II. TEXT BOOKS
[9] Shelley's Adonais, edited with introduction and notes by William Michael Rossetti. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press.)
If any proof were needed of what has been insisted on over and over again, that, until the Universities provide adequately for the proper study of English Literature—for the study of it side by side with Classical Literature—there will be small hope of its finding competent critics and interpreters, it would be afforded by the volume before us. For this volume the delegates of the Oxford University Press are responsible; and in allowing it their imprimatur they have been guilty of a very grave error. No such standard of editing would have been tolerated in any other subject in which they undertake to provide books. A work pertaining to Classics, to History, to Philosophy, to Science, marked by corresponding deficiencies, would have been suppressed at once, until those deficiencies had been supplied. To Mr. Rossetti himself we attach no blame. What he was competent to do he has, for the most part, done well and conscientiously,—conscientiously, as may be judged from the fact that, while the poem itself occupies twenty pages in large type, Mr. Rossetti's dissertations and notes occupy one hundred and twenty-eight in small type. It was, indeed, his misfortune, rather than his fault, to be entrusted with a work which required a peculiar qualification, an intimate acquaintance, that is to say, with Classical Literature. That he has no pretension to this is abundantly plain from his Introduction and from every page of his notes.
When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as Adonais, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently; it would be hardly too much, perhaps, to expect that it should be done excellently. Of this part of Mr. Rossetti's work we scarcely know which are the worse—his sins of commission or his sins of omission. His classical qualifications for commenting on a poem as unintelligible, critically speaking, without constant reference to the Platonic dialogues, particularly to the Symposium and the Timæus, and to the Greek poets, as the Æneid would be without reference to the Homeric poems and the Argonautica of Apollonius, appear to begin and end with some acquaintance with Mr. Lang's version of Bion and Moschus. We will give a few specimens. Mr. Rossetti is greatly puzzled with Shelley's allusion to Urania in stanzas 2 to 4.
"Where was lone Urania
When Adonais died?"
"Most musical of mourners, weep again.
Lament, anew, Urania!"
"Why out of the nine sisters," he asks, "should the Muse of Astronomy be selected? Keats never wrote about astronomy." Perhaps, he suggests, Shelley was not thinking of the Muse Urania, "but of Aphrodite Urania." Yet, if so, why should she be called "musical"?—a question to be asked, no doubt, as our old friend Falstaff would say. However, after balancing the respective claims of both, he finally comes to the conclusion that the Urania of Adonais is Aphrodite. If Mr. Rossetti had been acquainted with a work to which he never even refers, but which exercised immense influence over Shelley's poem—the Symposium of Plato—it would have saved him two pages of speculation. His ignorance of this is the more surprising as Shelley has himself translated the dialogue. But Mr. Rossetti need not, in this case, have gone so far afield. Has he never read the prologue to the seventh book of Milton's Paradise Lost? In his note on the lines—
"The one remains, the many change and pass,"
it is really pitiable to find him supposing that this is an allusion to "the universal mind," and "the individuated minds which we call human beings," when any schoolboy could have told him that the allusion is, of course, a technical one to the Platonic "forms" or archetypes; while "the power" in stanza 42, the "sustaining love" in stanza 54, and the "one spirit" in stanza 43, are allusions respectively to the Aphrodite Urania in the discourse of Eryximachus in the Symposium, and to the Divine Artificer in the Timæus. And these dialogues form the proper commentary on Shelley's metaphysics in this poem.
Still more extraordinary is Mr. Rossetti's note on "wisdom the mirrored shield"—
"What was then
Wisdom, the mirrored shield?"
(st. 27), which is as follows: "Shelley was, I apprehend, thinking of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto (!). In that poem we read of a magic shield which casts a supernatural and intolerable splendour ... a sea monster, not a dragon, so far as I recollect, becomes one of the victims of the mirrored shield." This slovenly and perfunctory mode of reference is, we may remark in passing, hardly the sort of thing to be expected in works issued from University Presses. We wonder what the Universities would say to an editor of Virgil who, in commenting on some Homeric allusion in his author, contented himself with observing that Virgil "is here thinking of the Iliad," and, "so far as I can recollect," etc. The reference is, we need hardly remark, not to any magic shield in the Orlando, but to the scutum crystallinum of Pallas Athene, as any well-informed fourth-form schoolboy would know. If Mr. Rossetti will turn to Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, chap. vii., he will find some information on this subject, which may be of use to him, should this work run into a second edition. Take, again, the note on the symbolism of the flowers and cypress cone in stanza 33:—
"His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white and pied and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew."
Here the editor's ignorance of ancient Classical Literature has led him into a whole labyrinth of blunders and misconceptions. "The ivy," he says, "indicates constancy in friendship"! Is it credible that a Clarendon Press editor should be ignorant that ivy—doctarum hederæ præmia frontium—is the emblem of the poet? The violet, he remarks, indicates modesty. It neither indicates, nor can possibly indicate, anything of the kind. Its traditional signification, deduced perhaps from Pliny's remark (Nat. Hist., xxi. c. 38), that it is one of the longest-lived of flowers, is fidelity. But the passage of which Shelley was thinking when he wrote this stanza—a passage to which Mr. Rossetti makes no reference at all, was Hamlet, [act iv. sc. 1]: "There is pansies that's for thoughts.... I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died." So that it is quite possible that the "faded violets," associated as these flowers are with the Muses and the Graces, merely symbolize the fading and drooping towards what may be further symbolized in the cypress cone,—death. We are by no means sure, however, that the cypress cone does, as Mr. Rossetti remarks, "explain itself." Shelley, assuming he gave the image another application, was doubtless thinking of Silvanus—"teneram ab radice ferens, Silvane, cupressum," Georg. i. 20 (see, too, Spenser's Faerie Queene, I. vi. st. 14), and may possibly have been symbolizing his sympathy with the genius of the woods—have been referring to that "gazing on Nature's naked loveliness," which he describes in stanza 31. In any case, Mr. Rossetti has entirely misinterpreted the meaning of the whole passage.
Wherever classical knowledge is required—as it is in almost every stanza—he either gives no note at all, or he blunders. Thus in stanza 24 he gives no note on the use of the word "secret." In stanza 28 he has evidently not the smallest notion of the meaning of the word "obscene" as applied to ravens. The fine adaptations from Lucretius (II. 578-580) in stanza 21, and again from II. 990-1010 in stanzas 20 and 42; the adaptation from the Agamemnon (49-51) in stanza 17; from the fragments of the Polyidus of Euripides in stanza 39; from the Iliad (vi. 484) in stanza 34; from Theocritus, Idyll., i. 66, and Virg., Ecl., x. 9-10 in stanza 2; and again from Theocritus, Idyll., i. 77 seqq., from which the procession of the mourners is adapted, and on which the whole architecture of the poem is modelled—all these are alike unnoticed. Nor is Mr. Rossetti more fortunate in explaining allusions to passages in other literatures. The adaptation of the sublime passage in Isaiah (xiv. 9, 10), by which one of the finest parts of the poem was suggested, stanzas 45 and 46; the singular reminiscence in stanza 28:—
"The vultures
... Whose wings rain contagion;"
of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, act ii. sc. 1, where he speaks of the raven which
"Doth shake contagion from her sable wings;"
the obvious reminiscence of Dante, Inf., 44 seqq. in stanza 44; of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, v. 3, which forms the proper commentary on lines 7 and 8 of stanza 3; of none of these is any notice taken. On many important points of interpretation we differ toto cœlo from Mr. Rossetti. The "fading splendour," for example, in stanza 22, cannot possibly mean "fading as being overcast by sorrow and dismay" (cf. stanza 25), it simply means vanishing, receding from sight—a magnificently graphic epithet. Is Mr. Rossetti acquainted with the proleptic use of adjectives and participles? We may add that Mr. Rossetti has not even taken the trouble to ascertain who was the writer of the famous article, of which so much is said both in the preface of the poem and in the poem itself, but "presumes," etc. Et sic omnia. And sic omnia it will inevitably continue to be, until the Universities are prepared to do their duty to education by placing the study of our national Literature on a proper footing.
It is, we repeat, no reproach to Mr. Rossetti, who has distinguished himself in more important studies than the production of scholastic text-books, that he should have failed in an undertaking which happened to require peculiar qualifications. Indeed, our respect for Mr. Rossetti and our sense of his useful services to Belles Lettres would have induced us to spare him the annoyance of an exposure of the deficiencies of this work, had it not illustrated, so comprehensively and so strikingly, the disastrous effects of the severance of the study of English Literature from that of Ancient Classical Literature at our Universities.