Percy Bysshe Shelley

IN the voluminous literature which has the life and work of Shelley for its subject, there is no phrase more familiar or more frequently quoted than Matthew Arnold's variation of the remark made by Joubert about Plato. The French "thought" runs: "Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings, one hears them rustle." Arnold, making use of this image, describes Shelley as "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." The poetical form of this characterisation serves to impress it upon the memory, but it must be reckoned, as to its content, one of the least felicitous things that Arnold ever said. It embodies too much of the patronising and even contemptuous spirit displayed by many well-intentioned writers when dealing with the work of Shelley. It is one of many illustrations of what Professor Woodberry calls the "poor, poor Shelley" theory of the poet's life. Recurring, however, to the original of Arnold's dictum, we are reminded that erring with Plato is at least a creditable form of intellectual infirmity, and those of us who have long held Shelley's memory enshrined in our heart of hearts may perhaps be content with the implied admission that his ineffectuality was of the same kind as that of Plato.

If it be the mark of ineffectual effort to arouse the most generous ardors of the spirit in behalf of an exalted ideal of social reorganisation, to inspire many of the best intellects of three successive generations with a renewed faith in mankind, to kindle in hundreds of thousands of souls a flaming passion for justice, for liberty, and for the brotherhood of man

-if to accomplish these things be "vain," then, and then only, may we accept Arnold's bit of rhetoric as a plain statement of the truth. The notion that Shelley was a mere visionary, a being as fragile in intellect as in frame, a nature of almost feminine weakness as well as feminine sensitiveness, has long had currency, although its refutation may be found easily enough in any of his biographies. If space permitted, it would be well to introduce at this point two or three of his very practical letters to Godwin. They would afford a most effective antidote to the belief that poots in general, and Shelley more than most other poets, can have no firm grasp upon the realities of every-day existence. I have never been able to understand what people mean when they complain of a poet like Shelley that his message is too vague and ethereal to have any perceptible influence upon human conduct. Would they have a poet abdicate his genius and descend to the homely level of Poor Richard and his maxims? Nor do I understand what they mean when they belittle such a poet by asserting that he has made no additions to human thought. Even Professor Dowden, who certainly

cannot be charged with a failure to write sympathetically of Shelley, says that "he did not contribute a single original idea of importance" to our nineteenth-century stock. What other poet, we may ask, has made such a contribution? If this be a reason for slighting Shelley, how much more are we bound to speak disapprovingly of Keats, who of set purpose refrained from putting philosophy into his verse; or of Byron, whose philosophy was as destructive and negative as that of Shelley was positive and constructive. We have no right to expect of a poet that he shall do things like the Kantian "Transcendental Esthetic," or the Darwinian "Origin of Species." A reasoned philosophy, such as that for the lack of which Arnold was reproached by Mr. Frederic Harrison, is the last thing that a poet should seek to give us. His function is rather to seize intuitively upon isolated and ultimate truths, or to interpret such results as have been achieved by the laborious processes of philosophy in that heightened language of which the poet alone is master, and in which ordinary words become raised to algebraic powers. Truth is many-sided, and its whole body is not to be sought in poetry; rather do its separate facets flash out here and there in the light which they reflect from the genius which shines upon them. When the thinker has done his work, the poet finds his opportunity; Coleridge found it in the transcendental philosophy, Tennyson found it in the doctrine of evolution.

The opportunity of Shelley was found in the doc

trines of the philosophers who prepared the way for the French Revolution. From the time when Burke leaped into the arena with his tremendous denunciations of the Revolution, and Fox greeted the fall of the Bastile as much the greatest event that had ever happened in the history of mankind, the French Revolution became a part of English literature in the sense that it almost superseded domestic topics as a subject of controversial discussion, and gave a new impulse to the group of writers who were destined to occupy the foreground of English poetry during the first half of the nineteenth century. Keats alone pursued his art, as we have seen, with what tranquillity he might, during the few years allotted him, unaffected by the upheaval of the social order which had taken place in Europe. But he was practically alone in this attitude of artistic detachment. How Byron and Coleridge, Wordsworth and Landor, were influenced by the Revolution it will be the task of subsequent chapters to state. It is with the case of Shelley that we are now concerned, and he was the child of the Revolution in its nobler spiritual aspects as distinctively as Byron was its child in its more violent aspects and their extensions beyond the domain of politics into those of literature and society. We may distinguish three phases in English opinion concerning the Revolution. There was first the phase of general sympathy, which was typified by the outburst of Fox and the early enthusiasm of Coleridge and Wordsworth. English politi

cal philosophy and practice had done much, through the influence of Rousseau and Voltaire, to bring about the upheaval of 1789, and many Englishmen recognised the stirring events of the years that followed as affording a practical application of principles with which they had long been familiar, and which they had long cherished. The second phase of opinion was that of indignant protest against the unbridled passions set free by the Revolution, of revolt against its excesses, and of despair at the triumph of the military despotism into which it became merged. Burke was the first and the most fiery exponent of this phase of opinion, and many who had at first dissented from his views were led by subsequent developments to add their influence to the conservative reaction. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were conspicuous among those who suffered disillusionment, and abandoned the hopes with which they had at first acclaimed the Revolution. The third phase of opinion was that of the men whose convictions of the ultimate validity of the principles upon which the Revolution was based were too firm to be overthrown, who were sobered yet undaunted by its outcome, and who held fast to the faith which had been rooted in them from the time of its earliest manifestations. They were the ones who

"Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong

would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.”