Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

he is simply making an ironical paraphrase from Godwin. The fine scene in Canto XI. of the Revolt of Islam, in which Laon, confronting the tyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who was about to stab him, is a too brief rendering of Godwin's reflections on the story of Marius and the Executioner (see [p. 128]).

And one more daring, raised his steel anew
To pierce the stranger: "What hast thou to do
With me, poor wretch?"—calm, solemn and severe
That voice unstrung his sinews, and he threw
His dagger on the ground, and pale with fear,
Sate silently.

The pages of Shelley are littered with such reminiscences.

Matthew Arnold said of Shelley that he was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." One is tempted to retort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and to people a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But the metaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The world into which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was not a void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to common mortals are usual, normal, inevitable—oppressions and wars, follies and crimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury. If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage and terror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Shelley, Matthew Arnold held, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomed to the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind of sanity to Shelley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to an angel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a country clergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, The Wonderful Visit. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our follies and our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists have loved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit as insight in L'Ingénu—the American savage who landed in France, and made the amazing discovery of civilisation. Shelley had not dropped from the clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to be discovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiable indignation.

One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devoted to the beauty of virtue; but one quality Shelley lacked which is commonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathy which can make its own the motives and desires of other men. Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of observation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he rather exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinian phraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament. So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental, anti-human. If he had grown up a mediæval Christian, he would have found no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the formula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural, incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in the doctrine that "positive institutions" have poisoned and distorted the natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in Queen Mab of all the oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away to absolve nature:

Nature!—No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society....
Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good.

It is a stimulating doctrine, for if humanity had only to rid itself of kings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief and eventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. There is, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoological fact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is there anything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives to institutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share in the making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are the creation of the servility and superstition of the mass of men. The eighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal. Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flock has sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in the lore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns to bear upon the slender fabric of Shelley's dream. Queen Mab was a boy's precocious effort, and in later verses Shelley put the case for his view of evil in a more persuasive form. He is now less concerned to declare that it is unnatural, than to insist that it flows from defects in men which are not inherent or irremovable. The view is stated with pessimistic malice by a Fury in Prometheus Unbound after a vision of slaughter.

Fury.

Blood thou can'st see, and fire; and can'st hear groans.
Worse things unheard, unseen, remain behind.

Prometheus.