In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a world of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses; the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped to set free the future of the race.
CHAPTER LVIII
THE ANGEL OF REVOLT
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of his age and drove his son almost to madness.
The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. They had a system of child slavery known as “fagging,” and Shelley revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that he swooned at the scent of the flowers in the Alpine valleys. He was gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it at incredible speed.
He went to Oxford, where at the age of nineteen he published a pamphlet entitled, “The Necessity for Atheism.” A reading discloses that the title might better have been “The Necessity for Abolishing Ecclesiasticism Masquerading as Christianity.” But it is not likely that such a change of title would have helped Shelley, who was unceremoniously kicked out of the university, and cast off by the Tory baronet who controlled his purse-strings.
So we find him, an outcast in London, living in lodgings and almost starving. He met a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a coffee-house proprietor, and hoping to convert her to his sublime faith, he ran away and married her. At the age of twenty we find him in Ireland, issuing an “Address to the Irish People” and circulating it on the streets. The scholarly critics of Shelley speak of this as the absurd extravagance of boyhood; whereas it was plain common sense and the obvious moral duty of every English poet. Infinitely touching it is to read this pamphlet, and note its beauty of spirit and sublimity of faith, not exceeded by the utterances of Jesus. All that was wrong with Shelley’s advice was that it was too good both for Ireland and England. For distributing it Shelley’s servant was sent to jail for six months.
The poet’s wife had no understanding of his ideals, and the couple were unhappy. After two years of married life, Shelley met the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin, revolutionary philosopher, and ran away with her. That was the crime of his life, for which he was condemned to infamy by his own time, and has hardly yet been pardoned. Two years later his former wife drowned herself; and the British lord chancellor deprived the poet of the custody of their two children, on the ground that he was an unfit person. We shall discuss the ethics of this affair later on. Suffice it for the moment to say that Shelley, broken in heart but not in will, fled to the Continent for refuge, and devoted the last four years of his life to the task of overthrowing the British caste system. A hundred years have passed, and he has not yet succeeded; but let no one be too sure that he will not succeed in the end!
He lived in Switzerland and Italy, and worked with desperate intensity, so that he brought on tuberculosis. There are no four years in the life of any other writer which gave us such treasures of the mind and spirit. The critics of Shelley judge him by his boyhood and his horrible scandal. But taking these last years, the impression we get is of maturity of mind, dignity of spirit, firmness of judgment. If you want to know this Shelley, read the wonderful letters he wrote from Switzerland. Read his essay, recently discovered and published, “A Philosophical View of Reform,” in which the whole program of radical propaganda is laid out with perfect insight and beauty of utterance. Read “The Defense of Poetry,” one of the finest pieces of eloquence in English. Note the soundness of his critical judgment, which erred in only one respect—an under-estimate of his own powers. He was humble to Byron, a lesser person both as poet and as man.
One after another Shelley now poured out the marvelous works on which his fame is based. He took the old myth of Aeschylus and wrote a drama, “Prometheus Unbound,” which might be described as the distilled essence of revolt, the most modern of philosophical dramas, proclaiming the defiance of the human spirit to all ordained gods. At the other extreme, and written in the same year, was “The Cenci,” a tragic story out of Renaissance Italy, human and simple, therefore poignant and real. The poet Keats died, and Shelley wrote “Adonais”—and those who think that art exists for art’s sake and beauty for beauty’s sake, make note that here is a work which combines all the perfections of poetry, and yet has a moral, a fighting message.
He wrote also political comedies in the style of Aristophanes—representing English society by an ecstatic chorus of pigs. So savage is this lashing that even today English critics keep silence about “Swellfoot the Tyrant.” The odious fat lecher, King George IV, was sued for divorce by his wife, Queen Caroline, and it was a most horrible scandal, which Britain hardly dared to whisper. I remember when I was a student in college, twenty-five years ago, searching the libraries in an effort to find out the contents of the “Green Bag” which figures in Shelley’s drama; but no commentator would tell me—and I don’t know yet!