Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys

It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the outer darkness. The other poets can describe these things, but he becomes what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens, that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their secret?

Not to "describe," but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of the thing you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours" of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth from among the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of their description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble us with a fatality we have to share. The passing from its "caverns of rain" of the newborn cloud—we do not only follow it, obedient to the spell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its "cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels all this and more under Shelley's influence—but alas! as soon as one has felt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy as frost," and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals, caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; and we awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"

With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example, there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying the heroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity. With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty—like a great, self-conscious speckled thrush upon a prominent bough.

But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the divine madness; and we pass out of ourselves, and "suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange." Into something "strange," perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of Shelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmy white light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed how all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, as mists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilection for white things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers, white ghosts, white daisies and white moons thrill us, as we read, with an almost unearthly awe. White Death, too; the shadow of white Corruption, has her place there, and the appalling whiteness of lepers and corpses. The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the White Mass, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence.

Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is more than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it. His passionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism," his sublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation of war, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order," his indictment of conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Institutions, his invectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any means the blind Utopian rhetoric that some have called them. That crafty slur upon brave new thought which we know so well—that "how-can-you-take-him-seriously" attitude of the "status-quo" rascals—must not mislead us with regard to Shelley's philosophy.

He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we say he is the only kind of philosopher who must be taken seriously—the philosopher who creates the dreams of the young?

Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid incarnation.

Strange though it may seem, there are not very many poets who have the particular kind of ice-cold intellect necessary if one is to detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil alienum" attitude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made this inevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly and "unhomely," something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, which alienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thing that makes so many objects poetical—I mean their traditional association with normal human life—is the thing that has to be destroyed if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity of mind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase, "human, too human," is a mood essential, if the world is to cast off its "weeds outworn." Change and growth, when they are living and organic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talk smoothly about natural "evolution." What Nature herself does, as we are beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds. One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for us to follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is that which has to be left behind! We thus begin to see what I must be allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. The false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"—his crying, "hands off! enough!"

It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were wanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness and daring which we find in him.

And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modern literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony, and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousness of the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus of their challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelists rather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy and subtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given to really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence of the importance of what might be called cruel positivity in human thinking. Shelley has, however, an advantage over Nietzsche in his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect, iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ than with the modern antinomians.