And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
And there is Byron behind the scenes—the Byron who might have been invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the child runs:
Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.
Shelley, for his part, when he is writing to Byron to ask what he is to do with the child (which has been left on his hands month after month), never mentions it but with a delight at least equal to his anxiety to get rid of it. “I think,” he tells Byron, “she is the most lovely and engaging child I ever beheld.” Shelley’s letters to Byron are the letters of a good man, but they are not good letters. They are the formal utterances of an angel. Byron’s letters, on the other hand, are good letters, though they are not the letters of a good man. They are the informal utterances of a man possessed by a devil. But whether he was as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure. When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription for her tomb ending with the verse: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.” If he had been all heartless, he could never have written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried to summon into being—a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch of Shelley—a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of Hell, a candidate for Paradise.
VIII
SHELLEY
Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England, as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image—“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”? Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even, have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call a star ineffectual. In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the word.