We may, at all events, while a grateful England is cherishing Shelley's memory, and congratulating herself on his majestic legacy of song to her, reflect almost with amusement on the very different attitude of public opinion seventy and even fifty years ago. That he should have been pursued by calumny and prejudice through his brief, misrepresented life, and even beyond the tomb, can surprise no thinking spirit. It was not the poet who was attacked; it was the revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant and paradoxical humanitarian. It is not needful, in order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveigh against those who, taught in the prim school of eighteenth-century poetics, and repelled by political and social peculiarities which they but dimly understood, poured out their reprobation of his verses. Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them "beaten hounds" and "carrion kites"; some, perhaps, were very respectable and rather narrow-minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry of Shenstone. The newer a thing is, in the true sense, the slower people are to accept it, and the abuse of the Quarterly Review, rightly taken, was but a token of Shelley's opulent originality.
To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded in the course of years an equally blind, although more amiable, admiration. Among a certain class of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, and once more the centre of attention was not the poet and his poetry, but the faddist and his fads. Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and canonised. Expressions were used about his conduct and his opinions which would have been extravagant if employed to describe those of a virgin-martyr or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians clustered around the eater of buns and raisins, revolutionists around the enemy of kings, social anarchists around the husband of Godwin's daughter. Worse than all, those to whom the restraints of religion were hateful, marshalled themselves under the banner of the youth who had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful of the fact that all his best writings attest that, whatever name he might give himself, he, more than any other poet of the age, saw God in everything. This also was a phase, and passed away. The career of Shelley is no longer a battlefield for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they still skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the main tract of it is not darkened with the smoke from their artillery. It lies, a fair open country of pure poetry, a province which comes as near to being fairyland as any that literature provides for us.
We cannot, however, think of this poet as of a writer of verses in the void. He is anything but the "idle singer of an empty day." Shelley was born amid extraordinary circumstances into an extraordinary age. On the very day, one hundred years ago, when the champagne was being drunk in the hall of Field Place in honour of the birth of a son and heir to Mr. Timothy Shelley, the thunder-cloud of revolution was breaking over Europe. Never before had there been felt within so short a space of time so general a crash of the political order of things. Here, in England, we were spectators of the wild and sundering stress, in which the other kingdoms of Europe were distracted actors. The faces of Burke and of his friends wore "the expression of men who are going to defend themselves from murderers," and those murderers are called, during the infancy of Shelley, by many names, Mamelukes and Suliots, Poles and Swedes, besides the all-dreaded one of sansculottes. In the midst of this turmoil Shelley was born, and the air of revolution filled his veins with life.
In Shelley we see a certain type of revolutionist, born out of due time, and directed to the bloodless field of literature. The same week that saw the downfall of La Fayette saw the birth of Shelley, and we might believe the one to be an incarnation of the hopes of the other. Each was an aristocrat, born with a passionate ambition to play a great part in the service of humanity; in neither was there found that admixture of the earthly which is needful for sustained success in practical life. Had Shelley taken part in active affairs, his will and his enthusiasm must have broken, like waves, against the coarser type of revolutionist, against the Dantons and the Robespierres. Like La Fayette, Shelley was intoxicated with virtue and glory; he was chivalrous, inflammable, and sentimental. Happily for us, and for the world, he was not thrown into a position where these beautiful qualities could be displayed only to be shattered like a dome of many-coloured glass. He was the not unfamiliar figure of revolutionary times, the grand seigneur enamoured of democracy. But he was much more than this; as Mr. Swinburne said long ago, Shelley "was born a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work." Let us attempt to discover what sort of prophecy it was that he blew through his golden trumpet.
It is in the period of youth that Shelley appeals to us most directly, and exercises his most unquestioned authority over the imagination. In early life, at the moment more especially when the individuality begins to assert itself, a young man or a young woman of feeling discovers in this poet certain qualities which appear to be not merely good, but the best, not only genuine, but exclusively interesting. At that age we ask for light, and do not care how it is distributed; for melody, and do not ask the purpose of the song; for colour, and find no hues too brilliant to delight the unwearied eye. Shelley satisfies these cravings of youth. His whole conception of life is bounded only by its illusions. The brilliancy of the morning dream, the extremities of radiance and gloom, the most pellucid truth, the most triumphant virtue, the most sinister guilt and melodramatic infamy, alone contrive to rivet the attention. All half-lights, all arrangements in grey or russet, are cast aside with impatience, as unworthy of the emancipated spirit. Winged youth, in the bright act of sowing its intellectual wild oats, demands a poet, and Horsham, just one hundred years ago, produced Shelley to satisfy that natural craving.
It is not for grey philosophers, or hermits wearing out the evening of life, to pass a definitive verdict on the poetry of Shelley. It is easy for critics of this temper to point out weak places in the radiant panoply, to say that this is incoherent, and that hysterical, and the other an ethereal fallacy. Sympathy is needful, a recognition of the point of view, before we can begin to judge Shelley aright. We must throw ourselves back to what we were at twenty, and recollect how dazzling, how fresh, how full of colour, and melody, and odour, this poetry seemed to us—how like a May-day morning in a rich Italian garden, with a fountain, and with nightingales in the blossoming boughs of the orange-trees, with the vision of a frosty Apennine beyond the belt of laurels, and clear auroral sky everywhere above our heads. We took him for what he seemed, "a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," and we thought to criticise him as little as we thought to judge the murmur of the forest or the reflections of the moonlight on the lake. He was exquisite, emancipated, young like ourselves, and yet as wise as a divinity. We followed him unquestioning, walking in step with his panthers, as the Bacchantes followed Dionysus out of India, intoxicated with enthusiasm.
If our sentiment is no longer so rhapsodical, shall we blame the poet? Hardly, I think. He has not grown older, it is we who are passing further and further from that happy eastern morning where the light is fresh, and the shadows plain and clearly defined. Over all our lives, over the lives of those of us who may be seeking to be least trammelled by the commonplace, there creeps ever onward the stealthy tinge of conventionality, the admixture of the earthly. We cannot honestly wish it to be otherwise. It is the natural development, which turns kittens into cats, and blithe-hearted lads into earnest members of Parliament. If we try to resist this inevitable tendency, we merely become eccentric, a mockery to others, and a trouble to ourselves. Let us accept our respectability with becoming airs of gravity; it is another thing to deny that youth was sweet. When I see an elderly professor proving that the genius of Shelley has been overrated, I cannot restrain a melancholy smile. What would he, what would I, give for that exquisite ardour, by the light of which all other poetry than Shelley's seemed dim? You recollect our poet's curious phrase, that to go to him for common sense was like going to a gin-palace for mutton chops. The speech was a rash one, and has done him harm. But it is true enough that those who are conscious of the grossness of life, and are over-materialised, must go to him for the elixir and ether which emancipate the senses.
If I am right in thinking that you will all be with me in considering this beautiful passion of youth, this recapturing of the illusions, as the most notable of the gifts of Shelley's poetry to us, you will also, I think, agree with me in placing only second to it the witchery which enables this writer, more than any other, to seize the most tumultuous and agitating of the emotions, and present them to us coloured by the analogy of natural beauty. Whether it be the petulance of a solitary human being, to whom the little downy owl is a friend, or the sorrows and desires of Prometheus, on whom the primal elements attend as slaves, Shelley is able to mould his verse to the expression of feeling, and to harmonise natural phenomena to the magnitude or the delicacy of his theme. No other poet has so wide a grasp as he in this respect, no one sweeps so broadly the full diapason of man in nature. Laying hold of the general life of the universe with a boldness that is unparalleled, he is equal to the most sensitive of the naturalists in his exact observation of tender and humble forms.
And to the ardour of fiery youth and the imaginative sympathy of pantheism, he adds what we might hardly expect from so rapt and tempestuous a singer, the artist's self-restraint. Shelley is none of those of whom we are sometimes told in these days, whose mission is too serious to be transmitted with the arts of language, who are too much occupied with the substance to care about the form. All that is best in his exquisite collection of verse cries out against this wretched heresy. With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct, his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the highest and most classic technical perfection. No one, among the moderns, has gone further than he in the just attention to poetic form, and there is so severe a precision in his most vibrating choruses that we are taken by them into the company, not of the Ossians and the Walt Whitmans, not of those who feel, yet cannot control their feelings, but of those impeccable masters of style,
who dwelt by the azure sea