Shelley most completely of all escapes the latter, not only because he died so early, but because his whole temperament resisted conventional pressure as a climbing plant resists being fastened to the earth; flung it off with impatience, as the shining plumage of the sea-bird flings off the leaden-coloured rain and the colourless sands of the shore. Shelley had not only genius: he had courage; the most rare, most noble, and most costly of all forms of courage, that which rejects the measurements and the laws imposed upon the common majority of men by conventional opinion. And this praise, no slight praise, may be given to him, which cannot be given to many, that he had the courage to act up to his opinions. The world had never dominion enough over him to make him fear it, or sacrifice his higher affections to it. In this, as in his adoration of Nature and his instinctive pantheism, he was the truest poet the modern world has known.
To the multitude of men he must be forever unintelligible and alien; because their laws are not his laws, their sight is not his sight, their heaven of small things makes his hell, and his heaven of beautiful visions and of pure passions is a paradise whereof they cannot even dimly see the portals. But to all poets his memory and his verse must ever be inexpressibly dear and sacred. His ‘Adonais’ may be repeated for himself. There is a beauty in the manner of his death which we must not grudge to him if we truly love him. It fitly rounded a poet’s life. That life was short, as measured by years! but, ended so, it was more complete than it would have been had it stretched on to age. Who knows?—he might have become a magnate in Hampshire, a country squire, a member of Parliament, a sheriff for the county, any and all things such as the muses would have wept for; Shelley in England, Shelley old, would have been Shelley no more. Better and sweeter the waves of the Tyrrhene Sea and the violet-sown grave of Rome. Sadder and more painful than earliest death is it to witness the slow decay of the soul under the carking fret and burdensome conventionalities of the world; more cruel than the sudden storm is the tedious monotony of the world’s bondage. The sea was merciful when it took the Adonais who sang of Adonais from earth when he was yet young. He and his friends, he and those who wrote the ‘Endymion’ and the ‘Manfred,’ were happy in their deaths; their spirits, eternally young, live with us and have escaped all contamination of the commonplace. Byron might have lived to wrangle in the Lords over the Corn Laws; Keats might have lived to become a London physician and pouch fees; Shelley might have lived to be Custos Rotulorum and to take his daughters to a court ball. Their best friend was the angel of death who came at Rome, at Missolonghi, at Lerici. ‘Whom the gods love die young.’
The monotony, the thraldom and the pettiness of conventional life lie forever in wait for the man of genius, to sink him under their muddy waters and wash him into likeness with the multitude: Shelley, Byron and Keats escaped this fell embrace.
What may be termed the material side of the intellect receives assistance in England, that is to say, in the aristocratic and political world of England; wit and perception and knowledge of character are quickened and multiplied by it. But the brilliancy, liberty and spirituality of the imagination are in it dulled and lowered. If a poet can find fine and fair thoughts in the atmosphere of a London Square, he would be visited by far finer and fairer thoughts were he standing by the edge of the Adrian or Tyrrhene Sea, or looking down, eagle-like, from some high spur of wind-vexed Apennine. The poet should not perhaps live forever away from the world, but he should oftentimes do so.
The atmosphere of Italy has been the greatest fertiliser of English poetical genius. There is something fatal to genius in modern English life; its conditions are oppressive; its air is heavy; its habits are altogether opposed to the life of the imagination. Out-of-door life in England is only associated with what is called ‘the pleasure of killing things,’ and is only possible to those who are very robust of frame and hard of feeling. The intellectual life in England is only developed in gaslight and lamplight, over dinner-tables and in club-rooms, and although the country houses in some instances might be made centres of intellectual life, they never are so by any chance, and remain only the sanctuaries of fashion, of gastronomy[gastronomy] and of sport. The innumerable demands on time, the routine of social engagements, the pressure of conventional opinion, are all too strong in England to allow the man of genius to be happy there, or to reach there his highest and best development. The many artificial restraints of life in England are, of all things, the most injurious to the poetic temperament, which at all times is quickly irritated and easily depressed by its surroundings. There is not enough leisure or space for meditation, or freedom to live as the affections or the fancy or the mind desires; and the absence of beauty—of beauty, artistic, architectural, natural and physical—oppresses and dulls the poetic imagination without its being sensible of what it is from the lack of which it suffers.
It has been said of a living statesman that he is only great in opposition. So may it be said of the poet who touches mundane things. He is only great in opposition. Milton could not have written a Jubilee Ode without falling from his high estate; and none can care for Shakespeare without desiring to expunge the panegyric on a Virgin Queen written for the Masque of Kenilworth. The poet is lord of a spiritual power; he is far above the holders of powers temporal. He holds the sensitive plant in his hand, and feels every innermost thrill of Nature; he is false to himself when he denies Nature and does a forced and unreal homage to the decrees and the dominion of ordinary society or of ordinary government.
‘Both are alien to him, and are his foes.’
This line might fittingly have been graven on Shelley’s tombstone, for it was essentially the law of his soul. The violence of his political imprecations is begotten by love, though love of another kind: love of justice, of truth, of tolerance, of liberty, all of which he beheld violated by the ruling powers of the state and of the law. With the unerring vision which is the birthright of genius, he saw through the hypocrisies and shams of kings, and priests, and churches, and council-chambers, and conventional morality, and political creeds. The thunder of the superb sonnet to England which begins with the famous line,
‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,’
came from his heart’s depths in scorn of lies, in hatred of pretence, in righteous indignation as a patriot at the corruption, venality and hypocrisy of