feel though not 
 to recognize his freedom; now we have the stories of Chivalry, 
 and now it is for a personal Deity whose earthly kingdom is 
 to be established that the Knights go forth. The reaction 
 against that oppression and degradation of the poor which 
 was so natural a consequence of the Feudal System, is evi- 
 dence of a higher idea of the purpose of life, if it be not the 
 first acknowledgment that life has a purpose at all. Man had 
 too long felt himself the creature of the mythologic gods, how- 
 ever, wholly to renounce them even now ; his difficulties and 
 dangers, his triumphs too, must needs present themselves 
 in an objective form; he could not yet realize the purely 
 spiritual. Still in this transition state man proves his 
 instinctive fealty to one living and true God, since genii 
 and magicians, giants and dwarfs, enchanted castles and 
 labyrinths, alike vanish at the shadow of the cross. La- 
 ter stories mark various periods of transition, of action and 
 reaction, and exhibit the peculiarities incident to phases of 
 civilization when great magnificence on the one hand is set 
 over against miserable squalor on the other. Such epochs 
 are characterized by the absence of any rational idea of the 
 value of life prevading all classes and tending to unite 
 in sympathy the rich and poor ; a superficial elegance dwell- 
 ing forever on some imagined field of the Cloth of Gold ig- 
 nores all interests which do not pertain to its feudal aris- 
 tocracy, and manifests little more knowledge of the human 
 heart, out of which the Apostle tells us are the issues of life, 
 than does the Ephemera of the material world in which its 
 brief day of existence waxes and wanes. 
 
 But time moved on ; the influence of the great poets and of 
 the great philosophers went abroad ; the whole nation sought 
 expression and found it at last in the novelists. 
 
264 The Western. 
 
 As the chosen art form of ^fctterature of the Nineteenth 
 Century modern fiction presents some curious problems not 
 least of which is that it has superseded if not dethroned the 
 drama. Adopted by classic states when the vigor of their 
 intellectual prime had perished, attempting vainly in the 
 Mediaeval ages to reconcile the external to the ideal ; this 
 species of literary^ effort has in our century absorbed into 
 itself all other forms. From it as the fountain of the best 
 thought, young and old draw knowledge ; in it they satisfy 
 their longings for the good, the true and the beautiful; it 
 holds " as t'were the mirror up to nature " shows "virtue her 
 own feature, scorn her own image and the very age and body 
 of the time his form and presence." 
 
 The introduction of movable scenery is said by Collier to 
 give date to the decline of the drama, but in itself it is of 
 course nothing more" than an indication of change in popular 
 taste consequent upon decay of imaginative power. When it 
 becomes necessary unduly to exalt accessories the essential is 
 already declining, and as the essential disappears the art form 
 dies while its spirit seeks elsewhere for dwelling and expres- 
 sion. Thus by a strange metempsychosis, the soul of the 
 drama entered the body of the Eomance which had long been 
 parted from spirit, and thenceforward if we have little true 
 art on the stage we .have notably true art in fiction. 
 
 The more we investigate the conditions under which we live 
 the more does the novel of the Nineteenth Century seem to 
 owe its origin to a real fitness of things, and to be almost of 
 necessity the one expression of this age. The life of the Six- 
 teenth Century was necessarily more individual, in a certain 
 sense, than the life of to-day ; the scarcity of printed books 
 and the absence of newspapers prevented any but the most 
 interrupted interchange of opinion among people in the lower 
 ranks of life, while the great intellectual awakening of the 
 
The English Novel. 265 
 
 nation had as yet tukej^ Bher shape nor organization. 
 When the people of this age, touched as they were by the new 
 influence of thought andf agitated by impulses which they 
 could not analyze, saw the plays of Shakespeare represented 
 on the stage of the Blackfriars or the Globe, they found an 
 avenue of escape for their emotions in dramatic presentation j 
 its intensity, its vividness, its action, the passion of their 
 natures demanded. We less emotional and more critical, with 
 infinitely greater means of education and self-development, 
 care less for action and more for motive ; having grown into 
 reverence for man we have grown also into habits of intro- 
 spection, and we try that which is presented objectively in 
 literature by appeals to our own inner consciousness. What 
 we are to enjoy then must be kept before us long enough to 
 admit of study and of reflection ; it is to be a perfect whole as 
 the Tragedy is, but it will involve greater elaboration of de- 
 tail — a more careful working out of parts. 
 
 Essentially the novel is dramatic, though it by no means 
 follows that that is the best novel which can most easily be 
 adapted to the stage. The novel diverges from dramatic re- 
 quirements, however, in several important respects : Goethe 
 says of it as distinguished from the drama, that " sentiments 
 and events in the one are to be set over against character and 
 deeds in the other." The sentiment of the hero by some 
 means or another must restrain the tendency of the whole to 
 unfold itself and to conclude. The drama on the other 
 hand must hasten and the character of the hero must press 
 forward to the end ; it does not restrain but is restrained." 
 
 The novel certainly allows as the drama does not allow the 
 emphasis of the subjective and in this sense maybe said to be 
 restrained in its development by the sentiments of the hero, 
 and this the more truly if it attempt to set forth the theory 
 of life and to reflect the human spirit as eminently does 
 
266 The Western. 
 
 Goethe himself in Wilhelm^^ter, or as does George Sand 
 in Consuelo. The process of spiritual growth cannot take 
 place rapidly ; it cannot be delineated rapidly. The emphasis 
 of the subjective is characteristic of our time, which with all its 
 restlessness has yet leisure to analyze its emotions and its 
 thought. Very happy is it if its attention be directed but to 
 the natural and healthy. Our representative poetry is the 
 lyric; our representative prose is the novel. This latter 
 shows not perhaps the actual collision of the drama, yet dis- 
 tinguishes agent from instrument, portrays the conflict of in- 
 dividual character and will with other individual character 
 and will as well as with circumstances, furthermore it sets 
 forth the conditions under which the represented action be- 
 comes possible. 
 
 Of the element of chance Goethe says that while some 
 scope may be allowed to it, it must yet always be led and 
 guided by the sentiments of the personages. " Chance may be 
 pathetic," but "Fate" he says " ought always to be terrible." 
 Goethe says further, " The novel hero must not be in a high 
 degree active " — not so highly active, he means perhaps, that 
 the action may not be temporarily suspended and naturally 
 resumed without the interposition of an actual barrier to pro- 
 gress, otherwise there would be little opportunity for digres- 
 sion or for explanation, and action would tend in better books 
 than those of Wilkie Collins to become the end as well as the 
 means and thus to destroy the true aim of art which is the 
 representation of the ideal in its totality — action not lost 
 sight of, yet rather the means by which the inner spiritual 
 life of the characters is to be translated into the world's 
 language, than that which in and for itself has independent 
 value, since no more in the novel than elsewhere is art re- 
 . leased from its aim of representing in appreciable form that 
 which is divine. 
 
The English Novel. 267 
 
 The characters of the novel have less than those of the 
 drama the office of exciting pity and terror, but they must none 
 the less be real people, not incarnated single ideas. It would 
 not of course be false art to represent a dominant power of 
 passion or principle, but with this must be combined all those 
 other often contradictory motives, feelings, passions and aims, 
 which make of each individual a complex whole — a being 
 capable of diverse development and of diverse influence. From 
 the unity in complexity of these characters the story must 
 logically proceed. Since the range of the novelist in the 
 choice of subject is very wide his choice of character will also 
 be much more free from restraint that is that of the dram- 
 atist ; he is, as above stated, only under obligation to show in 
 what way any person of a certain represented character 
 would naturally act — to tell us general truth in particular 
 form. This he may do with as much or as little use of dia- 
 logue as he pleases, but he is bound to give us characters not 
 mere word pictures. He may enter upon the scene in his own 
 character when the action needs temporary support, and may 
 describe and explain when the exigencies of the story require ; 
 his management of his appearances will often determine to 
 what degree he possesses artistic insight. Probably it would 
 not be far wrong to say, as some have done in the con- 
 clusion of this parallel, that the relation of the novel to 
 the drama is, so far as external art form goes, similar to 
 that in which painting stands to sculpture. The paint- 
 ing has the greater capability ; it shows form indeed but 
 adds thereto the phases of appearance, perspective, col- 
 or, light and shade. The accessories and conditions of 
 action so far as they are moral, the drama cannot repres- 
 ent directly, they must be reached inferentially ; the cause 
 must be found from its eifect. What the novel loses in 
 vividness it gains in power of self-iuterpretation. 
 
268 The Western. 
 
 We have discovered in education and in practical business 
 many royal roads ; our ascent of the Hill Difficulty has been 
 so often aided that despite our habit of introspection we have 
 grown into a state of semi-dependence. Everything is done 
 for us and we expect to have it done no less in our ideal than 
 in our real world, no less in our books that in our lives. We 
 do not wish to discover for ourselves why those things which 
 the novelist sets forth are true; we ask that he teach us 
 these things one by one. We are grown more reticent too 
 if we feel as keenly as did the people of Elizabeth's time, we 
 have learned to be silent — a few tears, a season of despair and 
 after each great sorrow we take up anew the burden of life. 
 In our own utterance we have no relief from pain, but in our 
 books the spirit in its " midmost heart of grief clasps secret 
 joy." In our books too we find expression for those senti- 
 ments and emotions which pervading our minds and becom- 
 ing part of our natures have yet never been framed in words. 
 " To know how to say what other people only think, is what 
 makes men poets and sages ;" the true novelist is poet and 
 sage in one. We have said that in literature our age demands 
 interpretation ; so it prefers the novel to the drama again be- 
 cause by this choice it is spared the necessity of translating, 
 the universal into its particular and of transporting charac- 
 ters from the dimness and distance of dramatic eras to the 
 full light of its to-day, in which alone it is able to discern , 
 truth, in which alone it so identifies itself with the action as 
 to feel pity or terror. The novel much more immediately 
 than the drama holds for this generation a magic mirror in 
 which man sees reflected his own image and in which he sees 
 represented the possible future of his earthly life. The more 
 realistic in its treatment the novel is the better up to a certain 
 point it becomes, but it will deserve to lose in interest when- 
 ever it allows its fondness for realism to lead it into the at- 
 
The English Novel. 269 
 
 tempt to elevate the essentially commonplace to the rank of 
 art, that is to say when it becomes a mere transcript of sordid 
 life in its external aspects, when it becomes photography not 
 creative art ; but it may find its material in any sphere of life 
 or of nature if only it be pervaded by the free spirit of artis- 
 tic truth. Our last great novelist has said : " Depend upon 
 it you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to 
 see some of the poetry and (he pathos, the tragedy and the 
 comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks 
 out through dull gray eyes and that speaks in a voice of quite 
 ordinary tones;" and further, "Let us always have men ready 
 to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing 
 of commonplace things, men who see beauty in these common- 
 place things and delight in showing how kindly the flight of 
 heaven falls upon them." 
 
 Thus far we have spoken of the novel in its historical and 
 psychological aspects ; we turn now to the application of our 
 principles of criticism to the modern fiction as illustrated in 
 the works of some of the great novelists. 
 
 De Foe is properly to be regarded in order of time the first 
 writer of novels ; his works, of which Robinson Crusoe is the 
 best known though perhaps not the most excellent, are re- 
 moved very far from the Eomance of Chivalry. The hero 
 differs in no important particulars from ordinary men; he 
 makes their mistakes, falls into their errors, and in all but 
 career is their prototype ; his adventures though wonderful 
 are by no means improbable; given the situation and they fol- 
 low logically. Constantly surprised we are as constantly re- 
 minded that our surprise has been quite naturally led up to. 
 In style De Foe has some of the qualities of Bunyan, his 
 words are the simplest and he indulges in no reflections ; he 
 has a story to tell which he thinks will commend itself, this 
 story he tells with no words that are useless, yet with definite- 
 
270 The Western. 
 
 ness, with picturesqueness, with such minuteness of detail 
 that the illusion is perfect ; it is for no imaginary being we 
 fear and tremble but for a real man on a real island suffering 
 real distress. Eobinson Crusoe and his man Friday are more 
 real to us than is the man who lives in the next street. Yet 
 if the office of the novel be to deal with the deeper problems 
 of life, to show the reciprocal influence of character and to- 
 set forth the triumphs of human freedom over circumstance, 
 then the writings of De Foe fail of true art value in so far as 
 they exhibit life only in its latter phase. Where so few char- 
 acters are introduced it is impossible to delineate perfectly 
 even those attempted. No character can stand fully revealed 
 till it has been brought into contact, not with matter alone, 
 with the mere external conditions of existence, but with the 
 internal and spiritual as it exists in the mental life of other 
 human beings. A plot determined by circumstances alone 
 affords little opportunity for development of any such com- 
 plexity of purpose or of interests as results when man be- 
 comes a member of society — the element of chance is much 
 too large. 
 
 Eichardson patiently, subtly, and very gradually unfolds 
 character, so gradually indeed that minuteness grows weari- 
 some. The elaboration is however essential to the story as it 
 exists in the author's mind. By almost inperceptible touches 
 he reveals to us the characters whom we follow hardly con- 
 scious whither we shall go ; arrived at the end of the book, at 
 last we discover how all the apparent obstacles to progress 
 were really helps to the denouement. Pathos which touches 
 the outer edge of pain, vibrates through these books, yet is 
 the result of purely natural causes and we prove that the 
 pleasure of expectation is indeed higher than that of surprise. 
 The circumstances are no longer mere accidents ; they are the 
 limitations of other minds as well. The collision of charac- 
 
The English Novel. 271 
 
 ter with character, of character with society, begins to be 
 portrayed — all this is especially true of Clarissa Harlowe 
 which we take as representative. Bichardson's chief fault 
 apart from the prolixity incident to his method is an evident 
 eagerness to point a moral. Not so Fielding. More than al- 
 most any other of our prose authors is his method that of 
 Shakespeare, and more than almost any other writer of the 
 Eighteenth Century may he lay claim to the birthright of 
 genius. What his characters do, . they do from the inherent 
 force of their natures, their acts and words are the legitimate 
 outgrowth of themselves, acts and words alike deduced logi- 
 cally from the character, not by the most casual observation 
 to be mistaken for the deeds and words of any other. The 
 individuals selected are not from any peculiar fitness subjects 
 of attention ; neither Tom Jones, nor Sophy, nor Squire 
 Western is in any way remarkable, but they are all imbued 
 with a most human interest, and while thoroughly individual 
 are yet types of the classes which they represent. Com- 
 bined with this profound method in the portrayal of manners 
 is an equally profound skill in the development of the plot. 
 The succession of events constantly surprises us, and as con- 
 stantly we see that we had no occasion whatever for sur- 
 prise, since effect merely follows efficient cause. Fielding's 
 faults glaring as they no doubt are, are those of his age, an 
 age of the greatest coarseness of expression known to our 
 literature — the interregnum between the Age of Chivalry 
 and the dawn of modern opinion and thought. Fielding's jus- 
 tice is the true poetic justice, man is painted as he is, such as 
 nature and his time have made him, but to him all the conse- 
 quences of his deeds return. Yet Fielding's characters are 
 after all more nearly the characters of the Drama than of the 
 novel, that is to say they are in a measure isolated, their lives 
 work out from within almost unrestrainedly ; they make their 
 
272 The Western. 
 
 own world and are not sufficiently passive to meet the require- 
 ment which Goethe makes of the novel hero. 
 
 Other writers have illustrated various phases of fiction. 
 Sterne differs from Fielding as widely as may be in constructive 
 power; his story is a mere thread where that author's is a 
 perfect whole, yet a few of his characters are wonderfully 
 persistent, as too are some of Goldsmith's. Uncle Toby and the 
 Vicar meet us everywhere in literature and with their gentle 
 humor furnish to our not over-joyful life perpetual delight. 
 Periods of peculiar sentiment and thought, though here and 
 there reflected in some of their phases by minor writers, find 
 at last the man who is fully to represent his age and to leave 
 its record to all subsequent time. 
 
 The publication in 1765 of Percy's Reliques roused through- 
 out England the long dormant interest in our old ballad 
 poetry whose picturesque vigor and directness appealed anew 
 and most powerfully to the popular heart stirring its blood as 
 in an earlier day it had stirred Sidney's like the blast of a 
 trumpet. To this republication we no doubt owe the Waverly 
 novels. The Highlands of Scotland are fitly the abode of the 
 romantic and the wonderful ; their legends were to the nov- 
 elist an unwrought mine. Scott seems however to have been 
 affected by little true feeling for his work as art: Carlylegoes 
 so far as to say he regarded it merely as a trade, which is not 
 the truth of the matter exactly. What is true is, no doubt 
 this, that he found his work no end in itself, to be wrought 
 out with life-long devotion, but rather a means by which Ab- 
 botsford might be rehabilitated. 
 
 " In the elder days of art 
 
 Builders wrought with greatest care 
 Each minute and unseen part — 
 For the gods see everywhere.?' 
 
 Probably Scott was no builder of this kind; he wrote rap- 
 
The English Novel. 273 
 
 idly, rather, as it seems from his works, with an eye to effect 
 than with conscientious effort to embody truth. His works 
 show much attention to details in the merely external, but 
 have few persistent or individual characters, and their plots 
 are very imperfectly constructed, whenever their construction 
 is his own. Scott is properly entitled to the honor of be- 
 ing regarded the founder of the modern historical novel 
 of the romantic school, but to learn how much his best 
 efforts may suffer when compared with the work of an 
 artist it is only necessary to compare Ivanhoe with the 
 Eomola of George Eliot. Mr. Leslie Stephen, says, after re- 
 counting Lockhart's story of the carved oak in imitation at 
 Abbotsford and of the coats of arms in stucco : " This anec- 
 dote gives the true secret of Scott's failures. The plaster 
 looks as well as the carved oak for a time, bat the day speed- 
 ily comes when the sham crumbles into ashes, and Scott's 
 knights and nobles like his carved cornices become dust in 
 the next generation." 
 
 Dickens and Thackeray are realists in the most exaggerated 
 sense of the term. Eealism in representation seems indeed 
 to be Dickens only ideal of art; but even this ideal he does 
 not often attain since his efforts are constantly thwarted by the 
 melodramatic tendencies of his own nature. He never seems 
 to realize the fact that art dare not be as strange as truth 
 sometimes shows itself, since its office is to represent un- 
 der the guise of variety the constant and the fixed. It is 
 much to be doubted if any true art can be found in Dickens, 
 for his work seems throughout to be characterized by absence 
 of comprehension of the unity and purpose of life. He de- 
 pends more even than Scott upon plaster and stucco, except 
 that his plaster and stucco but seldom serve such ornamental 
 purposes as cornices and coats of arms. Dickens' art has for 
 itself no lofty ideals, it has none for the reader. From the 
 VOL. II. NO. 5—18. 
 
274 The Western. 
 
 study of his works seems to come little love of duty for duty's 
 sake. When one recalls to his mind Dickens' characters it is 
 always the grotesquely caricatured who respond to the sum- 
 mons. Where he introduces, as he often does introduce, per- 
 sons actuated by high motives and obedient to duty, they 
 are too often overshadowed in the representation by char- 
 acters, let us rather say caricatures, whose only claim to 
 our attention is fonnd in such external oddities and inherent 
 peculiarities as would make them unendurable in real life. Yet 
 you are fain to acknowledge Dickens' power ; he plays on your 
 heart-strings most subtly ; he moves you at his will to laughter 
 or to tears, while through it all and especially after it all you 
 feel that you are unjustly dealt with and are conscious of 
 the rousing in you of a species of resentment. Dickens' charac- 
 ters are never particular forms of the universal and as such 
 eternal ; they are sincere and true often from instinct, just as 
 dogs are faithful ; but of men or women walking intelligently in 
 the path of duty for duty's sake there are few examples. 
 There is much blind devotion, much generous impulse, much 
 foible, much idiosyncrasy made flesh ; but little reason, little 
 return, in any true sense of action to its originator. There is 
 everywhere revealed however that wonderful power which 
 had only need of truth to render it immortal. 
 
 The objective method was inseparable from Thackeray's 
 art, for the satirist proper finds little exercise for his gift when 
 he descends to the springs of life and reaches the ultimate 
 motives of action. He finds much to reflect upon, much to 
 wonder at, much to pity and regret, but little to satirize ; life 
 at its fountains is so essentially tragic that but fairly to com- 
 prehend it paralyzes mirth. To his own idea of art Thack- 
 eray is, however, always true ; an ardent admirer of Fielding 
 he has something of his master's method together with much 
 of his genius. His books have too the charm of being in 
 
The English Novel. 275 
 
 harmony with the man, tender to humanity if keen sighted to 
 its faults, and throwing their influence in their own way on 
 the side of the true and brave. Thackeray does not often 
 descend to minutiae and seldom seems to explore the remote 
 causes of individual action ; he sees these things all clearly 
 enough and drops a hint here and there which shows how 
 much or how little force he attaches to circumstance, yet he 
 remains throughout true to his profound conviction, that 
 what a man is when he enters upon the stage of life, this he 
 will always remain — if true, then true and brave to the latest 
 day of life— if false, then false and a coward to his grave. His 
 clear eyes look through its bodily guise into the world's heart, 
 and what he sees he writes, and if he nothing extenuates he 
 also sets down naught in malice. 
 
 On behalf of the novel of the strictly objective school it may 
 perhaps justly be said that it withstands the desire of the pres- 
 ent age for explanation and elucidation properly ; that if it 
 present a faithful portraiture of external life it presupposes 
 the conditions of that life, and that in this world itself in the 
 long run practical justice is meted out even if the mills of the 
 gods do grind but slowly. It may be urged too that it is bet- 
 ter for a man's intellect that even against his will he be 
 obliged to determine the conditions of thought and the circum- 
 stances of character which render certain trains of action 
 possible to certain represented individuals. It would indeed 
 at first glance seem so, since it is certainly a fact that diligent 
 study of .real life may bring to light the eternal laws which 
 govern human society ; yet it is equally true that in most 
 cases the presuppositions of the character are not within 
 our cognizance, while the consequences of various modes of 
 life or of certain courses of action whether good or bad are 
 effectual not immediately nor in ways readily appreciable. 
 Had we even power to penetrate, for the moment, into the in- 
 
276 The Western. 
 
 most soul of man, had we power to find there the record of 
 his past, the prophecy of his future, it would still happen 
 through the complexity of human life that but seldom would 
 a character remain sufficiently long under our observation to 
 determine the accuracy of our judgment. It is in the soul 
 that the real man dwells ; it is in the spirit that the absolute 
 of art resides. So in the novelist's work that seems to be the 
 only true art which enters into the soul and shows how from 
 the soul the outward life grows, which depicts the real issues 
 of human existence and delineates those emotions and senti- 
 ments which are common to the men of all ages ; yet it is to 
 represent not classes but individual beings personally free 
 and personally responsible ; it is to trace the reflection of 
 action upon character and to estimate the force of trivial in- 
 cidents in the swerving of disposition or in determining the 
 manifestations of temperamental peculiarities, and it is to 
 show the uniformity and persistence of the laws of cause and 
 effect — in so far as it accomplishes these ends it fulfills its 
 office and becomes the most powerful moral instrument of our 
 times. 
 
 Of novels dealing with the deepest problems of psy- 
 chology, those of Hawthorne are perhaps most remarkable, 
 the more especially since their style affords so good an illus- 
 tration of the possible concordance of thought with its mode 
 of communication, yet they deal rather with the exceptional 
 than the general principles of life, and exhibit most profound 
 acquaintance with the morbid in character rather than a sym- 
 pathy with the natural and the healthy. They touch the 
 grotesque, even the horrible, but the withholding power of 
 genius has prevented any nearer approach to the modern sen- 
 sational fiction of the French. 
 
 In George Eliot the truly psychological novel finds its 
 
The English Novel. 277 
 
 apotheosis ; she has brought to her work the power to keep 
 God's image in repute and dares 
 
 "To look into the swarthiest face of things 
 For God's sake who has made them.'' 
 
 Her knowledge of human nature is the innate knowledge of 
 itself and of its compeers which has belonged to Shakespeare 
 and perhaps to a few other minds of perfectly developed gen- 
 ius. She writes under a command like that of old : " Write 
 the things that thou hast seen, the things which are and the 
 things which shall be hereafter." She shows us the conver- 
 gence of lives and of influences, solves better than any one 
 else, has done the problem how best to reconcile the persist- 
 ence of character with the effect of those things external to 
 the mind which have a bearing either direct or indirect on the 
 manifestation of the individual life. Her world is as real as 
 the world about us; her justice is the true artist's justice, not 
 always offering tangible rewards to virtue, not always visiting 
 open punishment on vice, but showing the inevitable tendency 
 of the spiritual life toward the good through manifold weak- 
 ness and failure, or to the evil even though in no direct viola- 
 tion of human law ; she shows the cumulative force of circum- 
 stances, the collision of the individual with other individuals 
 or with society ; her solutions are the solutions of real life — of 
 a life that would be meaningless and vain but for the soul's 
 immortality. 
 
 We have devoted no time to foreign works since there seem 
 to be few types not fully represented in our literature. The 
 novel in its present form seems legitimately the outgrowth 
 of the Anglo Saxon power of assimilation which is no less 
 evident in its literature than in its language. Prose fiction 
 has grown, as we have endeavored to show, very gradually yet 
 very surely into fuller and freer life having in each of its 
 
278 The Western. 
 
 stages met more nearly the requirements of the true artistic 
 spirit. It has, in short, from inert matter become at last a liv- 
 ing organism whose free spirit of art has been to us in the 
 past for solace, rest and hope and which in the future shall as 
 
 well 
 
 " Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 
 Of the eternal silence," 
 
 Grace 0. Bibb. 
 
 THE LAY OF THE WANDERER. 
 
 {From the Elder Edda.) 
 
 I. BALDER'S DREAMS. 
 
 To Asgard thronged the anxious gods in haste : 
 The stately goddesses their presence graced. 
 Grave was their purpose, and their question deep : 
 Why dreams of darkness haunted Balder's sleep ! 
 
 Auspicious dreams no more to sweetness lull 
 The sleep of much loved Balder, beautiful ! 
 They asked the gotuns, who the future see, 
 If this forboded dire calamity. 
 
 And came the sad response, that unto death 
 Was Balder destined— he the dearest breath ! 
 Odin and Friga were with sorrow quelled ; 
 And the sad gods their solemu council held. 
 
The Lay of the Wanderer. 279 
 
 And they resolved each being to beseech 
 That Balder's life no harm should ever reach. 
 And every being swore his life to spare : 
 Friga received their oaths with gladness rare. 
 
 Odin, forboding still, is filled with dread 
 That Balder's Guardian Spirits all had fled ! 
 The gods again in concourse he doth crave ; 
 And much is then devised in council grave. 
 
 II. THE DESCENT OF ODIN. 
 
 And now the Lord of Men uprose, and bade 
 
 With saddle fleetest Sleipner to be clad ;— 
 
 Downward to Niflheim* his gallop rang ; 
 
 When forth from Hela's t gate a gaunt hound sprang ! 
 
 Upon its nether jaw the blood was red, 
 
 And clots its slaughter-craving throat o'erspread, 
 
 Its horrid fangs at Odin snapped amain ; 
 
 And fearful howlings shook the dismal plain ! 
 
 And quaked the earth beneath him as he rode ! 
 But still he sped toward Hela's dark abode ; 
 Beside the eastern gate, in mist and gloom, 
 He paused and found the far-sought Vala's % tomb. 
 
 And there he chanted dead men's awful tunes ! 
 Northward he turned and laid the potent runes ; 
 Dark incantations muttered — spells to seek 
 The dead, and force her to arise and speak ! 
 
 * The land of mist ; the nethermost of the nine worlds. 
 + Hades ; or the abode of Death. 
 J A prophetess. 
 
280 The Western. 
 
 VALA. 
 
 Who is the dauntless man on distant quest 
 Who rudely breaketh now my spirit's rest ? 
 In snowy shroud, and drenched with icy rain, 
 t My bones have long in Death's embraces lain ! 
 
 ODIN. 
 
 I, Veltam's son, was Wanderer named at birth ; 
 Tell me of Hela— thee I call from Earth ! 
 That glittering board — for whom of honor old — 
 For whom those couches overlaid with gold? 
 
 VALA. 
 
 For Balder couches wait in Death's hall here ; 
 A shield is o'er the mead-cup's festive cheer ; — 
 The race of gods shall yield to anguish meek ! 
 I will be silent : force hath made me speak ! 
 
 ODIN. 
 
 Be not thou silent ! I will question thee 
 Until I know the deepest mystery, 
 Of Balder, loved one ! Who with malice rife — 
 Oh ! who will Odin's son bereave of life ? 
 
 VALA. 
 
 HSder shall hither send, in death-trance dull, 
 His glorious brother, Balder, beautiful — 
 Fated, the life of Odin's son shall seek ! 
 I will be silent : force hath made me speak ! 
 
 ODIN. 
 
 Be not thou silent ! I will question thee 
 Until I know the deepest mystery. 
 Who will on Hoder wreak a vengeance dread? 
 Who, Balder's slayer lay on Death's cold bed? 
 
 VALA." 
 
 Ri nda shall bear a son in her far home ; 
 His hands he will not lave, nor gold hair comb — 
 Ere one nigtit old he will dire vengeance wreak ! 
 I will be silent : force hath made me speak ! 
 
Spring Song. 281 
 
 ODIN. 
 
 Be not thou silent ! I will question deep : 
 Who are the maidens that will bitter weep, 
 And wildly unto Heaven their long veils cast? 
 Tell this ! Thou shalt not sleep until thou hast ! 
 
 VALA. 
 
 Oh ! — Thou'rt no Wanderer ! I behold thee now ! 
 I knew thee Odin ! — Lord of Men art thou ! 
 
 ODIN. 
 
 Thou'rt not a Vala of wise prophecy ! — 
 Thou art the mother of fierce giants three ! 
 
 vala. 
 Ride homeward, Odin ! Boast thy journey's quest ! 
 For ne'er another shall disturb my rest, 
 Until — when Loke breaks loose his fetters all — 
 The fearful Twilight of the Gods \ shall fall ! 
 
 Myron B. Benton. 
 
 SPRING SONG. 
 
 [Translated from J, G. v. Salis. 
 
 Verdure clothes again our meadows ; 
 Flowers perfume both hill and dale ; 
 Finches sing in keen, glad joyance, 
 Tenderly the nightingale. 
 All the tree-tops brighten greener, — 
 Cooing, wooing, fills the grove : 
 Every shepherd now grows bolder, 
 Shepherd maids incline to love. 
 
 \ Ragnarock ; the anticipated destruction of the Universe, including gods 
 and men. 
 
282 The Western. 
 
 Blossoms from the bud unfolding 
 
 Spring unvails in leafy drifts, 
 
 Dyes the velvet of the primrose, 
 
 Silver powder o'er it sifts. 
 
 From their broad leaves springing beauteous 
 
 Lilies of the valley see 
 
 Yield themselves as modest flowerets 
 
 For the breast of purity. 
 
 On their tender stems are tulips 
 
 Nodding gaily, yellow, red, 
 
 With its loving vines the woodbine 
 
 Weaves a canopy o'erhead. 
 
 All the bi-eezes, now grown milder, 
 
 Fan us with the breath of love ; 
 
 Spring's delights and scenes of pleasure 
 
 Move whate'er such joys can move. 
 
 J. C. PlCKARD. 
 
 TO JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 THE GIVER OF UTTERANCE. , 
 
 THIS famous hymn was composed by Paulus Diaconus, 
 a Lombard monk of the 8th century. The initial sylla- 
 bles of the verses in the first stanza are said to have suggest- 
 ed to Guido Aretinus the names of the seven notes of his mu- 
 sical scale, ut having been since changed to do for obvious 
 reasons. Weitzius laments the idolatrous use of this hymn as 
 a charm to recover the voice, singers appealing to John as 
 their " tutelaris Deus." 
 The first stanza of the original is appended with a transla- 
 
To John the Baptist. 283 
 
 tion of the whole. The first chapter of Luke's Gospel will 
 furnish sufficient commentary. 
 
 I. 
 
 Vt queant laxis 
 .ffiesonare fibris 
 Afira gestorum 
 famuli tuorum 
 Solve reatum 
 Labii polluti 
 Sancte Johannes ! 
 
 I. 
 Do thou O John divine 
 .Restore thy servant's power to praise 
 Jftrific deeds of thine, 
 far-sounding let our voices raise 
 -Solfeggios sublime. 
 
 Lave clean our sin-stained lips, that lays 
 Sidereal may chime. 
 
 II. 
 From high Olympus forth 
 A messenger divinely sent 
 Foretold thy wondrous birth 
 And life in earnest labor spent. 
 Announcing too thy name 
 With prophecy of fame 
 He soothed the father's discontent. 
 
 III. 
 
 He, doubtful of the truth 
 
 Of heavenly promise thus revealed 
 
 And hope of faded youth, 
 
 Was stricken dumb, his mouth was sealed. 
 
 But thou didst form anew 
 
 With modulation true 
 
 The organs of the voice congealed. 
 
284 The Western. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Reclining in the womb 
 
 With piercing eye and joy elate 
 
 Thou sawest through the gloom 
 
 Thy King in bridal chamber wait. 
 
 By merit of their son 
 
 Each parent power won 
 
 Deep plans divine to penetrate. 
 
 All praise to Sire above 
 All honor to begotten Son, 
 And to the holy Dove, 
 In sancity the paragon. 
 In every age and clime 
 Through everlasting time 
 The one triune, the triune one. 
 
 Geo. B. MacLellan. 
 
 THE SPHINX: A SONNET. 
 
 Grey with the dust of buried centuries, 
 Scattered from Time's swift chariot-wheels along 
 The silent ages, but still wise and strong, 
 
 An infinite grief in thine inscrutable eyes, 
 
 Thou sittest among thy mouldering memories ; 
 Making thee friends of the innumerous throng 
 That lived and vanished, as a lofty song 
 
 Fills the mute air with music, and so dies. 
 
 Among the nations shifting like the sand 
 
 Of thine own desert ; in a single day 
 
 Giddy with power and lightly swept away ; 
 
Development in Religion. 285 
 
 Thou sittest in scorn of man's weak littleness, 
 Above earth's petty turmoil and distress ; 
 Sternly serene and desolately grand. 
 
 Waylakd S. Hyatt. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT IN RELIGION. 
 
 THERE was a time when in the thoughts of men all events 
 in nature and society were looked upon as isolated and 
 exceptional, as supernatural and miraculous. The relation of 
 cause to effect, so far as comprehended at all, was then a very 
 limited one ; the natural order was little understood. The ele- 
 ment of wonder working was uncalculated. The possible 
 transformation of chemical and social forces had not been 
 thought of. Creation was a miracle, Geology was a record of 
 cataclysm and convulsion. Man, all orders in the three king- 
 doms, sprang fixed, full-grown and perfect upon the earth at 
 the flat of God. Language likewise and law, come as a gift, 
 without the laborious delay of long generations of rudimen- 
 tary experiment, modification and development. 
 
 Religions, especially to all the people who accepted them, 
 were at some epoch of history communicated entire as a 
 divine revelation and theophany ; in no sense depending upon 
 the growth and expression of a common consciousness, need 
 and aspiration among the people. The men who brought or 
 or even taught these religions, were not supposed to have 
 been born, or to have lived in the natural way. They were 
 held to be as exceptional as the messages of which they were 
 
286 The Western. 
 
 the medium ; and all through their history they are distin- 
 guished from ordinary men by some signal manifestations of 
 divine honor and power. Even their common acts are magni- 
 fied into miracles, and at death they are translated or become 
 gods or demigods, in the worship of the established faith. 
 You may verify these facts by a study of any of the vari- 
 ous world religions. 
 
 In a later period, and especially in our own, the excep- 
 tional ceases to be miraculous. We do not straightway make 
 haste to say an event is supernatural because we do not just 
 now understand it. We suspend judgment until further inves- 
 tigations. This is the characteristic of civilization and cul- 
 ture. Of course, we are still challenged by the shallow and 
 unreflecting to decide at once, to give an answer at sight, con- 
 cerning all strange phenomena. " If it isn't this and thus ; 
 what and how is it V they cry, expecting you to be com- 
 pelled to their view of the case. If this is not a special provi- 
 dence, a direct answer to prayer, a miraculous cure, a reap- 
 pearance of the dead, a case of witchcraft, a warning and 
 judgment of God — then what is it? But we are in no haste 
 to affirm ; on the whole we are rather disposed to doubt or 
 deny. In any event we take further time for consideration, 
 remembering how so many things are in time explained by 
 natural causes ; understanding now how all occurrences do 
 depend upon certain previous processes of preparation ; how 
 every result small or great is in reality a development and 
 growth, long preparing in the womb of time. 
 
 We look out upon society as it is, and we are immediately 
 led to a contemplation of society as it was. A great accumu- 
 lation of facts brought together by the student and man of 
 science in these latter years takes us back into a history once 
 undreamed of. Written history will take us back three or four 
 thousand years, perhaps, and then we find the world of men 
 
The Western. 
 
 MARCH, 18 7 6. 
 
 THE SOUL OF SHELLEY. 
 -S- 
 
 POETEY may be classified into two kinds which, while 
 so intermingling as to allow no definite line of division, 
 do yet, according to the predominance of either in his work, 
 distinguish the genius of the poet. These two kinds are the 
 observant and the speculative. The observant sees things as 
 they appear, and has a certain power of interpretation in 
 detecting semblances and contrasts invisible to the common 
 view. The speculative searches behind appearances for their 
 essential meaning, and in its wanderings of imagination 
 would fain surprise Truth disrobed in her deepest haunt of 
 mystery. Of the former, Homer is the greatest example among 
 the ancients, and Shakespeare among moderns. Of the lat- 
 ter, Job sovereigns the old world of literature, and Dante, 
 Milton, Goethe and — may I not say — Shelley, reign in the 
 
 new. 
 
 i 
 
 Homer has no theories. Good and evil engage his atten- 
 tion by the incidents of their manifold strife, but raise no 
 questionings of their origin or nature or destiny. His gods 
 are simply men of extraordinary stature. He sees heaven 
 and earth in the same plane of vision and all that they con- 
 tain, vast and little, permanent and fleeting, with equal vivid- 
 ness of conception. In the rush of warring years not the nod 
 VOL. II. no 3.-9. 
 
130 The Western. 
 
 of a helmet misses his glance, not the least device upon a 
 shield, mot the vibration of a bow-string, not the length of a 
 warrior's stride, nor even the petty household-cares with 
 which the wives of heroes busy their hearts from fear of evil 
 tidings from the fray. 
 
 So too with Shakespeare, whose sight, broad and minute as 
 Homer's, goes deeper into the mind. Where Homer sees a 
 will vanquished by one conspicuous passion, Shakespeare 
 sees it beset and borne down by a multitude. A single life 
 furnishes him a field of Troy whereon a whole Iliad of 
 motives struggles through plots, dissensions, delays, numer- 
 ous assaults to its moral catastrophe. Yet describing it he 
 does not take part — he only looks on in thought. No conjec- 
 tures of the whence and how and whither of life distract the 
 gaze which engrosses all his faculties and transforms them 
 into a magnifying lens of such wondrous power that merest 
 sporules of emotion, impalpable to the minds in which they 
 lurk, are imaged by it large as full-grown deeds. 
 
 In Job we observe a different type of genius. His pictures 
 of nature and man, sublime and tender as they are, beyond 
 rivalry, compose the background of a study on which lie, 
 like the shadows of the crosses in Gerome's painting of Gol- 
 gotha, the dark crucial problems of the soul. 
 
 Likewise, Dante's dream, under its magic realism of scenery 
 borrowed from earth and only changed to ghastlier or morfe 
 gorgeous colors by being placed amid preternatural light, 
 conceals a grave philosophy of religion — the work of outraged 
 conscience, mournful pity and disappointed love, phrasing the 
 universal knowledge of an epoch into an answer that may 
 still their cry for justice, mercy and peace. 
 
 Milton's epic has for its central figure around which all 
 others are grouped for illustration and relief, the strength, 
 courage, and majesty of will, which, as divine attributes, ren- 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 131 
 
 dering their possessor, though a fiend, God-like still in 
 power of fascination, enable Evil to cope with the omnip- 
 otence of Good. ( 
 
 Goethe cannot be strictly designated either an observant 
 or speculative poet. He is equally native to both regions. 
 His intellect is planetary — takes all the lights and shadows 
 of a diurnal round of experience and at the same time moves 
 along an infinite orbit about the Unknown. The poem, how- 
 ever, in which he sought to give paramount expression of his. 
 mind, belongs to the speculative order. Faust is an attempt 
 to solve the riddle of the soul. The soul seeks happiness and 
 finds misery; knowledge leads to doubt, not to certitude; 
 superiority to one's fellows is elevation .to a solitude with- 
 out sympathy; virtue failing to compensate for the loss of 
 pleasures renounced in pursuit of higher joy, seems a detest- 
 able cheat. In desperation now the soul makes a compact 
 with the spirit of Evil, and surrendered to his guidance, ranges 
 without scruple the entire realm of Sense and Action, but 
 again misses the happiness it would find. Had it been only 
 wise, it would have known at the beginning what is taught 
 by the end of this career, that right to happiness it has 
 none, nor even to existence ; that being, it should content 
 itself within the conditions of being, and as a river which 
 may have acquiescent smoothness of flow but cannot by 
 ,yearnful billows become an ocean, glide without fretting 
 against its shores, in whatsoever channel Nature has left for 
 its course. 
 
 To this princely line of poets I have ventured to add the 
 name of Shelley. Such rank, in my j udgment, he deserves, 
 not only because of the promise of powers which never 
 reached their ripest fulfillment, but also by virtue of achieve- 
 ments which, considered, independently of the youth of their 
 
132 The Western. 
 
 author, are prodigies, and as the works of one so young, 
 almost miraculous. 
 
 That his place has not yet been fixed in literature is due 
 mainly to the anticipative character of his poetry which 
 needed another era than his own to recognize its prophetic 
 inspiration£__Shelley was at war with society as he found it, 
 and society could not repress its indignation enough to hear 
 any music in his denunciations of its most cherished customs. 
 What music it did hear was in the lyrics which descanted on 
 congenial themes and which, because heard, compelled its 
 praise as perfect. But these were the playful warblings of 
 a genius that took rest in them for louder and more earnest 
 tones of thought. To Shelley's contemporaries outspoken 
 thought was discord. It grated upon their prej udices already 
 nervous with fear of revolution, and they called if madness. 
 
 The singer's life they regarded as proof of this insanity, 
 because the life corresponded with the song. (How could a 
 man be rational who defied public opinion ? Did not the folly 
 of such defiance demonstrate aberrancy of intellect ? What 
 was to be gained by it ? — not wealth nor popularity nor high 
 position. And who but a madman would challenge with vo- 
 ciferous rhyme public scrutiny to conduct which was alto- 
 gether unprofitable and plainly hostile to self-interest? So 
 Shelley's contemporaries reasoned and doubtless felt their 
 anger subside into a sense of charity under the effort to 
 mitigate by such excuses his crime of thinking. 
 
 Moreover at that time poetry was deemed to consist more 
 in finish of form than in richness of material. Criticism had 
 adopted canons as conventional as the manners of the court. 
 A drama must have five acts — so verse must have a certain 
 number of syllabic feet, a certain ratio of imagery to literal- 
 ness of style, and a certain set of subjects exclusively dedic- 
 ated to Art. Art could not be didactic. Art must not reason. 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 133 
 
 Art should uot excite disagreeable emotions, as, for instance, 
 by opposing prevalent beliefs. Art must keep her fair com- 
 plexion from freckling with exposure to the rude' air of 
 politics, and cultivate in seclusion the toiletry of sentiment. 
 This method of criticism Shelley despised and said of it — 
 " It sprang up in that torpid , interval when poetry was not. 
 It never presumed to assert an understanding of its own ; it 
 has always, unlike true science, followed, not preceded, the 
 opinion of mankind, and would even now bribe '] with worthless 
 adulation some of our greatest poets to impose gratuitous 
 fetters on their own imaginations and become unconscious 
 accomplices in the daily murder of all genius either not so 
 aspiring or not so fortunate as their own." iHe, for one, 
 would not submit to its shackles. He set up the standard of 
 revolt, and the revolt has since become a successful revo- 
 lution. Melody is to be measured by accents, not by a thumb- 
 rule. Imagination and Fancy may shine over a poem as the 
 sun over the sea, and turn every rippling line to sparkles. 
 Greece is a goodly land, and excursions to its groves and 
 mountains pleasant enough for holidays of reminiscence, but 
 men are alive now as truly as they were when Parnassus 
 reached half-way to heaven, land the Now with its pangs of 
 travail for a birth of better manhood, should inspire the 
 singer's loftiest strain. So from the Present and the Future 
 Shelley took his themes, or rather, the themes took posses- 
 sion of Shelley's spirit and with its voice of perfect melody 
 told their story of pain and wrong, their hope of triumphant 
 Eight. Other poets were more or less skillful workers in 
 verse and might observe the rules of their craft with advan- 
 tage, but Shelley's soul was poetry itself and whatever 
 passed through it became a poem. Artist he scarcely can be 
 called. Critical as was his intellect, its faculties of criticism 
 were overborne by the mightier impulse of creation. Criticism 
 
134 The Western. 
 
 is the office of prose; it demands for its task the cooler 
 moods of thought, and when performed by the poet himself, 
 implies a limit to the creating power where the mind becomes 
 reflective by reaction. But limit Shelley's imagination sel- 
 dom, if ever, reached. It could not pause long enough to 
 look calmly back on its course. Its very rests were lyric 
 pantings. Nought but the utmost stretch of words could 
 momentarily check its flight, and even they, while restraining, 
 were lifted, by its effort to transcend them, into meanings 
 strange because higher than their wont. In two days this 
 panurgic mind-force wrought a poem as long as one of Tenny- 
 son's Idyls of the King, and rich as any of them in jewels of 
 fancy well-set in metrical gold; in two months a tragedy 
 surpassed by none but Shakespeare's ; in six months an epic 
 drama that vies with the life-time labors of the giant bards of 
 our race ; and in five years ending before the thirtieth of the 
 poet's age was complete, a volume of verse which has proved 
 a mine of suggestions to succeeding poets such as Tennyson, 
 Browning, Arnold, Buchanan, the Bossetis and Swinburne, as 
 well as to our own Lowell, who more than any other has 
 caught the spirit of Shelley's Odes and inherited their wealth 
 of phrase at once philosophic and pictorial. Verily it was a 
 frenzy of song which had seized this minstrel and kept him 
 in perpetual transport of utterance. He had the genuine 
 madness of the muses, the Bacchic intoxication without which, 
 according to Plato, " Whoever approaches the poetical gates, 
 having persuaded himself that by art alone he may become 
 sufficiently a poet, will find in the end his own imperfection, 
 and see the poetry of his cold prudence vanish into nothing- 
 ness before the light of that which has sprung from divine 
 insanity." 
 
 Hence the rapt bard sang, albeit without hope of audience 
 from his own time — sang because his soul overflowed with 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 135 
 
 music pouring into it through every sense, and from all the 
 air of thought. Audience he felt that he would have but from 
 another age and that age already existed in his mind ; for his 
 was an ideal world where present and future are one. There 
 his opinions were powers, his abstractions personalities, his 
 hopes the very ground on which he walked and " an over- 
 hanging day." 
 
 Shelley's idealism differed from that of the metaphysicians 
 who hold theirs as a result of logical processes to have no 
 influence on the ordinary life by whose instincts and duties it 
 is contradicted. His conceptual faculty was too vivific to 
 allow any inference to lie dead in its sight, and no sooner was 
 the inert idea seen than it was under a warm embrace which 
 made it live and become a part of the soul's own life. In no 
 other poet has speculation been so intimately identified with 
 feeling, desire, being itself. Other poets have first speculated 
 and then translated their speculations into symbols of out- 
 ward reality. But to Shelley their reality was the dream and 
 their dream the reality. Instead of attempting to express 
 thought in images of sense, it was more his effort to animate 
 the things of sense with the most delicate traits of thought. 
 In his mind the barrier between the inward and outward was 
 broken down and they blended in a vague sentiment that was 
 almost consciousness of another mind of which the two worlds 
 were different and yet identical manifestations. 
 
 Here at last the Berkleyan Philosophy had found a genius 
 native to its finest ether. 
 
 " Some truths there are ," wrote Berkley, " so near and ob- 
 vious to the mind that a man needs only open his eyes to see 
 them. Such I take this one to be, viz., that all the choir of 
 heaven and furniture of the earth — in a word, all those bodies 
 which compose the mighty frame of the world — have not any 
 substance without a mind ; that their being is to be perceived 
 
136 The Western. 
 
 or known ; that consequently as long as they are not actually 
 perceived by me or do not exist in my mind, or that of any 
 other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, 
 or subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit; it being perfectly 
 unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction 
 to attribute to any single part of them an existence inde- 
 pendent of a spirit." By the influence of this teaching 
 Shelley's imagination was swept to cadences that ran as a 
 sustaining undertone through all the varied measures of his 
 music. So distinctly has he declared it in some of his strains 
 that but for their tropical magnificence the words might be 
 taken for an exact re-statement of Berkley's propositions, as 
 when in Hellas, Ahasuerus says to Mahmud 
 " Sultan, talk no more 
 
 Of thee and me, the future and the past ; 
 
 But look on that which cannot change — the One, 
 
 The unborn and the undying. Earth and Ocean, 
 
 Space, and the isles of life or light that gem 
 
 The sapphire floods of interstellar air, 
 
 This firmament pavilioned upon chaos, 
 
 With all its cressets of immortal Are, 
 
 Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably 
 
 Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them 
 
 As Colpe the Atlantic clouds — this whole 
 
 Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers, 
 
 With all the silent or tempestuous workings 
 
 By which they have been, are, or cease to be, 
 
 Is but a vision ; all that it inherits 
 
 Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams. 
 
 Thought is its cradle and its grave ; nor less 
 
 The future and the past are idle shadows 
 
 Of thoughts eternal flight — they have no being ; 
 
 Nought is but that which feels itself to be." 
 I Accordingly when Shelley looked out upon Nature, it was 
 his own soul that he saw there — its moods, beliefs, fears and 
 aspirations. At one time 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 137 
 
 " The gentleness of rain is in the wind." 
 At another 
 
 " The grass sprung 
 Startled, and glanced, and trembled, even, 
 To feel an unaccustomed presence." 
 
 A woodland scene imaged in a pool 
 
 "Had lent 
 To the dark waters breast 
 Its every leaf and lineament 
 With more than truth expressed ; 
 Until an envious wind crept by, — 
 Like an unwelcome thought 
 Which from the ?nind's too faithful eye 
 Blots one dear image out.'" 
 
 Then there are scenes that partake of his own extreme 
 sense of the horrible, as when — 
 
 " Like a dying lady lean and pale 
 Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil 
 Out of her chamber, led by the insane 
 And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, 
 The moon arose up in the murky east 
 A white and shapeless mass." 
 
 At the death of Keats, all ' that he had loved and molded 
 
 into thought from shape and hue and odor and sweet sound, 
 
 lamented him ' — 
 
 " 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 ; 
 
 Afar the melancholy thunder moaned. 
 
 Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay 
 
 And the wild winds flew round sobbing in their dismay." 
 
 Likewise, when Shelley's mind changed its view and looked 
 in upon itself^ it found there a visible Nature. As sight 
 before had been thought, thought now became sight. He saw 
 
138 The Western. 
 
 ' wintry forests ' of grief, ' many- winding rivers ' of reverie, 
 'light sands of consciousness paving the ocean of dreams,' 
 ' drownings of sleep,' 
 
 " Where the dreamer seems to be 
 Weltering through eternity." 
 
 ' moonlight of Love which hides the night of Dejection,' 
 
 "From its own darkness, until all is bright 
 Between the heaven and earth of the calm mind ;" 
 
 and long processions of personified mental attributes, as when 
 
 to mourn for Adonais 
 
 " Desires and Adorations 
 
 Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, 
 
 Splendors and Glooms, and glimmering incarnations 
 
 Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies ; 
 
 And Sorrow with her family of sighs, 
 
 And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam 
 
 Of her own dying smile instead of eyes 
 
 Came in slow pomp ; the moving pomp might seem 
 
 Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream." 
 
 Into this ideal world the poet had brought a sensitiveness 
 naturally excessive and irritated by the failure of visionary 
 experiments at mending the laws and institutions of his land. 
 Born under the star of the French Eevolution, its fiery spell 
 was in his blood and fevered it to an almost hatred of op- 
 pression. At school he had resisted the brutal custom of 
 fagging and earned for himself a brave immunity. During 
 the few months of his residence at Oxford he had written to 
 well-known liberals with a design of organizing, if possible, 
 an association of reform — a small offense compared with the 
 villainy he afterwards perpetrated of presuming to use his 
 reason in matters of religion — villainy which was punished by 
 immediate expulsion from the privileges of the University. 
 Then the door of his father's house was shut against him, 
 his first love foreswore her troth, and the boy barely nineteen 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 139 
 
 years old betook himself to London in as desolate exile as if 
 he had been thrown on a South-sea island. But though fra- 
 gile the body that encased it, his was as dauntless a spirit as 
 ever informed the strength of a Titan. There were baronial 
 estates at home to which he was heir, but he preferred the 
 wretchedness of intellectual freedom. The pin-money of sis- 
 ters at boarding-school near London, kept breath in his body 
 until his father consented with small annuities to let it stay 
 there; and a fair schoolmate who meanwhile had brought 
 their pittances to his hand, won its impulsive clasp in mar- 
 riage. It was a marriage to be repented of — a chain upon the 
 very heart that vowed its energies to breaking the chains of 
 a race. These chains Shelley heard clanking everywhere — 
 iron on the feet of the poor to enslave them to a soil whose 
 harvests were not their own; gold on the wrists of the rich 
 who knew not that the bracelets they esteemed so pretty, 
 withheld their hands from worthier prizes ; collars of unjust 
 law on the necks of whole peoples to drag them before 
 crowned apes of power, and visors of .custom clamped over 
 the eyes of reason lest it should discover the absurdity of the 
 things it had been taught to reverence. Eeligion, too, seemed 
 to him a chain and its every rite and dogma links forged by 
 cunning priests to bind the homage of men to a despotism 
 enthroned in heaven as authority for all the oppressions of 
 earth. To break these chains and give man liberty, Shelley 
 believed, was to set him in the way of moral and social per- 
 fection. For man's vices, Shelley argued, were not innate but 
 the effect of adverse circumstances : — of pernicious education. 
 All voluntary actions originated in opinions. Whatever man 
 did — of good or evil — he did because at the time he thought 
 it conducive to happiness. Experience would acquire wisdom 
 whenever left free to pursue it in all directions, alike through 
 folly and through prudence. The individual might perish in 
 
14:0 The Western. 
 
 the pitfall of his vices but humanity exists through many 
 generations, and where one generation left off another would 
 take up the career of training in a continuous progression 
 towards a knowledge of right conduct, so full and clear and 
 impressive as to constrain obedience to its directions. This 
 philosophy of sagacious maxims and hopeful errors Shelley 
 had learned from Godwin at whose feet he sat and who thus 
 syllogized it in his Inquiry of Political Justice — 
 
 * There is no conduct in itself reasonable, which the refutation of error 
 and dissipating of uncertainty will not make appear to be such. There 
 is no conduct which can be shown to be reasonable, the reasons of which 
 may not sooner or later be made impressive, irresistible and matter of 
 habitual recollection. Lastly, there is no conduct the reasons of which are 
 thus conclusive and thus communicated, which will not infallibly and 
 uniformly be adopted by the man to whom they are communicated." 
 
 It was easy for Shelley to fill out and enforce this reasoning 
 with illustrations which, though at first glance appearing refu- 
 tatory, would on further examination change to proofs. 
 What chiefly retards the progress of the species, he would 
 say, and keeps it in chronic puerility is a system of govern- 
 ment inimical to growth because growth threatens to over- 
 throw it. As a part of this policy of dwarfage men are edu- 
 cated to lie and believe in lies. The bauble that glitters in 
 the hand of a king is a lie. The king himself tricked up in 
 meritricious dignity is a lie; and those who smirk, nod and 
 kneel in masquerade of homage about his throne are still 
 meaner lies ; while every path of service which leads to that 
 high court of pretense rises rank by rank up a steep ascent 
 of turpitude in lying. The jurisprudence that allows the lord- 
 ling a thousand acres and kills the pauper who poaches on one 
 of them, is but a chartered lie. The judge who distributes jus- 
 tice by classes the perjured arbiter of lies ; and every field of 
 
 * Pol. In. Vol. 1, Page 51, 2d Edition. 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 141 
 
 blood shed as the patriotic right of a government which 
 wages war for a freak named honor and then grinds with 
 poor laws the surviving families of those who fall in its 
 defense, a lie so inexcusable and atrocious that the very ele- 
 ments are guilty in not combining with rage to forbid it. 
 Nay more ! Are there not upon the statute-books enactments 
 which say " Thou shalt lie and swear that thy lie is truth V 
 Dare a man's mouth betray his inmost conviction ? What if 
 he should call the Prince-Eegent a rake f How long could he 
 claim as an indefeasible right equal privileges with the rest 
 of his kind, and remain out of prison 1 Is it possible, then, 
 for him to be true to himself — not to speak of his fellows — 
 when with every breath he inhales hypocrisy and at every 
 turn touches a fraud ? 
 
 " Oh that the wise from their bright minds would kindle 
 Such lamps within the dome of this dim world 
 That the pale name of Priest might shrink and dwindle 
 Into the hell from which it first was hurled, 
 A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure ! 
 Till human thoughts might kneel alone, 
 Each before the judgment-throne 
 Of its own aweless soul, or of the Power Unknown. 
 Oh that the words which make the thoughts obscure 
 From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew 
 From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture, 
 Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue, 
 And frowns and smiles and splendors not their own, 
 
 Till in the nakedness of false and true 
 They stand before their lord, each to receive its due ! " 
 
 — [Ode to Liberty.) 
 
 To liberty therefore which meant equality, sincerity, self- 
 / respect, generous emulation of noble examples and eager- 
 I ness of culture— forces of social advancement which in co- 
 j operation would be irresistible — Shelley devoted his life. For 
 | three years the outlawed boy roved in a knight-errant's quest 
 
142. The Western. 
 
 for exploits which should extend the fame of his mistress and 
 show himself worthy to wear her arms on his escutcheon. 
 Now he was in London and anon in Edinburgh; at York to- 
 day, at Keswick to-morrow ; this month in Dublin, the next 
 at Nan Gwylt and afterwards in rapid transition at Kadnor- 
 shire, Leynmouth, London again, Tanyrolt and Bracknell; 
 writing pamphlets and letters, making speeches, trying to 
 organize societies, always in debt because always giving 
 his money to others less needy than himself, building dykes 
 to save the houses of the poor from floods, studying medi- 
 cine in hospitals to relieve the ailments of the poor with- 
 out the charges that frayed almost to breaking the thread of 
 wages that at best only kept them suspended over starvation, 
 and finally contracting in his enterprise of charity an opthal- 
 mia which turned the beauty he most loved, to torture, as the 
 very grass blades and boughs of trees cut themselves ' with 
 microscopic distinctness ' on his eyes. 
 
 But the notablest deed of this dream-haunted vagrancy 
 was the letter to Lord Ellenborough. It was a veritable deed. 
 Its words rang against intolerance like blows of a battle-axe 
 — and their echoes are still abroad. Lord Ellenborough had 
 passed a severe sentence on one Eaton, a bookseller, for 
 publishing the third part of Paine' s Age of Beason. • The 
 sentence roused Shelley's indignation. He was a mere 
 stripling — not more than twenty years of age — but he denoun- 
 ced the outrage with invective worthy of the maturest intel- 
 lect of Burke. 
 
 "What end," he asks, "is persecution designed to answer? Can it 
 convince him whom it injures ? Can it prove to the people the falsehood of 
 his opinions? It may make him a hypocrite and .them cowards ; but bad 
 means can promote no good end. The unprejudiced mind looks with sus- 
 picion on a doctrine that needs the sustaining hand of power.* * * * But I 
 will demand if that man is not rather entitled to the respect than the dis- 
 countenance of society, who, by disputing a received doctrine either proves 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 143 
 
 its falsehood and inutility ( thereby aiming at the abolition of what is false 
 and useless ) or gives to its adherents an opportunity of establishing its ex- 
 cellence and truth. Surely the individual who devotes his time to fearless 
 and unrestricted inquiry into the grand questions arising out of our moral 
 nature ought rather to receive the patronage than encounter the vengeance 
 of an enlightened legislature. T would have you to know, my lord, that 
 fetters of iron cannot bind or subdue the soul of virtue. From the damps 
 -and solitude of its dungeon it ascends, free and undaunted, whither thine, 
 from the pompous seat of judgment dare not soar." 
 
 Increasing years bring wisdom, and Shelley soon ceased to 
 look for any immediate result from his schemes of reform. 
 Men had been too long in bondage to know the value of 
 freedom. They were reconciled to their degradation and obliv- 
 ious of its shame. Only when hungry would they growl and 
 then a toss of meat would slop their mouths. Liberty could not 
 be thrust upon them — it must be a desire before it can become 
 a heritage. Time would have to work ; segregated thinkers 
 mewing their hope in secret, meet together; thoughts add 
 themselves to thoughts until they should marshall and fly 
 abroad in unseen troops of influence ; theories, repulsive on 
 account of their novelty, acquire by degrees the fascination 
 of familiarity, and entering the unoccupied minds of a fresh 
 generation, fashion them to more viriie forms of character, 
 before a nation could rise and stand in complete enfranchise- 
 ment. 
 
 But, however long delayed, the day was sure to come. 
 Shelley had the earnest of it in his own great hope, and the 
 expanding prevision of dangers and difficulties in the way of 
 its approach only sublimed his courage to encounter and 
 remove them. But the strength to do was spent. His frail 
 body was pining inc onsumption, his sympathies had grown 
 so morbid that they suffered every pain they saw or heard of, 
 and worst of all, a canker gnawed incessantly his heart — grief 
 .at the disgrace and suicide of his first wife, and at the loss of 
 
144 The Western. 
 
 his children whom the law had wrested from him as unfitted 
 by immoralities of opinion to be their custodian. 
 
 He cannot breast the tempest any more. Away in some 
 friendlier clime he will seek a nest woven by Nature of 
 hills and woods and streams for wounded spirits like his own. 
 There forgetting the passions which prompt the lays of other 
 poets but which for him to remember is to bleed afresh, he 
 will sing in the world's night of its golden dawn. Dear as 
 ever are the old themes — truth, freedom, the brotherhood of 
 the race and its perfectibility — but now that he can bear no 
 more the brunt of opposition in their service, the ear which 
 would not listen to his ephemeral speech, shall hear them 
 chanted in immortal psalms. 
 
 Nature welcomed him to her Italian solitudes as a pet 
 child, and in their depths his aching head lay at rest as be- 
 tween the breasts of a great Mother. One can almost see a 
 faun in the naked revels he has described himself as taking 
 alone in a ravine near the Baths of Leucea — 
 
 " In the middle of the day, I bathe in a pool or fountain, formed in the 
 middle of the forests by a torrent It is surrounded on all sides by precip- 
 itous rocks, and the waterfall of the stream which forms it falls into it on 
 one side with perpetual dashing. Close to it on the top of the rocks are 
 alders and above the great chesnut trees, whose long and pointed leaves 
 pierce the deep blue sky in strong relief. The water of this pool which, to 
 venture an unrythmical paraphrase, is sixteen feet long and ten feet wide, 
 is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, 
 as it were, trembling in the light of noon-day. It is exceedingly cold also. 
 My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the 
 perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into 
 this fountain — a practice in hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This tor- 
 rent is composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up 
 which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving 
 the spray all over my body, whilst I clamber the moist crags with diffi- 
 culty." — {Letters to Peacock. Fraser's Mag., March, 1860.) 
 
 Shelley's love of nature was unique. Admiration the dull- 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 145 
 
 est sensibility feels when confronted, by her grander aspects, 
 and there is a kind of technical interest often mistaken for 
 affection, which even among poets regards her less as a sov- 
 ereign joy than* as a model posing for pictures of phrase ; but 
 Shelley's love was a positive entran cement, a total eclipse of 
 self by her closer presence on his soul. When he went to the 
 woods it was not to hunt for a sonnet, nor when climbing 
 mountains did he think of getting from their peaks a fine 
 effect of sunset tints for inchoate cantos ; he sought Nature 
 solely from love, and that he might feel love's divinest thrill 
 in contact with her beauty. Yet he knew by name and with 
 recognition that was almost mutual, every tree and shrub and 
 wild flower that grew in his favorite resorts— how the branch- 
 es rambled from the trunk and were mimicked by the veins 
 of the leaves, how restlessly the vines climbed and under what 
 serpentine hues of blossom, how the sod ' scarce heaved when 
 the tender blue-bell was born ' and the water-lily glowed with 
 moonlight beams of its own, and the daffodil wets 
 
 " Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears 
 When the low wind its playmate's voice it hears." 
 
 He knew as well the passions and caprices of the sea — its 
 shallows and depths of color and the hours they reflect, the 
 blackening of its waves in the wind, and the rainbowed spray 
 of hope with which they die in sunshine, and from the 
 faintest wrinklings of its surface could tell what purpose, yet 
 unformed, of wrath or pleasure had begun to stir within its 
 heart. These, and many secrets which Nature refuses to per- 
 sistent inquiry, Shelley learned by the still content of lying 
 in her arms and overhearing her talk in sleep. And he 
 learned more — the most enamoured tones of her voice which, 
 spoken to his own spirit and transfused through it into song, 
 made him the most musical of poets. This pre-eminency has 
 been disputed by a recent critic* in favor of Swinburne ; but 
 
 * E. C. Steadman. 
 
 VOL. IT. NO 3. — 10. 
 
146 The Western. 
 
 the difference between them is the difference between genius 
 of inspiration and genius of skill. Swinburne is a musician of 
 words, Shelley a born singer. Swinburne's excellence is tech- 
 nical brilliancy of variation, Shelley's is essential grace of tune. 
 Swinburne's sonatas are masterly tricks of art, but the im- 
 pression they make is too much one of surprise at their 
 nimble overleaping of difficulties of versification, to leave the 
 mind free for full enjoyment of their rhythm ; Shelley's profuse 
 strains are but the audible pulses of his thought, spontaneous, 
 easy and versatile in modulation, ranging at will through all 
 the compass of sound, and even when wild, wild without dis- 
 cord, like the melodious respiration of a mocking bird. 
 
 When Shelley lauds the skylark, his measures take its 
 earth-scorning spring and rise with the gladness of its soar- 
 ing strain. When describing the sympathetic sisters of the 
 sensitive plant, his voice has the peal of hyacinthine bells — 
 " So delicate, soft and intense 
 It is felt like an odor within the sense." 
 And echoes as they recede among distant hills mock them- 
 selves in his cadences with " low, sweet, faint sounds like the 
 farewell of ghosts." 
 
 But Shelley's love of Nature, while both a passion and an 
 inspiration, had other moods in which it became worship. 
 Nature to him was then an apparition of God. He glimpsed 
 God in her splendors, heard God in her voices, fell at God's 
 feet on her high altar-places. Though generally believed to 
 have been an atheist and himself accepting the nickname in 
 a temper of youthful bravado, atheist he never was after the 
 brief fit of the Queen Mab period of his youth had passed. 
 In that day every kind of opinion that denied the traditional 
 definition of God received the same stigma of epithet. Only 
 one idea of His character was tolerated as consistent with 
 an acknowledgment of His existence, and that idea was the 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 147 
 
 most crudely mechanical and anthropomorphic. God was 
 either the absolute ' carpenter and chemist ' of the universe or 
 an august name for nothing. To suppose Nature co-eternal 
 with Him was to set up a rival Deity or propose a degrading 
 partnership. Before Nature began, He had filled an eternity 
 of boundless void with infinite sleep, and then one day awoke, 
 did a week's work and immediately sank back again into 
 sleep unbroken until now, save when some part of the 
 universal machinery has run wrong and required Him to put 
 in a finger of miraculous repair or providential adjustment. 
 To deny such fabrication and control of Nature by a Being 
 whose personality was further defined as consisting of human 
 idiosyncrasies monstrified to superhuman bulk, was pro- 
 nounced Atheism. Shelley accepted the title, but while doing 
 so, insisted that ' his negation must be understood solely to 
 affect a creative Deity,' and that in his poetry it was ' the 
 erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of 
 a supreme being that was spoken against, not the Supreme 
 Being itself.' 
 
 After all, when it is remembered that the God of every 
 man's worship is but his own conception of God and must 
 fall as immeasurably short of the whole truth as an infinite 
 Unknown transcends human ability to conceive it; that as 
 much of this Truth as cannot be conceived must remain 
 inoperative upon intelligence and therefore upon character- so 
 far as intelligence supplies its motives and principles ; that 
 this conception itself grows with the growth of all knowledge, 
 being one thing in' the Fetichist, another in the Greek, an- 
 other in the Jew, another in the Buddhist, another in the 
 Moslem, another in the Christian, and as manifold among 
 Christians as their differences of information and circumstan- 
 tial bias ; when it is remembered that every mind which 
 adores at all, adores its own ideal of what is greatest and 
 
148 The Western. 
 
 best and most satisfactory as a solution of the mystery of life 
 and its surroundings— this railing accusation of infidelity 
 from one fallible mind against another appears in its proper 
 aspect as nothing more nor less than a charge of difference of 
 ideal or, in other words, of inequality of knowledge and dis- 
 similarity of mental organism. What right have I to say — 
 what else than arrogance can I exhibit by saying — that you 
 deny God because you deny my trivial notion of His 
 Majesty, or that you blaspheme His name by describing my 
 notion as grotesque. It is your own God, not another's, that 
 you are to believe in, reverence, and obey; to Him, and Him 
 alone, you stand or fall. 
 
 With no conception of Deity did Shelley quarrel as the pre- 
 rogative of the intellect that entertained it ; it was the claim 
 of the conception to an autocratic sway over all other intel- 
 lects, and the accompanying threat of vengeance should they 
 refuse submission, which his reason and sense of justice and 
 love of liberty alike resented. 
 
 " What irs that Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood 
 
 Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown 
 
 Fill heaven and darken earth, and in such mood 
 
 The form he saw and worshiped was his own, 
 
 His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown ; — 
 
 And 'twere an innocent dream, but that a faith 
 
 Nursed by fear's dew of poison grows thereon, 
 
 And that men say that Power has chosen Death 
 
 On all who scorn its laws to wreak immortal wrath." 
 
 Unwilling to submit his reason to the guesses of others, 
 Shelley was as reluctant to yoke it with a tight hypothesis of 
 his own. He held is belief as tentative and to be displaced 
 by any theory of the origin and purport of the universe which 
 could more clearly explain its mystery. That mystery, how- 
 ever, was too dark for swift rushes or sudden leaps of faith. 
 Enough if he could stumble through bogging inquiries to any 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 149 
 
 footway of speculal ion, and along that footway towards the 
 dimmest promise of Light. Even a "Will o' the Wisp were 
 kind should it lead him out of the morass of doubt to firmer 
 thinking. More than once did he repine and fall, and as one 
 utterly spent, give up his heart to sobs, but the sobs of his 
 heart were a miserere of more than earthly music to lull its 
 despair. Thus, metaphysician as well as poet, he groped 
 from a materialism black as perdition to the twilight of an 
 idealism which, if it erred, -erred by what might be called an 
 excess of Divinity — that is by the denial of all other existence 
 than the Divine — as one who had lived in protracted night and 
 for the first time saw the dawn might believe the light, to have 
 created the objects it only reveals and that those objects have 
 no other reality than its revelation. 
 
 In Shelley's creed mind alone existed, and that mind was 
 the Eternal. All others were but portions of it, phases of its 
 meditation, thoughts projected into an appearance of entity 
 by the necessary law of intelligence, which cannot reflect up- 
 on its thoughts without objectifying them to the reflecting 
 self. He wrote, in an unfinished Essay on Life, 
 
 " Nothing exists but as it is perceived. Pursuing the same thread 
 of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to 
 that which is employed in now questioning its . own nature, is like- 
 wise found to be a delusion. Let it not be supposed that this doc- 
 trine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person 
 who now, write and think am that one mind — I am but a portion of it. 
 The relations of things remain unchanged by whatever system. Yet 
 that the basis of things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges, mind, 
 is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any experience of its pro- 
 perties, ( and. beyond that experience how vain is argument ! ) cannot 
 create — it can only perceive." 
 
 Shelley, however, did not believe the universal mind to be 
 similar to the individual. The latter was marked by limita- 
 tions which could not bound the former. Man's conscious- 
 
150 The Western. 
 
 ness was but the sense of limitation to , his personality — a 
 personality that to the absolute mind could be nothing more 
 than one of its own ideas. As such, it would have the life of 
 that mind and feel such life in the intuitions which are inde- 
 pendent of the understanding, which cannot be dissolved by 
 analysis or conceived of as other than necessary and eternal, 
 which are most impressive when consciousness of individual- 
 ity is least distinct as if their inflow were obliterating 
 the sense of limitation and flooding the flnititude of thought 
 with the infinitude of feeling — intuitions of the True, the 
 Beautiful, and the Good. All else was phenomenal, evanes- 
 cent, illusory ; these alone were real and enduring. What- 
 ever opened the mind most amply to their entrance was of all 
 things that appear, most essentially Divine. Wherever they 
 had genialest play, God might be said to abide as in a Sheki- 
 nah. To Shelley this key of inner opening and this sacred 
 dwelling place were the property of Nature. Nature withdrew 
 his thoughts from ' the hate, fear, disdain, envy, self-love and 
 self-contempt ' of mankind, and soothed the rankling of that 
 barb of a broken arrow which nothing but Death could extract 
 from his heart. Nature communicated to his life the spirit of 
 her own — the spirit of an all-pervading Beauty that does not 
 differ from Truth and Goodness, but is one with them and the 
 same. How worshipful with trust and love and earnest 
 pleading his invocation of her aid — 
 
 " Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate 
 With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon 
 Of human thought or form, where art thou gone ? 
 Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, 
 This dim vast vale of tears, yacatit and desolate? — 
 Ask why the sunlight not forever 
 Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river : 
 Why aught should fade and fail that once is shown j . 
 Why fear and dream and death and birth 
 
The Soul of Shelley. ' 151 
 
 Cast on the daylight of this earth 
 
 Such gloom ; why man has such a scope 
 
 For love and hate, despondency and hope? 
 
 No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 
 
 To sage or poet these responses given : 
 
 Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, 
 
 Remain the records of their vain endeavor ; 
 
 Frail spells whose uttered charm might not avail to sever 
 
 From all we heaV and all we see, 
 
 Doubt, chance and mutability. 
 
 Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven, 
 
 Or music by the night-wind sent 
 
 Through strings of some wild instrument, 
 
 Or moonlight on a midnight stream, 
 
 Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. 
 
 ********** 
 
 ********** 
 
 The day becomes more solemn and serene 
 
 When noon is past ; there is a harmony 
 
 In Autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 
 
 Which through the Summer is not heard nor seen, 
 
 As if it could not be, as if it had not been. 
 
 Thus let thy power, which like the truth 
 
 Of Nature on my passive youth 
 
 Descended, to my onward life supply 
 
 Its calm — to one who worships thee 
 
 And every form containing thee, 
 
 Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 
 
 To fear- himself, and love all humankind." 
 
 Idle yearning of a lawless sentimentalism, the poetic prayer 
 may seem to those who consider religion a hard, rough, and 
 abrasive legality ; but in Shelley's soul this sentimentalism 
 had more than the force and did the full work of law. Beauty 
 swayed every impulse of his being. Though passing storms 
 sometimes vexed its surface, its deep, constant tides always 
 obeyed Beauty's mild and lunar persuasion. He loved physi- 
 
152 The Western. 
 
 cal pleasure, not with a bestial appetite and relish, but be- 
 cause and only to the extent in which it was beautiful to his 
 senses. He loved Truth because it was beautiful to his rea- 
 son ; benevolence, because it was beautiful to his sympathies ; 
 right, duty, goodness, because they were beautiful to his con- 
 science. 
 
 And if to govern passion by temperance ; to shun falsehood 
 with abhorrence ; to follow conviction without hesitancy or 
 regretful looking back even when it leads away from friends, 
 fortune, title and good report, and offers no compensation but 
 a cross of calumny ; to esteem the happiness of others above 
 one's own; to go through temptation not unscathed of evil 
 but untainted with constitutional vice, keeping the soul faith- 
 ful as a maiden-knight betrothed to its own San Greal; if 
 this be religion — then was Shelley's a thoroughly and bravely 
 religious character — all the more so because he fulfilled the 
 law from love alone and without the stimulating expectation 
 of immortal wages. 
 
 His views of marriage were, doubtless, immoral in their 
 tendencies, but they cannot on that account be construed as 
 a sign of immorality in his character. To know the truth 
 does not demonstrate virtue, nor to be ignorant of it, vice. 
 Knowledge of truth is often the result of educational good 
 luck or of rare endowments of intellect, without implying the 
 exercise of courage, resolution, self-denial or any distinctively 
 moral trait ; whereas, the adoption of error may end a life-long 
 endeavor to avoid it — an- endeavor which in noble sincerity 
 has forsaken beliefs once dear, wrestled with doubts, borne 
 reproach, suffered almost daily martyrdom. It is the love of 
 truth, not the knowledge of it, which is moral ; and by this 
 test Shelley's character should be judged. Was he honest 
 in the formation of his opinions and diligent in his search of 
 the evidences which should determine them? If so, not to 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 153 
 
 confess them in his conduct, however odious that conduct 
 would appear to the public, may have been prudence or 
 cowardice, but certainly was not morality. 
 
 Shelley's mistake consisted in transferring the ideal life of 
 a perfect society to the conditions of one malformed and 
 mischievous. Since in an Elysium of humanity no laws or 
 rites would be necessary to control personal action, that 
 action being prompted by the impulse of a pure heart wish- 
 ing the welfare of all, and all being harmonized by the preval- 
 ence of the same wise and supreme sentiment of equity — 
 Shelley imagined that he ought to set an example of indepen- 
 dence of laws and rites in his own behavior. He failed to 
 consider that his ethical relations were not with the end of 
 the world but with the England of his own day and, that in 
 the absence of the conditions which alone could warrant per- 
 fect spontaneity of life, such life was not only unobligatory, 
 but sure to be pernicious. 
 
 When Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, they were 
 both little more than children and neither believed in mar- 
 riage as an indissoluble bond unless the hearts it united 
 grew together as one. In their case it proved a tie of antag- 
 onisms, and they parted with mutual consent. For Helen's 
 subsequent and tragic fall Shelley cannot be held account- ■ 
 able. Enough that it was the fall of the star Wormwood 
 into the sweet waters of his new love, turning them to bitter- 
 ness. In Mary Godwin he met the only woman, perhaps, of his 
 time who could sympathize with his morbid nature and share 
 its most visionary moods. Herself the offspring of celebrated 
 parents who had abjured all other bonds of matrimony than 
 unconstrained agreement, and educated in their way of think- 
 ing, she consented to partake his obloquy and pain. It was a 
 happy union — that is to say, as happy as any could be which 
 began partly in distress of heart and continued under the 
 
154 The Western. 
 
 scorn of society. As far as evidence reveals, Shelley was 
 true to its affiance. The erotic poems which seem to indicate 
 other loves are pure idealizations — one of them an allegory 
 of his own soul and its desires, the other a souvenir dedicated 
 to a lady who received none of his writings except through 
 the hand of her husband, his best friend in life and his com- 
 rade in death. In accordance with the refinement of their 
 theme, which was not so much the persons they addressed 
 as certain ideal qualities represented by those persons, neither 
 of the poems contains a hint of flesh-and-blood sensuality. 
 Indeed, sensuality is the last charge that with any show of 
 plausibility can be brought against this soul which, whatever 
 its eccentricities of belief or action, stood so high above mean 
 aims and gross passions, that even Byron in his mad career 
 of license avouched with a tinge of enthusiasm in his words — 
 
 " Shelley was the most gentle, the most amiable, the least worldly-minded 
 person I ever met ; full of delicacy; disinterested beyond all other men, and 
 possessing a degree of genius joined to a simplicity as rare as it is admir- 
 able. He had formed to himself a beau-ideal of all that is fine, high-mind-! 
 ed, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter." 
 
 Such was the poet in his twenty-seventh year when about 
 to undertake his coronal work. He had seen, read, and stud- 
 ied much. He had consulted the great oracles of all ages — 
 Homer, Plato, the Greek dramatists, Moschus, Virgil, Dante, 
 Tasso, Calderon, Goethe, and by translating their speech into 
 his own, had guaged his ability of expressing fairest and sub- 
 limest thought. He had charmed his heedless countrymen 
 with lyrics which convinced them that the mind they regard- 
 ed a dusky and tangled brake of delusions was nevertheless the 
 home of a nightingale. He had, moreover, essayed an epic 
 which, thickly sown with splendors of description, wanted 
 only symmetery of plan to render them a world-known con- 
 stellation. And if 
 
 " Most wretched men 
 Are cradled into poetry by wrong 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 155 
 
 And learn in suffering what, they teach in song," 
 he had received from that severe poetic discipline a competent 
 training. And now he " will do something which a serious 
 and earnest estimate of his powers has suggested and which 
 shall be in every respect accommodated to their utmost 
 limits." 
 
 So at Rome, amid the flowery glades that flourish on the 
 ruined baths of Caracalla, under a roof of bright blue sky, 
 and with every sense and faculty intoxicated by the atmos- 
 phere of Spring, he begins Prometheus Unbound. There, 
 day after day, may be seen his tall spare form sitting on the 
 mossy lawn which overspreads the mosaic pavement of the 
 upper walls and arches, the brown hair too early streaked 
 with gray, falling in thick curls on a pensive forehead, the 
 girlish face flushed as if ' radiant apparitions ' were wooing 
 his genius, and the hand quick with its record as if eager to fix 
 their fading discourse in periods that can never grow dim. 
 
 It is a well-chosen trysting-place for Shelley, and Poetry. 
 Desolation is there to tell of the havocs of the Past, and Na- 
 ture's latest bloom to remind how ever out of death springs 
 richer life, and over all a glorious climate to forecast the Pro- 
 methean Age of Mankind. 
 
 To say no more than that the, poem is extraordinary which 
 absorbs these influences and grows by them into a consum- 
 mate symbol of Divine humanity, were to ^detract from its 
 least merit. To say that in certain respects it is the most 
 wonderful of poems, is to incur the suspicion of extravagance, 
 usually excited by superlatives. But where else will you find 
 such cosmic might of imagination condensing diffusest nebu- 
 lae of mind into a world of dream with landscapes clear as ev- 
 er delighted eye of flesh yet so phantasmal, it seems, the jar 
 of a sunbeam would dissolve them— 
 
 " Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumined caves 
 
156 The Western. 
 
 And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist 
 
 And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains — " 
 
 all peopled with ' terrible, strange, sublime, and beauteous ' 
 forms, bodied from no common dust of invention, but born of 
 the subtilest aura of fantasy and with the breath of Orphic 
 song in their lips 1 
 
 Where else will you find such flights of speculation exploring 
 height above height the remotest firmaments of mystery 
 without a tiresome strain or dull droop of wing, up to the em- 
 pyrean that overlooks the whole round of time complete at 
 last in man delivered from the torture of evil and emparadised 
 in the felicities of his own free spirit — 
 
 " Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the King 
 Over himself; just, gentle, wise ; but man, 
 Passionless ? no : — yet free from guilt and pain — 
 Which were, for his will made or suffered them ; 
 Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, 
 From chance and death and mutability, — 
 The clogs of that which else might oversoar 
 The loftiest star of unascended heaven 
 Pinnacled dim in the intense inane." 
 
 Fault has been found with the poem because of its lack of 
 human incidents and passions, but unreasonably, for these 
 would be incongruous to its design. It has nothing to do 
 with the individual or his life. It is a drama of the race. Its 
 scenery and plot' pertain to a generic mind, which has the pe- 
 culiarities of no family, tribe, or nation, but spreads through 
 all humanity and endures through all epochs. By the igno- 
 rance of this mind Evil was created and then deified. The 
 propensions of this mind Evil has turned to tormenting furies 
 
 of 
 
 " Pain and fear 
 
 And disappointment and mistrust and hate 
 And clinging crime.'' 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 157 
 
 The very best aspirations of this mind — its love and hope 
 and worship — Evil has thwarted of their true aim and duped 
 into his own unrecognized service of.fanaticism and woe — 
 
 " The good want power but to weep barren tears ; 
 The powerful goodness want — worse need for them ; 
 The wise want love ; and those who love want wisdom ; 
 And all best things are thus confused to ill.'' 
 
 But, on the other side, in the hope and love of this mind 
 lives a fortitude which Evil cannot utterly crush, and in its 
 knowledge grows a strength which all the sufferings sent by 
 Evil to subdue it only invigorate and weapon for the blow 
 that at last hurls the Arch-Usurper from his throne. 
 
 Thus, from beginning to end, the drama seeks to enact 
 itself within a purely subjective realm which admits nothing 
 from the outside. The intrusion of an earthly character would 
 mar its speculative integrity. The Divina Commedia may 
 have the live fraudulent counselors of Florence swathing 
 themselves from recognition with the flames of its Malebolge, 
 and a Beatrice illuminating its Paradise with her smile — for 
 Dante's are. a hell and heaven of individual retribution and 
 reward. Faust may have its pedantic Wagner and tipsy 
 Frostch, and heart-broken Marguerite singing crazy snatches 
 of ballads in her dungeon — for Goethe's is an earth of indivi- 
 dual longing, endeavor, disappointment and self conquest. 
 But Shelley's world must, at all risks of obscurity, unreality, 
 absence of adventure, exclude the individual and outward 
 from its transcendental scenes. Its inhabitants must be spec- 
 tral often formless, sometimes only voices ; its hero a ' writh- 
 ing shadow 'mid whirlwind-peopled mountains, its Demogor- 
 gon — impersonating Necessity — a tremendous gloom.' 
 
 Evidently a poem so unique in conception cannot be pro- 
 perly judged by standards adopted from masterpieces of an 
 entirely different kind. Are its sentiments strange and mys- 
 
158 Tlie Western. 
 
 tical ? They are anticipations of a sublimer humanity than 
 now exists, and move on a level with its altitude. Are the 
 images difficult to interpret? — they are attempts to cast 
 hueless and formless ideas into colors and shapes of sense. 
 Are the speculations perplexed with excessive allegory? — 
 in a drama where the actors are all abstractions and many of 
 the scenes are pictured phases of a cosmogony, it is scarcely 
 possible to confine allegorical action within an average of 
 popular ability to understand it. No doubt there are passages 
 that need explanation and baffle any effort to discover their 
 esoteric import, but such have generally a double meaning — 
 a form of beauty as well as a secret of philosophy, and 
 should the latter be missed, the former will delight. Take, 
 for illustration, the whole of the second Act. It represents 
 the flight of Asia and Panthea to the throne of Demogorgon 
 and thence to a vision of man's future Eden. They pass 
 through landscapes of matchless beauty, and hear music so 
 sweet that the joy of listening is almost pain. The landscapes 
 are shown with a finish of detail and vividness of coloring 
 that make the poet's words seem stereoscopic of realities, and 
 the music breathes out of the lines that describe it as out of 
 the opening stops of a flute. But all the while this .flight 
 sybolizes an argument for the progress and perfectibility of 
 mankind. The argument is Necessity — Nature's primal law — 
 the inevitable relation of antecedent and consequent which 
 renders every thought, word and deed as persistent and per- 
 petual in their influence as the forces that formed and are yet 
 forming the earth ; and as these forces have evolved order 
 out of chaos, life out of death, and spirit out of clay, so the 
 wise thought, the true word, and the good deed, by the im- 
 perishable power within them, shall countervail the Evil of 
 temporary ignorance and falsehood, and produce the perfect 
 race. 
 
The Soul of Shelley. 159 
 
 It is while in search of this prophetic law that Asia and 
 Panthea pass through a forest full of eddying sounds ; the 
 delicate music represents the spiral play of the forces of 
 growth in the trees — forces which have various modes of 
 manifestation, but are one and the same in air, and water, and 
 earth, and therefore it may be said of them in their molecular 
 fay-like movements, that 
 
 "• The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun 
 Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave 
 The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, 
 Are the pavilions where such dwell and float 
 Under the green and golden atmosphere 
 Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves, 
 And when these burst, and the thin fiery air 
 The which they breathed within those lucent domes, 
 Ascends to flow like meteors through the night 
 They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed, 
 And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire 
 Under the waters of the earth again." 
 
 But the search goes deeper than the mysteries of external 
 Nature — 
 
 Down, Down ! 
 Through the shade of Sleep, 
 Through the cloudy strife 
 Of Death and of Life ; 
 Through the veil and the bar 
 Of things which seem and are 
 Even to the steps of the remotest throne, 
 Down, Down." 
 The throne types the universal reign of law. This consul t- 
 ted, the Immortal Hours are seen driving by, and last of their 
 cortege appears one whose chariot is 
 
 "An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire, 
 Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim 
 Of delicate strange tracery." 
 
 He is the Hour with ' dove-like eyes of hope ' — the foreseen 
 
160 The Western. 
 
 hour of man's rescue from immemorial bondage — and con- 
 ducts the flight of argument on to its grand conclusion — 
 
 "We have passed Age's icy caves, 
 
 And Manhood's dark and tossing waves, 
 
 And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray ; 
 
 Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee 
 
 Of shadow-peopled Infancy, 
 
 Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day." 
 
 To be duly esteemed Prometheus Unbound must not only 
 be read but studied — studied with a modest disposition to 
 think that what appears its author's mysticism may be the 
 student's mistiness of apprehension — studied with an effort to 
 learn the ideas which its characters personify and thereby 
 to interpret their discourse — studied with the recollection 
 that it is throughout an allegory and that its most realistic 
 passages preserve the allegorical continuity of its plan. Thus 
 studied in addition to the music and painting and colossal 
 sculpture of impersonation which the most careless reading 
 acknowledges to be wonderful — it will disclose a breadth and 
 depth and height of philosophy that make it the Epic of 
 Modern Thought. 
 
 Poetry of sense may be a pastime— smooth sleigh-driving 
 to a jangle of bells — but Poetry has other offices than amuse- 
 ment. Her noblest work is to elevate, to make the goal of 
 the past the starting point of the future, to remove the ideals 
 of the race further and further onward and aloft. She is the 
 seer of possibilities and the forerunner of progress. All 
 that is known of beauty, wisdom, power, and goodness lie 
 beneath her feet, which stand upon the loftiest summit of 
 reason, whence she gazes down only for likenesses that may 
 limn to those who dwell below, the heavenly vision she alone 
 can see. 
 
 Hence that poem is greatest which, like a mountain, having 
 all climes of sentiment on its slopes, rises to peaks of ideal- 
 
The Soul -of Shelley. 16L 
 
 ization unattainable without the Alp-climber's circumspect 
 eye and tense exertion. And such a poem, though it springs 
 with the steepness of a crag into the region of clouds, is Pro- 
 metheus Unbound. 
 
 Fifty years have gone by since Shelley sank into the Medi- 
 terranean ; and his genius, contemned while pent within his 
 youthful form, is now seen dilating the stature of our cen- 
 tury. His odes are the marching-hymns of science. His 
 wild dreams of reform are fast sobering into fulfillment. 
 Many of the laws that angered him against the government 
 of his native land, have been repealed, and others lie as im- 
 potent as death upon its statute-books. The liberty which 
 he hailed from afar has drawn near; the lightnings of her 
 eyes have become familiar, and nation after nation, once 
 blinded by their lustre, is learning to bear their look and 
 soon shall rejoice in it as an angel's look of blessing. 
 
 E. A. Holland.. 
 
 Vol. ii. no 3.— 11. 
 
162 The Western. 
 
 THE ILIAD 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 Jove to persistent Thetis nods, 
 
 Great Juno chides. Feast of the Gods. 
 
 Thus she spake. But to her, Jove, Cloud Oompeller, replied not. 
 Nay, he long sat silent. But Thetis, as first she his knees clasped, 
 So, she, clinging, held ; and again she further besought him : 
 '" Faithfully, even infallibly, pledge me ! — Yea, nod me a promise ! 
 Else refuse — for no god is near — and assuredly show me 
 How much more than all am I, though a goddess, dishonored." 
 Cloud-Compelling Jove then answered her, heavily sighing : 
 ''Woeful the task — alas ! — for thou dost. command me to madden 
 Juno, when she shall anger me with her contemptuous speeches ; 
 
 520 And she, 'mong the immortal Divinities ever at me thus 
 Raileth, and chargeth that I give aid to the Trojans in battle. 
 Nay, now, thou withdraw thee at oitce*,>Bor suffer to see thee 
 Juno ; and I will attend to this, and secure its fulfillment. 
 Come ! — if thou doubt, with the nod will I promise, that thou mayst 
 
 believe me ! 
 Sithencc that this from me is with the Immortals the highest 
 Evidence : sithence that neither retracted, neither deceptive, 
 Neither shall be unexecute, what with the nod I may promise." 
 Yea ! — and with his cerulean brows the Saturnian nodded! 
 Then flowed undulant down the ambrosial locks of the Euler — 
 
 530 Sovereign from the eterne ! And mighty Olympus was shaken ! 
 They twain, counseling thus, disparted. She, in an instant, 
 Into the depths of the salt sea leaped from shining Olympus. 
 But to his dome went Jove. And at once rose all the Divine Ones 
 From their thrones, at the sight of the Father ; nor any one ventured 
 His approach to await, but all arose at his entrance. 
 Thus, then, sat he down on his throne. Yet he not from Juno 
 Hidden had been, for she witnessed when with him united in counsel 
 Thetis the Silver Foot, child of the Ancient One of the Salt Sea. 
 Then, with words heart-piercing, to Jove the Saturnian spake she : 
 
 540 " Which of the gods has been joining in counsel with you, youJ 
 Deceiver ? 
 
*>/& 
 
 
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