That both Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley had considerable, though insufficient, grounds for regarding the dedicatory stanzas as a record of the poet’s experiences at Eton, is unquestionable. Mrs. Shelley could, doubtless, have defended her view of the verses with words spoken by her husband, who entertained her with several equally strange and delusive stories of his life at the public school. Besides the poet’s authority, Lady Shelley could, perhaps, produce other evidence to justify her concurrence with Mrs. Shelley’s opinion. Whilst he deems it possible that Shelley was thinking more of Eton than Brentford, when he committed the verses to paper, the present writer has no doubt whatever that the poet, soon after their composition and ever afterwards, regarded the three stanzas as veracious autobiography—as a faithful poetical record of what he had suffered, resolved, and done, when he was under Dr. Keate’s rigorous government. But the poet’s words may not be produced as sure evidence respecting the tenor and chief incidents of his career. From manhood’s threshold to his last hour, he was subject to strange delusions about his own story; some of the marvellous misconceptions having reference to matters of quite recent occurrence. ‘Had he,’ says Hogg, ‘written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eye-witness, each of his ten reports would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances. The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of to-day, as the latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.’ Peacock, who also knew and loved him well, bears similar testimony to the looseness and inaccuracy of the poet’s statements about his own affairs, even about those of his affairs, respecting which (had he been a man of ordinary exactness and fidelity to facts) he would be naturally regarded as the best source of information. To escape the disagreeable necessity of thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to the notion that his friend was the victim of ‘semi-delusions.’ With all his desire to palliate his friend’s besetting frailty, so as to relieve it of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the conclusion that they were only ‘semi-delusions;’ that the mis-statements of the poet’s mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. Whatever their show of autobiographic purport and sincerity, it is obvious that the verses of a poet, suffering from so perplexing an infirmity, differ widely in evidential value from the autobiographic statements of an ordinary individual.
How far the Byronic poems should be held accountable for Shelley’s Byronic way of dealing with his personal story in poems offered to the world, is a question deserving more consideration than can be given to it in this chapter. At this early point of an attempt to exhibit ‘the Real Shelley,’ it is, however, well to indicate why criticism should deal with the egotisms of the Shelleyan poems precisely as criticism has long dealt with the egotisms of the Byronic poems.
However people may differ about the respective merits of the two poets, all persons must allow that Byron and Shelley were both egotists in the superlative degree,—and that differing from other poets in more unusual and admirable qualities, they differ from them also in surcharging their magnificent poetry with more or less misleading references to their private concerns, and with emotion and sentiment arising from their purely personal interests,—often from their purely personal discontents. In this respect, both poets strayed from the high poetic path; sacrificing art to egotism, fame to foible, greatness to vanity. If Childe Harold was the wail of a single romantic sufferer for his own sake, Laon and Cythna was the cry of a single romantic sufferer for his own as well as the world’s sake. The poet’s personality is forced upon the reader’s notice no less resolutely in Shelley’s than in Byron’s poem. If it was Byron’s vanity to demand human sympathy as the victim of fate, it was Shelley’s vanity to solicit it as the victim of persecution.
Whilst the man of sin and mystery invited the world to admire his proud endurance of the doom that distinguished him from all other mortals, the angel of goodness and light invited mankind to worship him, for his unselfishness, his impatience of evil, his abhorrence of oppression, his ineffable benevolence, his heroic readiness to perish for the good of his species. Both actors were equals in sincerity and in dishonesty. The man who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human nature. In assuming the character of a libertine,
‘A shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee,’
Byron assumed the character that interested and fascinated him. In assuming the character of the social martyr, Shelley, true to his own nature, selected the character that appeared to him the most admirable. Both characters were taken from the marvellous creations of the romantic literature on which the two poets fed from childhood to years of discretion. It was a literature that may be styled the romantic literature of the good principle and the evil principle. In taking a representative of the evil principle for his model, Byron displayed his genuine disposition which, in spite of his engaging qualities and several generous endowments, was a disposition towards evil. In determining to be a representative of the good principle of human existence, as that existence was exhibited in the ‘blue books,’ and other literature of the circulating libraries, Shelley made a choice no less true to his own more gentle and earnest nature. Mere boys when they forced themselves into notoriety, neither of them could readily relinquish the part,—chosen so easily and naturally. Shelley determined to be on the side of the angels, because his disposition was in the main towards goodness; Byron went with the devils, because he found them upon the whole better and more congenial company than the angels of light.
In other respects, their resemblance was striking. Endowed with a memory that equalled Byron’s memory in retentiveness, though more liable to illusions, an imagination even more powerful than Byron’s imagination, and a sensibility no less acute than Byron’s sensibility, Shelley resembled Byron also in his habit of brooding over old sorrows, intensifying them by the exercise of fancy, and using them as instruments of self-torture. Certainly in some degree, probably in a high degree, this habit is referable to the influence of Byron’s genius,—to the influence of the Byronic poems, and also of their popularity. Whilst success never fails to produce imitators, the affectations of the successful are curiously infectious. This was notably the case with Byron’s success, that putting the younger poets and poetasters into turn-down collars, caused them to train their voices to notes of what they deemed Byronic melancholy, and to set their features into what they deemed expressions of Byronic bitterness, and melancholy. It is not suggested that Shelley was for a single minute one of the Byro-maniacal apes. It is not hinted that he ever imitated Byron, except in the way in which a loyal, enthusiastic, and altogether honest disciple may be seen to imitate a great master.
From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley’s never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters and critics to Byron’s discredit.
The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley’s influence over Byron in the Third Canto of Childe Harold, are curiously blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron’s influence on Shelley in Laon and Cythna. When the most has been said of the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron’s poem, it cannot be questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four Cantos of Childe Harold would have been substantially the same poem they now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan enthusiast to believe that Laon and Cythna would have been the same poem it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of 1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of his time, living under the domination of Byron’s intellect, and had been for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron’s writings; written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made at least one futile attempt to approach, Laon and Cythna bears the most distinct marks of Byron’s influence in Shelley’s selection of the Spenserian measure, in the poem’s Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of these pages can discover for himself), Laon and Cythna resembles Childe Harold, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant’s education. Just as the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being either ‘a copy,’ or even ‘an imitation,’ in any dishonourable sense of the term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as ‘works of the same school,’ Shelley’s great poem resembles Byron’s great poem.
Byron was in no degree accountable either for the ‘story’ of Shelley’s poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether foreign to Byron’s views on the religious, political, and social questions dealt with in Laon and Cythna, his writings are in evidence that he must have regarded Shelley’s approval of ‘Laon’s’ incest with his own sister as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron’s brain and pen, the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time Byron’s greatest achievement in song. Qui s’excuse s’accuse. The very words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of ‘presuming to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,’ and, whilst disclaiming the presumption, declares his ‘unwillingness to tread in the footsteps of any who preceded him,’ are words of evidence that he was fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting for his choice of the measure which Byron’s poem had rendered more popular for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet’s attempt to shut his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because Childe Harold had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter, there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.’ Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with success.