[XVI]
RADICAL NATURALISM
If in the year 1820, any respectable, well-educated Englishman had been asked: "Who is Shelley?" he would undoubtedly, if he could answer the question at all, have replied: "He is said to be a bad poet with shocking principles and a worse than doubtful character. The Quarterly Review, which is not given to defamation, says that he himself is distinguished by 'low pride, cold selfishness, and unmanly cruelty' and his poetry by its frequent and total want of meaning.' He has lately published a poem called Prometheus Unbound, the verse of which the same review calls 'drivelling prose run mad.' And the press is unanimous in this opinion. The Literary Gazette writes that, if it were not assured to the contrary, it would take it for granted that the author of Prometheus Unbound was a lunatic—as his principles are ludicrously wicked, and his poetry is a mélange of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty, and pedantry. It calls the work in question 'the stupid trash of this delirious dreamer.'"
And it is quite possible that our Englishman would have added, in an undertone: "There are very bad reports in circulation about Shelley. The Literary Gazette, which is always specially severe on the enemies of religion, hints at incest. It declares that 'to such a man it would be a matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a family whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer.' These expressions may be too strong, but it is hardly credible that they are entirely undeserved; for Blackwood's Magazine, the only periodical which has been at all favourable to Shelley, writes of his Prometheus; 'It seems impossible that there can exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality.' And you may possibly have heard Theodore Hook's witty saying: 'Prometheus Unbound—it is well named: who would bind it?'"
And if, two years later, when this harshly reviewed poet was already dead, the same curious inquirer had applied to the publisher for information as to the saleableness of the fiercely attacked works, the latter would quite certainly have complained of them as a bad business speculation, and told his questioner that, during Shelley's lifetime, not a hundred copies of any of his works, except Queen Mab and The Cenci, had been sold, and that, as far as Adonais and Epipsychidion were concerned, ten would be nearer the number.
If any one were to ask now: Who was Shelley? what a different answer would be given! But to-day there is no one in England who would ask.
It was on the 4th of August 1792 that England's greatest lyric poet was born. On the same day on which, in Paris, the leaders of the Revolution—Santerre, Camille Desmoulins, and others—were meeting in a house on the Boulevards to make the arrangements which resulted, a few days later, in the fall of monarchy in France, there came into the world at Field Place, in the English county of Sussex, a pretty little boy with deep blue eyes, whose life was to be of greater and more enduring significance in the emancipation of the human mind than all that happened in France in August 1792. Not quite thirty years later his name—Percy Bysshe Shelley—was carved upon the stone in the Protestant cemetery in Rome under which his ashes lie; and below the name are engraved the words: Cor cordium.
Cor cordium, heart of hearts—such was the simple inscription in which Shelley's young wife summed up his character; and they are the truest, profoundest words she could have chosen.