Shelley Again.
Shelley went back from Switzerland to a home for a year or more, beyond Windsor, near to Bisham—amid some of the loveliest country that borders upon the Thames. Here he wrote that strange poem of Laon and Cythna (or Revolt of Islam, as it was called on its re-issue), which, so far as one can gather meaning from its redundant and cumulated billows of rich, poetic language, tells how a nation was kindled to freedom by the strenuous outcry of some young poet-prophet—how he seems to win, and his enemies become like smoking flax—how the dreadful fates that beset us, and crowd all worldly courses from their best outcome, did at last trample him down; not him only, but the one dearest to him—who is a willing victim—and bears him off into the shades of night. Throughout, Laon the Victim is the poet’s very self; and the very self appears again—with what seems to the cautious, world-wise reader a curious indiscretion—in the pretty jumping metre of “Rosalind and Helen”:—
“Joyous he was; and hope and peace
On all who heard him did abide,
Raining like dew from his sweet talk,
As where the evening star may walk
Along the brink of the gloomy seas,
Liquid mists of splendid quiver.
His very gestures touched to tears
The unpersuaded tyrant, never
So moved before.…
Men wondered, and some sneered, to see
One sow what he could never reap;
For he is rich, they said, and young,
And might drink from the depths of luxury.
If he seeks Fame, Fame never crowned
The champion of a trampled creed;
If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned
’Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed
Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil,
Those who would sit near Power must toil.”
It was in 1818, four years before his death, that Shelley sailed away from English shores forever. There was not much to hold him there; those children of the Westbrook mother he cannot know or guide.[74] The Chancellor of England has decided that question against him; and Law, which he has defied, has wrought him this great pain; nay, he has wild, imaginary fears, too, that some Lord Chancellor, weaving toils in that web of orderly British custom, may put bonds on these other and younger children of the Godwin blood. Nor is it strange that a world of more reasonable motives should urge this subtle poet—whose head is carried of purpose, and by love, among the clouds—to turn his back on that grimy, matter-of-fact England, and set his face toward those southern regions where Art makes daily food, and where he may trail his robes without the chafings of law or custom. But do not let me convey the impression that Shelley then or ever lived day by day wantonly lawless, or doing violence to old-fashioned proprieties; drunkenness was always a stranger to him, to that new household—into which he had been grafted by Godwinian ethics—he is normally true; he would, if it were possible, bring into the lap of his charities those other estrays from whom the law divides him; his generosities are of the noblest and fullest; he even entertains at one time the singular caprice of “taking orders,” as if the author of Queen Mab could hold a vicarage! It opens, he said, so many ways of doing kindly things, of making hearts joyful; and—for doctrine, one can always preach Charity! With rare exceptions, it is only in his mental attitudes and forays that he oversteps the metes and bounds of the every-day moralities around him. Few poets, even of that time, can or do so measure him as to enjoy him or to give him joy. Leigh Hunt is gracious and kindly; but there are no winged sandals on his feet which can carry him into regions where Shelley walks. Southey is stark unbeliever in the mystic fields where Shelley grazes. Wordsworth is conquered by the Art, but has melancholy doubts of the soul that seems caught and hindered in the meshes of its own craftsmanship. Landor, of a certainty, has detected with his keen insight the high faculties that run rampant under the mazes of the new poet’s language; but Landor, too, is in exile—driven hither and thither by the same lack of steady home affinities which has overset and embroiled the domesticities of the younger poet.