“His eyes were blue, unfathomably dark and lustrous. His hair was brown: but very early in life it became grey, while his unwrinkled face retained to the last a look of wonderful youth. It is admitted on all sides that no adequate picture was ever painted of him. Mulready is reported to have said that he was too beautiful to paint. And yet, although so singularly lovely, he owed less of his charm to regularity of feature, or to grace of movement, than to an indescribable personal fascination.”
As to his voice, impressions varied:—
“Like all finely-tempered natures, he vibrated in harmony with the subjects of his thought. Excitement made his utterance shrill and sharp. Deep feeling, or the sense of beauty, lowered its tone to richness; but the timbre was always acute, in sympathy with his intense temperament. All was of one piece in Shelley’s nature. This peculiar voice, varying from moment to moment, and affecting different sensibilities in diverse ways, corresponds to the high-strung passion of his life, his finedrawn and ethereal fancies, and the clear vibrations of his palpitating verse. Such a voice, far-reaching, penetrating, and unearthly, befitted one who lived in rarest ether on the topmost heights of human thought.”[244]
If the physical characteristics of a great Teacher or of a sublime Genius excite a natural curiosity, it is the principal moral characteristics which most reasonably and profoundly interest us. To the supremely amiable disposition of the creator of The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound brief reference has been made; and we shall fitly supplement this imperfect sketch of his humanitarian career with the vivid impressions left on the mind of the friend who best knew him. Love of truth and hatred of falsehood and injustice were not, in his case, limited to the pages of a book, and forgotten in the too often deadening influence of intercourse with the world—they permeated his whole life and conversation.
“The qualities that struck any one newly introduced to Shelley were, first, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his discourse with warm affection and helpful sympathy; the other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement, and the fervent eloquence with which he discussed such subjects. His conversation was marked by its happy abundance, and the beautiful language in which he clothed his poetic ideas and philosophical notions. To defecate life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion of his soul; he dedicated to it every power of his mind, every pulsation of his heart. He looked on political freedom as the direct agent to effect the happiness of mankind; and thus any new-sprung hope of liberty inspired a joy and even exultation more intense and wild than he could have felt for any personal advantage. Those who have never experienced the workings of passion on general and unselfish subjects cannot understand this; and it must be difficult of comprehension to the younger generation rising around, since they cannot remember the scorn and hatred with which the partisans of reform were regarded some few years ago, nor the persecution to which they were exposed.
“Many advantages attended his birth; he spurned them all when balanced with what he considered his duties. He was generous to imprudence—devoted to heroism. These characteristics breathe throughout his poetry. The struggle for human weal; the resolution firm to martyrdom; the impetuous pursuit; the glad triumph in good; the determination not to despair.... Perfectly gentle and forbearing in manner, he suffered a great deal of internal irritability, or rather excitement, and his fortitude to bear was almost always on the stretch; and thus, during a short life, he had gone through more experience of sensation than many whose existence is protracted. ‘If I die to-morrow,’ he said, on the eve of unanticipated death, ‘I have lived to be older than my father.’ The weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily. You read his sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he held over them in his animated countenance and brilliant eyes.
“He died, and the world showed no outward sigh; but his influence over mankind, though slow in growth, is fast augmenting; and in the ameliorations that have taken place in the political state of his country we may trace, in part, the operation of his arduous struggles.... He died, and his place among those who knew him intimately has never been filled up. He walked beside them like a spirit of good to comfort and benefit—to enlighten the darkness of life with irradiations of genius, to cheer with his sympathy and love.”[245]
WITH the name of Shelley is usually connected that of his more popular contemporary, Byron (1788–1824). The brother poets, it already has been noted, met in Switzerland; and, afterwards, they had some intercourse in Italy during Shelley’s last years. Excepting surpassing genius, and equal impatience of conventional laws and usages they had little in common. The one was first and above all a reformer, the other a satirist. To assert, however, the author of Childe Harold to have been inspired solely by cynical contempt for his species is unjust. A large part of his poems is pervaded apparently with an intense conviction of the evils of life as produced by human selfishness and folly. But what distinguishes the author of Prometheus Unbound from his great rival (if he may be so called) is the sure and certain hope of a future of happiness for the world. Thus, that belief in the all-importance of humane dietetics, as a principal factor in the production of weal or woe on earth, is far less apparent in Byron is matter of course.
Yet, that in moments of better feeling, Byron revolted from the gross materialism of the banquets, of which, as he expresses it, England