PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1822-1922 BY GERTRUDE SLAUGHTER In the woods that skirt the Arno near Florence, Shelley, striving with the West Wind "in his sore need", uttered his prayer: Make me thy lyre even as the forest is. Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Three years later, he was drowned in the Bay of Spezia. Since then, a hundred years have passed. Has his prayer been answered? There is no longer any question about the incantation of his verse. He is everywhere acclaimed either as the supreme lyrical voice of England or as sharing that honor with Keats. But it was not enough to Shelley that he should sing like a bird, though he envied the lark his song of pure joy. His desire was centred in his thought; his prayer was that through his lips should blow the trumpet of a prophecy. Ten years after his death, when Browning celebrated him in Pauline as the "Sun-Treader" who had been the inspiration of his youth, he believed Shelley's fame to be secure; as indeed it was. His detractors had been so far silenced that no respectable English review would ever say again that "his life was a disgrace to humanity and his poetry a blot upon literature". Yet a century of controversy had scarcely begun; and even to-day, concerning the quality of his genius and the ultimate value of his prophecy, Shelleyan criticism is a confusion of tongues. Among those who unite in praise of his singing-power, one critic is carried away by his intellectual quality, while another rejoices that his songs of emotion and feeling are unburdened by any thought whatever; to one he is morally unsound, while another finds "his gossamer world infused with the strength of his heroic conscience"; one calls him a poet of illusions, while another praises his unique faculty for truth; one finds him altogether a mist of abstractions, while to another the chief merit of his verse is its presentation of thoughts in definite, clear-cut images. Perhaps there will always be those who agree with Matthew Arnold that Shelley's poetry lacks substance; that it is vague and remote from life; that it is not quite sane because Shelley was not quite sane; that he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain". And there will always be those who agree with Mr. Santayana that he has a great subject-matter and a real humanity; that, far from being remote from life, his poetry is an inspired contribution to life itself; that in glorifying his own nature he glorified "the purest, tenderest, richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse". It is difficult to measure the effect of Shelley's reassertion of the hopes and aspirations which, after the French Revolution, were crushed in England, but were gathered up into his song, transmuted by his genius, and lifted on wings of flame. He has been the inspiration of poets from Landor to Mr. Woodberry; and more than half a century ago it was asserted that, while critics were disagreeing, the workingmen of England had accepted him as their poet. Apart from these very different lines of influence, one detects a change of attitude among the critics as one follows them down through the century. One finds an increasing tendency to respect Shelley's ideas and to regard not only his music but his meaning with approval. More and more it is recognized that his contribution to life is a gift of matchless lyrics, and something more. There has been a gradual approach, by tortuous ways, to the kind of appreciation Shelley desired. Perhaps it is because, as someone has said, we are all revolutionists of one kind or another to-day-in feeling, not in politicsthat writers are dropping the old apologetic attitude toward the things Shelley really cared about and declaring that the ideal of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas is "the noblest ideal of the modern world" and "the hope of all thinking men". Perhaps it is because we are in such need of a spiritual vision that shall recall the disillusioned mind to a sense of the majesty of life, that Shelley's belief in a world redeemed by perfect love and universal sympathy is acquiring a new value. It is true that Leslie Stephen's opinion in 1909 that the goal of Shelley's ideal world is barbarism-complete lawlessness in man and nature scarcely differs from that of The National Review, in 1820, that it is "nothing else than absolute raving". It is true that Francis Thompson, writing with a poet's sympathy his marvelous essay, peeps over the wild masque of revolutionary metaphysics and sees the face of a child; while to Mr. Irving Babbitt, who grants him the conciliatory title of "romantic Hellenist", he is the type of all that is most pernicious in romanticism; for anyone who could write My soul is an enchanted boat Which like a sleeping swan doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing, must be abandoned to impulse and unacquainted with the "inner check". Mr. Babbitt surmises that if anyone cares for Shelley as much at forty as he did at twenty, he has simply never grown up. But let that pass. We have to oppose to these conceptions the more and more prevalent opinion that the essence of Shelley's genius is its moral quality; that his hope for humanity, having been given new meaning by the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, is "an exact symbol of what yet may be, despite fearful lapses". In this year of his centenary, Shelley has been hailed as a prophet of the twentieth century. So far, the century seems not to have merited so optimistic a eulogy. By another critic-and both are Americans-it has been questioned whether he means anything to us outside of the classroom. This question is pertinent not to Shelley alone but to all poetry except our own special variety. The poetry that is popular among us to-day boasts of being "unrelated"; of giving an impression, a picture, or a story unrelated to any philosophy or religion or to any ideas whatever. We would not decry any style of poetry so long as it is sincere. But Shelley's is related to everything in heaven and earth-to everything within the reach of an intellect at once receptive and speculative and a soaring, creative imagination. What then is our predicament! A poet who might for his ideas be to us a prophet of the future is so far removed by the quality of his poetry that we must question whether he is anything more than a school room idol! We have little interest in Utopias at the present time. And we have so far accepted the idea of government as a means of social progress that we have little interest in philosophical anarchy. But neither Utopias nor philosophical anarchy are essential to Shelley's idealism. The intellectual formulæ which he took up from Godwin and others became something quite different in his hands. He would be called neither anarchist nor atheist to-day. To the Communists he would be hostile. Whatever doctrines appealed to him in his youth were transformed as his character grew into that full-grown but still youthful personality which he glorified in his verse. Shelley was a reformer before he was a poet. His desired reforms are interesting chiefly as they reveal his nature; yet it is interesting to know how many of them have been accomplished. They show him rather as a prophetic advocate of social ethics than as a wild anarchist. He advocated them in his early pamphlets and open letters and in an unfinished treatise entitled A Philosophical View of Reform written years later in Italy and published for the first time only a few months ago. It is not necessary to recall how hopeless such reforms seemed in those days of political repression, when England was suffering from a Tory reign of terror; when a word against the Government was regarded as treason; when civil liberties were confined to the Church of England; when there was no representation in Parliament of the large manufacturing cities, and the workers were in absolute misery. Of the international situation, Shelley himself, the "vague", the "abstract”, the “visionary", has given some excellent accounts in his odes To Liberty and To Naples; and in his description of Napoleon in The Triumph of Life he summed up in two amazing lines many chapters of history:Napoleon Who left the giant world so weak If Shelley's ideas of parliamentary reform and religious liberty were not original, the impetuous ardor with which he championed the cause of democratic principles was all his own. At the age of nineteen, when he ought to have been entering upon his second year at Oxford, having been expelled for attempting to shake the foundations of current beliefs, he was in Dublin with his wife and sister-in-law, bent upon reforming the human race with Ireland as the propitious starting-point. He had already begun to suffer from those strange paroxysms of pain to which he was always subject; and, convinced that he was doomed to an early death, he had resolved to lose no time in contributing "his mite to the treasury of wisdom and knowledge". First of all, he would "awaken a noble nation from the lethargy of its bondage". It is a striking picture-the young aristocrat, with his fair skin and soft, flowing hair, his deep blue eyes now wild with excitement, now subdued in meditation, his tall, supple figure, his small head bent forward eagerly on broad, masculine shoulders, his sensitive, changing expression. Suddenly, in the corruption and poverty of Ireland, he rises up to show to oppressors and oppressed alike the way to virtue and liberty. One has only to read his proclamations to the Irish people to realize the nobleness and the folly of the ardent youth. He soon discovered that "more people hated him as an advocate of free thought than loved him as a votary of freedom". He turned about and faced the facts, as he always did after his flights of enthusiasm, acknowledged that he had been "premature", and returned to England. It is easy to smile at all this and to see why the authorities did not trouble themselves to arrest the young heir to a baronetcy. Yet the reforms he advocated were brought about a few years later, and in the very manner he proposed. At that early age |