Thus Shelley tells us in the preface to the 'Prometheus' that he could not accept the view, adopted by Æschylus, of a final reconciliation between Jupiter and his victim. He was 'averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the champion with the oppressor of mankind.' He cannot be content with the intimate mixture of good and evil which is presented in the world as we know it. He must have absolute good on one side, contrasted with absolute evil on the other. But it would seem—as far as one is justified in attaching any precise meaning to poetical symbols—that the fitting catastrophe to the world's drama must be in some sense a reconciliation between Prometheus and Jupiter; or, in other words, between the reason and the blind forces by which it is opposed. The ultimate good must be not the annihilation of all the conditions of human life, but the slow conquest of nature by the adaptation of the life to its conditions. We learn to rule nature, as it is generally expressed, by learning to obey it. Any such view, however, is uncongenial to Shelley, though he might have derived it from Bacon, one of the professed objects of his veneration. The result of his own view is that the catastrophe of the drama is utterly inexplicable and mysterious. Who are Jupiter and Demogorgon? Why, when Demogorgon appears in the car of the Hours, and tells Jupiter that the time is come, and that they are both to dwell together in darkness henceforth, does Jupiter immediately give up with a cry of Ai! Ai! and descend (as one cannot help irreverently suggesting) as through a theatrical trapdoor? Dealing with such high matters, and penetrating to the very ultimate mystery of the universe, we must of course be prepared for surprising inversions. A mysterious blind destiny is at the bottom of everything, according to Shelley, and of course it may at any moment crush the whole existing order in utter annihilation. And yet, it is impossible not to feel that here, too, we have still the same incoherence which was shown more crudely in 'Queen Mab.' The absolute destruction of all law, and of law not merely in the sense of human law, but of the laws in virtue of which the stars run their course and the frame of the universe is bound together, is the end to which we are to look forward. It will come when it will come; for it is impossible to join on such a catastrophe to any of the phenomenal series of events, of which alone we can obtain any kind of knowledge. The actual world, it is plain, is regarded as a hideous nightmare. The evil dream will dissolve and break up when something awakes us from our mysterious sleep; but that something, whatever it may be, must of course be outside the dream, and not a consummation worked out by the dream itself. We expect a catastrophe, not an evolution. And, finally, when the dream dissolves, when the 'painted veil' called life is drawn aside, what will be left?
Some answer—and a remarkable answer—is given by Shelley. But first we may say one word in reference to a point already touched. The entire dissolution of all existing laws was part of Shelley's, as of Godwin's, programme. The amazing calmness with which the philosopher summarily disposes of marriage in a cursory paragraph or two, as (in the words of the old story) a fond thing, foolishly invented and repugnant to the plain teaching of reason, is one of the most grotesque crudities of his book. This doctrine has to be taken into account both in judging of Shelley's character and considering some of his poetical work. It is, of course, frequently noticed in extenuation or aggravation of the most serious imputation upon his character. We are told that Shelley can be entirely cleared by revelations which have not as yet been made. That is satisfactory, and would be still more satisfactory if we were sure that his apologists fully appreciated the charge. According to the story as hitherto published, we can only say that his conduct seems to indicate a flightiness and impulsiveness inconsistent with real depth of sentiment. The complaint is that he behaved ill to the first Mrs. Shelley, considered not as a wife, but as a human being, and as a human being then possessing a peculiar and special claim upon his utmost tenderness. This is only worth saying in order to suggest the answer to a casuistical problem which seems to puzzle his biographers. Is a man the better or the worse because, when he breaks a moral law, he denies it to be moral? Is he to be more or less condemned because, whilst committing a murder, he proceeds to assert that everybody ought to commit murder when he chooses? Without seeking to untwist all the strands of a very pretty problem, I will simply say that, to my mind, the question must in the last resort be simply one of fact. What we have to ask is the quality implied by his indifference to the law? If a man acts wrongly from benevolent feeling, misguided by some dexterous fallacy, his error affords no presumption that he is otherwise intrinsically bad. If, on the other hand, his indifference to the law arises from malice, or sensuality, it must of course lower our esteem for him in proportion, under whatever code of morality he may please to shelter his misdoings.
In Shelley's particular case we should probably be disposed to ascribe his moral deficiencies to the effect of crude but specious theory upon a singularly philanthropic but abnormally impulsive mind. No one would accuse him of any want of purity or generosity; but we might regard him as wanting in depth and intensity of sentiment. Allied to this moral weakness is his incapacity for either feeling in himself or appreciating in others the force of ordinary human passions directed to a concrete object. The only apology that can be made for his selection of the singularly loathsome motive for his drama is in the fact that in his hands the chief character becomes simply an incarnation of purely intellectual wickedness; he is a new avatar of the mysterious principle of evil which generally appears as a priest or king; he represents the hatred to good in the abstract rather than subservience to the lower passions. It is easy to understand how Shelley's temperament should lead him to undervalue the importance of the restraints which are rightly regarded as essential to social welfare, and fall in with Godwin's tranquil abolition of marriage as an uncomfortable fetter upon the perfect liberty of choice. But it is also undeniable that the defect not only makes his poetry rather unsatisfying to those coarser natures which cannot support themselves on the chameleon's diet, but occasionally leads to unpleasant discords. Thus, for example, the worshippers of Shelley generally regard the 'Epipsychidion' as one of his finest poems, and are inclined to warn off the profane vulgar as unfitted to appreciate its beauties. It is, perhaps, less difficult to understand than to sympathise very heartily with the sentiment by which it is inspired. There are abundant precedents, both in religious and purely imaginative literature, for regarding a human passion as in some sense typifying, or identical with, the passion for ideal perfection. So far a want of sympathy may imply a deficiency in poetic sensibility. But I cannot believe that the 'Vita Nuova' (to which we are referred) would have been the better if Dante had been careful to explain that there was another lady besides Beatrice for whom he had an almost equal devotion; nor do I think that it is the prosaic part of us which protests when Shelley thinks it necessary to expound his anti-matrimonial theory in the 'Epipsychidion.' Why should he tell us that—
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
and so on; in short, that he despises the 'modern morals' which distinctly approve of monogamy? Human love, one would say, becomes a fitting type of a loftier emotion, in so far as it implies exclusive devotion to its object. During this uncomfortable intrusion of a discordant theory, we seem to be listening less to the passionate utterance of a true poet than to the shrill tones of a conceited propagator of flimsy crotchets, proclaiming his tenets without regard to truth or propriety. Mrs. Shelley does not seem to have entered into the spirit of the composition; and we can hardly wonder if she found this little bit of argument rather a stumbling-block to her comprehension.
To return, however, from these moral deductions to the more general principles. It is scarcely necessary to insist at length upon the peculiar idealism implied in Shelley's poetry. It is, of course, the first characteristic upon which every critic must fasten. The materials with which he works are impalpable abstractions where other poets use concrete images. His poetry is like the subtle veil woven by the witch of Atlas from 'threads of fleecy mists,' 'long lines of light,' such as are kindled by the dawn and 'star-beams.' When he speaks of natural scenery the solid earth seems to be dissolved, and we are in presence of nothing but the shifting phantasmagoria of cloudland, the glow of moonlight on eternal snow, or the 'golden lightning of the setting sun.' The only earthly scenery which recalls Shelley to a more material mind is that which one sees from a high peak at sunrise, when the rising vapours tinged with prismatic colours shut out all signs of human life, and we are alone with the sky and the shadowy billows of the sea of mountains. Only in such vague regions can Shelley find fitting symbolism for those faint emotions suggested by the most abstract speculations, from which he alone is able to extract an unearthly music. To insist upon this would be waste of time. Nobody, one may say briefly, has ever expanded into an astonishing variety of interpretation the familiar text of Shakespeare—
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little lives
Are rounded with a sleep.
The doctrine is expressed in a passage in 'Hellas,' where Ahasuerus states this as the final result of European thought. The passage, like so many in Shelley, shows that he had Shakespeare in his mind without exactly copying him. The Shakespearean reference to the 'cloud-capped towers' and 'gorgeous palaces' is echoed in the verses which conclude with the words:—
This whole
Of suns and worlds, and men and beasts, and flowers
With all the violent and tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision: all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight—they have no being.
Nought is but that it feels itself to be.
The italicised words point to the original in the 'Tempest;' but Shelley proceeds to expound his theory more dogmatically than Prospero, and we are not quite surprised when Mahmoud is puzzled and declares that the words 'stream like a tempest of dazzling mist through his brain.' The words represent the most characteristic effect of Shelley as accurately as the aspect of consistent idealism to a prosaic mind.