Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/Shelley
SHELLEY
SHELLEY
It says something for, at least, the vitality of Shelley that he is the only personage of his time over whom intelligent and candid men still see fit to lose their tempers. He was born a hundred years ago this 4th of August 1892, and he has been dead just seventy years this 8th of July, and Shelleyans and Anti-Shelleyans are standing at this hour with hostile faces over against one another, both prepared to talk vehement nonsense on the slightest provocation. No such phenomenon is to be seen with regard to his contemporaries—to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Keats or even Byron. They are accepted now or denied, intelligently or stupidly; but the denial and the acceptance are both more or less moderate: they arouse no passions. In the case of Shelley, it is true, the claims advanced are irreconcilable with the accusations levelled. The one asks all; the others not only will give nothing, but even go so far as to allege an aching minus quantity. Shelley is a great man; Shelley is an inspired imbecile. Shelley is a modern Christ; Shelley is a wretch. And lastly, there is the amiably silly effort after reconciliation which takes the shape of 'poor dear Shelley.'
All this is very strange to the new generation. Why this disquietude about Shelley? He is no more to us than any one else. We want to get out of him just what there is to be got; nothing more, nothing less. We have no interest in making him seem other than he is. We do not want to assault him; he does not block the way. We do not want to worship him; he does not appeal to us sufficiently. Why, then, should we take sides over his love affairs with Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin? Both the girls were quite uninteresting and unimportant in themselves. All they showed was Shelley's capacity for making a fool of himself over women. But nobody now comes to blows over Byron's separation from his wife, because everybody sees that it was the very best thing that could have happened to him. We take the affair merely as a factor in the formation of his life and character. Why cannot we do the same with Shelley?
This necessity for swallowing or rejecting people in the bulk is a survival of a period totally uncritical, and we should protest against it. The greatest men have the most grave limitations. They have the limitations of their time, the limitations of their temperaments. How can it be otherwise? There is room for plenty of destructive criticism on them all, before we have passed through the empty thunder and spectacular lightning, and can hear 'the still small voice' that is the clear and eternal note of the Godhead. Since we speak of Shelley, let us speak of him with absolute simplicity and candour. He can afford to be spoken of in that way; indeed, no other way is worth the attempting, and surely, if he were alive and one of us, he himself would be the first to agree to this.
It is absurd to claim for him any great practical abilities. His ignorance of life and living was extreme. His personal relations make up one long list of grotesque misconceptions. He was, in the obvious sense of the word, a visionary, and his violent antagonisms were far more caused by his disgust with the contact of reality than by any genuine appreciation of the relative values of good and evil. He made no sane and conscious effort to understand things. He did not know how to strike injustice in its weakest part, or how best to help on the downtrodden. He wasted three-fourths of his energy on side-issues. He was always taking seriously the wrong people and the wrong ideas. He held Harriet Westbrook for a victim of social oppression, whereas she was merely the average pretty girl in search of 'bread-and-cheese and kisses.' He accepted Mary Godwin as a sort of female seraph, and this essentially vulgar-souled, small-minded, sentimental poseuse exploited him fifty times more ruthlessly than the poor little Methodist. This did not in the least prevent him from a still wilder, if only momentary, aberration over the lovely nullity of Emilia Viviani, the attitudinising Italian girl from whom he was inveigled by the envious Mary, resolute to retain the monopoly of exploitation which she had won by the ruin of a better woman than herself. Intellectually or sexually—it makes little difference which—Shelley was the born child of illusion. To the very last he looked upon Godwin—Godwin, the most sordid of mediocrities—as a great thinker, and his conception of Byron as a supreme artist is one of the gems of criticism. Shelley's true brother is Blake, the inspired Cockney. For both were visionaries and little else. Blake remained one to the close of a long career. Shelley died at thirty, having just discovered in Jane Williams, the wife of a friend of his and another ordinary good-looking Englishwoman (with a baby), a final incarnation of 'the woman's soul,' which (teste Goethe, of all men in the world) 'draws us upwards.'
It is when one comes to compare the visionary of this limited calibre with the visionary on the higher plane that one realises how, and why, the claims made in behalf of the personal greatness of the Shelleys or the Blakes are so untenable. Jeanne d'Arc was a visionary, but that did not in the least prevent her from being a shrewd and sensible young woman, wonderfully in touch with the actualities of things. She knew what life and living meant, which is to say that she knew what men and women were like, and this was why she was able not only to achieve so much herself, but also to remain one of the perpetually inspiring figures of history. Shelley achieved little or nothing, even in his own small circle, and his personal blunders were the cause of catastrophe after catastrophe. Once and once only do we see him at his truest, at his best, and that is in the charming pages of Trelawny's Records, where we have him alone. Left to himself, or to the society of the one or two who understood him, he lived the free life of the happy, melodious, childlike dreamer who is master of his dreams. The moment he came into contact with the more or less everyday man or woman, the trouble began. He had a most liberal supply of good intentions, of course. As Keats sardonically observed of him, he had 'his quota of good qualities.' But he never saw any one or any thing as they really were, and all the while he piqued himself on a deeper and intenser comprehension of them, shoving them on to the rack of his imaginary conceptions, and vehemently essaying to stretch them out to ideal proportions. When they shouted and struggled, he was indignant, or, in the hour of subsequent dejection, confessed with a sorrowful ingenuousness that his 'passion for reforming the world' did not somehow seem to work well. In darker hours still he craved for the final peace of extinction. Wilder 'passions for reforming the world' than ever Shelley had have reformed the world more than once, but they have done so because they were allied to a profound sense of the nature of men and women, of the meaning of life and living. Zoroaster, Gautama, Jesus, Mohammed—the list can be enlarged at will.
Shelley died, we have noted, only seventy years ago, and already the symbolism which he used in his attempted 'criticism of life' is effete. It was, as it were, so largely journalism, so little literature; so largely mistaken and superficial subjects, so little a powerful utilisation of the permanent materials of life. To put it shortly, he was passably wanting in brains, and he did not make up for it by any great force of intuition. And then he did not in his heart really care much about what are optimistically termed his 'ideas.' His revolutionary enthusiasm never went very deep. Of course he thought it did. For his sensitiveness was acute, and whatever breeze blew on the wires produced music. If these ideas had been a dominant passion in him, he would have found the patience and strength requisite for something like a real apprehension of the social problem. He would have illuminated it at least partially, and he has illuminated it in no wise. Nothing he said of it is of any importance; little of any interest. His sole contribution here is his complete fearlessness, the fearlessness of the dream-drugged fanatic who believes he cannot be killed by infidel bullets. 'Give us the truth, whatever it is,' he exclaims once, and it is usual to call this sort of thing the passion for truth. But it is not: it is the passion of the intoxication of courage. No one can deny Shelley courage. He would go anywhere, and face anything. You had only to persuade him that some of those horrid people who defiled and destroyed his dreams were in front of him, and he was ready to risk his life in trying to get at them; and nothing was easier than to persuade him. A little laudanum would do it; a little spiteful talk would do it. He was at the mercy of every fool or knave, male or female—and especially female. There was no calculating on him, and the worst feature of all in him was that he was always sincere, always in earnest. Some such character, perchance, was John, the beloved disciple, also called Boanerges; and in the hands of a Master whose wisdom and tact were consummate, John doubtless did peerless service. Shelley was unlucky enough never to meet a master. Those he took for such were men like Godwin, and, in a measure, Byron—the one a vagabond charlatan, the other a mere superb Hau-Degen, as the Germans say, a glorified swashbuckler on the right side. Shelley was forced to stand by himself, forced to attempt all alone the feat of 'scaling the Alps,' in the picturesque phrase of Carlyle, who opined that the would-be climber's general existence must have been 'haggard.' Carlyle was mistaken. Sometimes it was, but often it was not, and sometimes it was happy beyond words. Shelley, in his Italian woods, on his Italian rivers and shores, is the one revelation of pure, unconscious, lyric happiness granted us from the life of his contemporaries.
As in every case, his strength and his weakness went hand in hand. That acute sensitiveness of his made him susceptible to the whisper of 'the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come' to an extent that was remarkable for its discoveries and its errors. Wordsworth, in his heavy way, Coleridge, in his effusive way, had been excited in their youth by the 'bliss' of the revolutionary dawn in France. Wordsworth was hopelessly doomed to respectability from the start, and Coleridge was too cowardly and faithless to accept deeds of blood. Besides, their real cares lay elsewhere—Wordsworth in his 'pedlar poems' and the appalling edifice of his teleological orthodoxy; Coleridge in his criticism, in his golden lyrics, in the philosophic balloons, the sending off of which diverted his last years of collapse. Keats, like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Byron, on the other hand, knew thoroughly well how badly beaten was the cause of liberty and progress. He knew what the Tory Government of England meant; what the Holy Alliance Government of Europe meant. Circumstances drove him into the opposition, and the old berserker fury came upon him. He fought for the sake of fighting, to ease his heart and mind, and he felt vaguely that in the long-run the stupid and corrupt conquerors must be beaten; but that was all. It would never be in his time. Waterloo had settled all that. Shelley, in his complete ignorance of the conditions of the struggle, thought that things might recommence at any moment. Therefore he sang with a divine optimism of revolts in the clouds, utterly undisturbed in his conviction of the approaching triumph of the ideas which he found interesting and animating. 'The necessity of Atheism'—the necessity of incest—the necessity of a vegetable diet,—everything was a 'necessity' which happened at the moment to have hold of him. Then, when things did not commence nor show the slightest sign of commencing, he fell into the blackest pessimism, and only roused himself from it to indulge in versified fairy-tales, where he could manipulate everything according to his fantasy. He was right and he was wrong, therefore: nearer the truth than Wordsworth and Coleridge, further away than Byron and (on his own special side) than Keats. It was the same with his efforts after a social circle. Matthew Arnold has drawn a justly derisive picture of Shelley's associates ('What a set! what a life!' and so on), but concludes with making one of his unctuous personal appeals to Cardinal Newman as a witness in favour of better things elsewhere. This is that Cardinal Newman of whom Carlyle remarked that he had 'no more brains than a rabbit'; and it is unlikely that Carlyle would have contented himself with even such criticism of the members of Newman's 'set.' Shelley's 'set' may have been this or that, and his 'life' may have been that or this, but at least he continually sought for a society that had in it a stream of ideas, that had an outlook on to the future, that could animate and sustain his creative and critical faculties; and he would have found nothing of the sort with the Wordsworths or the Southeys or the Coleridges, any more than years later with the pitiful company of the Puseys and Newmans and Kebles. He found Byron, however, who, with all his dreadful limitations, was the one great man then alive in England; and he appreciated all that was best, not only in Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also in Keats. No other man of his time had a taste so catholic. He could not help feeling whatever was new and true. None of the others, except Keats, had a tithe of his receptivity, a tithe of his sincerity. Keats advised him to 'curb his magnanimity and become more of an artist,' and the advice was the best he could have had. Goethe could not have diagnosed his case more infallibly, or have prescribed a more certain cure for his disease. But Shelley, like the rest of us, could only be what he was, the circumstances being unhappy. What he might have become it is impossible to say and idle to speculate. Our sole concern is with what he was.
Towards the close he showed signs of a sounder power of estimation; but what did it amount to? He was going off on the tack of the scholarly recluse, complicated by the old wild outbursts, and who is more ignorant of life than the scholar, and especially the sensitive scholar? He was so easily drawn into adventures of a sort that was fatal to him. The Gambas and Emilia Viviani—Williams and Mrs. Williams—revolutionary skirmishes and rapt Platonics—Mediterranean yachting and his neighbour's wife; it was all of a piece. He knew no more about managing a boat than he did about managing himself or other people, and the last of his catastrophes settled the business for ever. And yet he had a distinct faculty for coming back on himself, and, though his turning his experiences of all sorts to artistic use was only an unconscious instinct, still the instinct certainly existed. But he could not curb his magnanimity; he could not become more of an artist. When he had exploited his emotions it was always to find that they had also exploited him, and he turned away at once with a shudder from his expression of them as from 'a part of him already dead.' There lies the essential insincerity of his sincerity. Only an inspired amateur could have fooled himself every time in the way Shelley did, and found nothing but an empty husk for after-use.
Byron's glory is this: that at the darkest hour which the cause of liberty and progress has known in the century, when the furtherance of that cause was utterly hopeless in the domain of action, he asserted it with irresistible power in the domain of literature. The sword was shattered: Byron seized the pen. Defeat and disaster were everywhere: he rallied the scattered ranks, and, in a mad assault on the conquerors, checked their ruthless pursuit and saved the future. And he did this not for one country or another, but for all Europe. What France owed and owes him she can never repay. He lifted her from the dust. Italy's debt to him is, if possible, a greater one. But why should one specialise? Civilisation must refuse to forget the honour due to the man who, at the crisis of life and death, imperiously declared for life, and struggle, and the claim of victory. Shelley at this crisis did nothing—could do nothing. He had no readers, no public. Byron was an English lord, an English aristocrat, and the start this gave him in the race was then enormous. Europe, lying under the feet of English Toryism and the Holy Alliance, suddenly saw an English noble strike blow after blow at its oppressors. Even Wellington, the sacred peace-monger of the world, was not safe. Byron bemocked his nose! The death of an English king was celebrated by an English Laureate in incredibly fulsome style, and no one dared open lips to ridicule or reject. History will yet have to tell us what it meant at such a moment as this to see that Laureate swept away in a fiery torrent of wit and mockery and scorn. Nothing can get over the fact that Byron, at the direst time of need, did the actual work—and a tremendous piece of work it was—which threw back the advancing tide of tyranny and kept our hope alive. Shelley's influence did not at that time count at all. He could not have lifted a straw off the ground. Later on, when the panic was over—when the process of reorganisation was begun—his purer personality began to act. But it is not as a pioneer of the Cause, as a protagonist of liberty and progress, that he can be put beside Byron, not to say in front of him.
What final claim, then, can we make for Shelley? What shall we give as the lasting result of his life and labours? Firstly and chiefly—the purity of his personality. No other man of his time was so disinterested, none other so ingenuous. He loved the light and continually sought for it, fearing nothing, with one heart and with one face for all. His courage was peerless. His curiosity was unbounded. He had no respect for anything or for any one except such as he conceived they were able to justify. Superstition had no place in him. Selfishness, meanness, ignobility were unknown to him. His generosity was of the sort which instantaneously forgives everything to the vanquished. The woe he would have dealt out was for the conquerors alone. Finally, his capacity for happiness, for childlike trustfulness and love, was immense. Left to himself, he was as one of the kingdom of heaven. Ah, truly we do well to blame him for his faults, excellently well, we commonplace people of the hour, we children of this world, wiser in our day and generation, seeing that the shapes of folly or sin which these faults took upon themselves were due to none but us. Child that he was, and child of light, we wrinkled denizens of the darkness vexed and tortured him with our unendurable egotisms, our hateful exigencies. But now we know him better. Life is life, and, in the terrible struggle of our kind, benefactors and malefactors must be judged—can alone be judged—by the strict rules of the game. We cannot call him great; but is it nothing to say of his spirit that it was lovely? We cannot take his larger labours seriously: they are not lasting contributions to our exiguous store of deathless achievement; but is it nothing to say that the vision of this radiant and lovely soul in its halcyon hours has filled us again and again with a new sense of the beauty and value of life? Is it nothing to say that a handful of his lyrics gives us a delicate music, a subtle perfume, that are too rare and too exquisite for either us or those who come after us ever to forget?
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed:
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.