That piece of sculpture has never been executed; but it would hardly have been more inappropriate than the two chief monuments that have been erected, the one in Christchurch Priory, Hants, the other at University College, Oxford; for what could be less in keeping with the impression left by Shelley’s ethereal genius than to figure him, as is done in both these works, as a dead body, stretched limp and pitiful like some suicide’s corpse at the Morgue? Let us rid our thoughts of all such ghastly and funereal notions of Shelley, and think of him as what he is, the poet not of death but of life,[22] that nobler life to which mankind shall yet attain, when they have learnt, in his own words:

To live as if to love and live were one.

The most human portrait of Shelley, to my thinking, is the one painted by a young American artist, William West, who met him at Byron’s villa near Leghorn, in 1822, and being greatly struck by his personality, made a rough sketch which he afterwards finished and took back to America. There it was preserved after West’s death, and reproduced for the first time in the Century Magazine in October, 1905, with an explanatory article by its present owner, Mrs. John Dunn. By the courtesy of Mrs. Dunn, I was able to use this portrait as a frontispiece to a revised edition of my study of Shelley, published in 1913. Mr. Buxton Forman told me that he did not believe in the genuineness of the picture; but readers of Letters about Shelley (1917) will see that Dr. Richard Garnett held a contrary opinion, and so, as I know, did Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Some account of West’s meeting with Shelley, and of his recollections of Byron, may be found in Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists. His portrait of Byron is well known; and there seems to be no inherent improbability in the account given of the origin and preservation of the other picture, which certainly impresses one as being more in agreement with the verbal descriptions of Shelley in his later years than the almost boyish countenance so familiar in engravings.

Shelley is the greatest of the poet-pioneers of civilization, and his influence is still very far from having reached its zenith: he is “the poet of the young” in the sense that future generations will be better and better able to understand him.

Thy wisdom lacks not years, thy wisdom grows
With our growth and the growth of time unborn.[23]

VIII
VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS

I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.
James Thomson (B.V.).

POETS, as Shelley said, are “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” The surest solace for the conditions in which men’s lives are still lived is to be found in the utterances of those impassioned writers, poets or poet-naturalists as we may call them, who are the harbingers of a higher social state, and, as such, have power to cheer their fellow-beings with the charm of their speech, though it is only by the few that the full purport of their message can be understood. It is of some of these lights in the darkness, these voices crying in the wilderness, that I would now speak.

There would seem, at first sight, to be a great gulf fixed between Shelley and James Thomson, between optimist and pessimist, between the poet of Prometheus Unbound whose faith in the future was immutable, and him of The City of Dreadful Night, who so despaired of progress as to hold that before we can reform the present we must reform the past. Yet it was on Thomson’s shoulders that the mantle of Shelley descended, in so far as they were the singers of free-thought; and he was one of the earliest of all writers of distinction to apprehend the greatness of that “poet of poets and purest of men” to whom his own Vane’s Story was dedicated. Though we do not assent to the pessimistic contention that we are the product of a past which has foredoomed human effort to failure, we may still profit by the mood of pessimism, the genuine vein of sadness that is found in all literatures and felt at times by all thoughtful men; for in its due place and proportion it is as real as the contrary mood of joy. Why, then, should the darker mood be sedulously discountenanced, as if it came from the source of all evil? It stands for something; it is part of us, and it is not to be arbitrarily set aside.