Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is something in the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathes the childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shelley dreamed of "a nation made free by love." With a strange mystical insight, he stepped beyond the range of the Godwinian ethics, when he conceived of his humane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrifice for the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, because he loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings at last by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laon walks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heaped for him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a last affirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty of comradeship.

Thrice Shelley essayed to paint the state of perfection which mankind might attain, when once it should "arise and will." The first of the three pictures is the most literally Godwinian. It is the boyish sketch of Queen Mab, with pantisocracy faithfully touched in, and Godwin's speculations on the improvement of the human frame suggested in a few pregnant lines. One does not feel that Shelley's mind is even yet its own master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the third act of Prometheus Unbound. He is still repeating a lesson, and it calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth. There sings Shelley. The picture itself is a faithful illustration etched with a skilful needle to adorn the last chapter of Political Justice. Evil is once more and always something factitious and unessential. The Spirit of the Earth sees the "ugly human shapes and visages" which men had worn in the old bad days float away through the air like chaff on the wind. They were no more than masks. Thrones are kingless, and forthwith men walk in upright equality, neither fawning nor trembling. Republican sincerity informs their speech:

None talked that common false cold hollow talk
Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.

Women are "changed to all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons," and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber the ground like the unnoticed ruins of a barbaric past.

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless.

The story ends there, and if we do not so much as wait for the assurance that man passionless, tribeless, and nationless lived happily ever afterwards, it is because we are unable to feel even this faint interest in his destiny. There is something amiss with an ideal which is constrained to express itself in negatives. What should be the climax of a triumphant argument becomes its refutation. To reduce ourselves to this abstract quintessential man might be euthanasia. It would not be paradise.

The third of Shelley's visions of perfection is the climax of Hellas. One feels in attempting to make about Hellas any statement in bald prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a channel of sense, has a power which defies the analytic understanding. Hellas, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolute music. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey a definite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymes will carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and the picture hold your imagination.

And yet Shelley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhere is his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact, yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. He conceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for the liberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Shelley's circle at Pisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him as crude facts in the newspaper. The historians of classical Greece were his continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of ideal forms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, as actual as the newspapers. Hellas is the vision of a mind which touches fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one glowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the golden consummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as the Age of Pericles. For Shelley, this denial of time had become a conscious doctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later years influences as intimate as Godwin. Again and again in his later poems, he turns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from death and decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with a serene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearance of mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in Hellas:

The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight.