For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?’—
would, were it published now, be quoted with admiration by all the good Radicals, with John Morley at their head; indeed, it is astonishing that they have never reprinted it in their manuals for the people. It is wonderful also that ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ has escaped quotation by the leaders of the Irish opposition, and that the lines written during the Castlereagh administration have not been exhumed to greet the administration of any Tory Viceroy. Shelley in these forgot, as poets will forget, his own law, that the poet, like the chameleon, should feed from air, not earth. But what then was deemed so terrible a political crime in one of his gentle birth and culture would now be thought most generous and becoming, as the democratic principles of Vernon Harcourt and Lord Rosebery are now considered to be by their political party; the odes and sonnets which then drew down on him execration and persecution would now procure him the gratitude of Gladstone and the honour of the Nineteenth Century.
‘A people starved and stabbed in the untillèd field,’
is a line which has been strangely overlooked by orators for Ireland.
Shelley’s political creed—if an impersonal but intense indignation can deserve the name of creed—was born of his hatred of tyranny and a pity for pain which amounted to a passion. But his nature was not one which could long nurture hate; and he says truly that, with him and in all he wrote, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.’
In politics, had he lived now, he would certainly have fared much better; in moral liberty also he would, I think, have found more freedom. Though the old hypocrisy clings still in so much to English society, in much it has been shaken off, and within the last twenty years there has been a very marked abandonment of conventional opinion. There is much that is conventional still; much to the falsehood of which it is still deemed necessary to adhere. But still there is a greater liberality, a wider tolerance, an easier indulgence; and it may certainly be said that Shelley, if he lived now, would neither be worried to dwell beside Harriet Westbrooke, nor would Mary Godwin be excluded from any society worthy of the name. Society is arriving at the consciousness that for an ordinary woman to expect the monopoly of the existence of a man of genius is a crime of vanity and of egotism so enormous that it cannot be accepted in its pretensions or imposed upon him in its tyranny. Therefore it is wholly out of date, and unfitting to the times, to see critics and authors discussing and embittering the memory of Shelley on account of his relations with women.
These relations are in any man indisputably those which most reveal his character; but they are none the less indisputably those with which the public have least permission to interfere. We have the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and ‘The Revolt of Islam’; we have the sonnet to England and the ode to the skylark; we have the ‘Good-night’[‘Good-night’]; and the ‘Song’; and with all these riches and their like given to us by his bounteous and beautiful youth, shall we dare to rake in the ashes of his funeral-pyre and search in the faded lines of his letters to find material for carping censure or for ingenious misconstruction? It adds greater horror to death; this groping of the sextons of the press amongst the dust of the tomb, this unhallowed’’ searching of alien hands amongst the papers which were written only to be read by eyes beloved. The common mortal is freed from such violation; he has left nothing behind him worth the stealing, he has been a decorous and safe creature, and his signature has been affixed to his weekly accounts, his bank drafts, his household orders, his epistles to his children at school, and not a soul cares to disturb the dust on their tied-up bundles. But the man or woman of genius has no sepulchre buried so deep in earth or barred so strongly that the vampire of curiosity cannot enter to break in and steal; from Heloise to Shelley the paper on which the burning words which come straight from the heart are recorded is the prey of the vulgar, and the soul bared only to one other soul becomes the sport of those who have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor mind to understand.
I have said ere now often, and I shall say it as long as I have power to say anything, that with the private life of the man or woman of genius the world has nothing to do.