Among them Landor was particularly noteworthy, and his invincible optimism became the legacy of his friend Robert Browning, who kept it alive in English poetry down to our own time. These three phases of opinion were not strictly consecutive, they were rather concurrent in men of different temperaments and different degrees of hopefulness. Shelley, although born too late to feel the impact of the first waves of the revolutionary movement, represents the third phase of opinion, and must be counted among those whose unwavering faith could not conceive it possible that the right should not eventually triumph in a reorganised and regenerated society. He was in close spiritual kinship with Condorcet, who, as Mr. John Morley says, "while each moment expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of man." "This contemplation," Condorcet wrote, at a time "when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism"

"This contemplation is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason knows how to create for

40

30

2.0

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

39

itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights."

These words might easily pass for Shelley's, so exactly do they express the spirit and the temper of his life work. A frequently quoted passage from Wordsworth occupies a central position in the poetry of this period as a description of the feelings with which the Revolution was hailed by those who look forward to a realisation of the golden years of the fabled past.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise."

Professor Woodberry says:

"When Shelley began to think and feel, and became a living soul, the first flush of dawn had gone by; but the same hopefulness sprang up in him, it was invincible, and it made him the poet of the Revolution, of which he was the child. So far as the Revolution was speculative or moral, he reflected it completely. Its commonplaces were burning truths in his heart; its ferment was his own intellectual life; its confusions, its simplicities, its misapprehensions of the laws of social change, were a part of himself. It would be wrong to ascribe the crudities of Shelley's thought merely to his immature and boyish development: they belonged quite as much to the youth of the cause: he received what he was taught in the form in which his masters held it."

The most complete exposition of Shelley's social and religious philosophy is to be found in the three

longer poems: "Queen Mab," "The Revolt of Islam," and "Prometheus Unbound." They were published at the respective ages of twenty-one, twenty-five, and twenty-eight. The seven years that fall between the first and the last of these dates were years of swiftly ripening thought and broadening ideals. The youthful poem of "Queen Mab," although it cannot be ignored in any study of the poet's intellectual development, has had far too large a share in forming the popular estimate of Shelley's teachings. It is full of crudities, both of thought and expression, and precisely because of these crudities it made a strong appeal to radicals of the narrow and uncultivated type. Its rather cheap declamation against the "kings, priests, and statesmen" who "blast the human flower Even in its tender bud"; its audacious adoption of the Voltairian watchword, écrasez l'infâme; its blatant avowal of an atheism which the poet took no care to explain as being nothing more than a protest against the forms and the vices of an official religion-these were the qualities by virtue of which "Queen Mab” appealed to a certain class of raw and intolerant thinkers, who at once seized upon the poem as an effective tract for the uses of their propaganda. Shelley himself soon became ashamed of "Queen Mab," and sought to suppress it, but the circulation had gone beyond his control. The poem is not, however, without its passages of unusual beauty, and the young reader, who takes small heed of the niceties of thought or of poetic art, may well find in it a favour

able introduction to Shelley, or even, as the present writer has a vivid personal recollection of having found, an introduction to the whole realm of poetry, hitherto unappreciated and unexplored. There is something peculiarly forcible about the manner in which the poem depicts the wretchedness of man's estate under the withering influences of selfishness and superstition, while its eloquent exposition of the doctrine of human perfectibility, which Shelley got directly from Godwin and indirectly from the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, is still capable of stirring the soul to a fine enthusiasm. Shelley's vision of the future and all the wonder that shall be, is expressed in this poem with the glow of emotion, at least, if not with the perfection of art, which we find in the choruses of "Prometheus Unbound" and "Hellas."

"O happy Earth! reality of heaven!

To which those restless souls that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe, aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope!
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!
Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,
Verge to one point and blend forever there:
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling place!
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:
O happy Earth, reality of heaven!

"Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss

Where friends and lovers meet to part no more.
Thou art the end of all desire and will,
The product of all action; and the souls
That by the paths of an aspiring change
Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace,
There rest from the eternity of toil

That framed the fabric of thy perfectness."

In the renovated earth of that vision,

"Mild was the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he."

And the final invocation to the spirit before whose gaze all this panorama of past, present, and future has been unrolled, may still have for us the inspiration, if only the faith be given us, that it had for Shelley and his readers of nearly a hundred years ago.

"Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,

Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue

The gradual paths of an aspiring change:

For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked soul has found its home,
All tend to perfect happiness, and urge
The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal.

"Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand,
So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch burns;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,
The transient gulph-dream of a startling sleep.