Shelley has the qualities of sublimity and fervor; also he has the defects of these qualities—he is often windy and wordy and unreal. But in his last miraculous years he shed these faults, and produced lyrics of such loveliness that he is today the poet of poets, the soul companion of generous and idealistic youth. In his “Mask of Anarchy” are songs of revolt which have reached the workers—and which therefore English critics still find it necessary to deprecate! A couple of years ago was celebrated in London the anniversary of Shelley’s death, and there assembled a great number of people of the sort who would have skinned him while he was alive. A famous editor, Mr. J. C. Squires, took occasion to quote the poem: “Men of England, wherefore plow?” How obviously foolish! If the men of England did not plow, they would starve! But it just happens that Shelley did not say that; what he said was: “Men of England, wherefore plow for the lords who lay ye low?” And five million, five hundred thousand labor votes echo: “Wherefore?”
This poet of the future was scorned in his lifetime, as no other great Englishman in history. He was the byword of the literary wits of London; “Prometheus Unbound,” they said, an excellent name: who would bind it? By Sir Walter Scott and his ruffians of the Tory “Review,” Shelley’s name could not be spoken without crossing yourself. The poet Moore cried out in horror—Tommy, little snob of the drawing-rooms, who “dearly loved a lord.” And Wordsworth, ignorant and bigoted, living among his peasants, reading nothing; and Southey, turncoat and prig. Even Byron made no fight for Shelley’s fame; while Byron’s friends, the fashionable idlers of the Continent, rebuked him for keeping such disreputable company.
Even two generations later the evil spell was not broken. Matthew Arnold, standard English critic, read about Shelley’s friends, and lifted his scholarly hands and cried: “What a set!” It did not occur to the critic to ask what other kind of set Shelley might have had. What people had he to choose among? Arnold had not tried being a radical, so as to see what queer people swarm about you—especially when you are known to have an income of four thousand pounds a year, and to give away nearly all of it! A poet who believes everything good about his fellows, and who lives in dreams of exalted nobleness, is the last person in the world to discover the faults of those who gather about him. And after he has made the discovery, he remains a dreamer; instead of casting them off, in the fashion of the good, respectable world, he clings to them, trying to help them, often in spite of themselves.
Shelley believed in “free love,” and tried out his theories; and that horrified Matthew Arnold, who said after reading the record, “One feels sickened forever of the subject of irregular relationships.” Quite so; I also have seen people try out this theory, and have felt sickened. But consider the question, in which way will the race more quickly acquire knowledge as to the rights and wrongs of sex—if men say honestly what they believe, and tell frankly what they do, or if they preach one code and practice another, and hide their sins in a dark corner?
Shelley followed the former course; he was young, and knew no older person who understood him and could give him wise advice. He believed that if your heart was full of generosity and kindness and unselfishness and a burning sense of justice, you could trust your desires, even those of love. He tried it, and filled his life with pain and tragedy. And seventy or eighty years later comes an eminent and well-established critic, and in solemn tones protests that it is a crime against good taste to give us these facts! Let poets follow the plan of Wordsworth, who sowed his one wild oat in a foreign land, and put a heavy stone of silence over the crop, and became a Tory laureate and pillar of Churchianity!
In the course of a hundred years we have got all the details of Shelley’s two marriages; we know that when he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, his first wife, he told her his ideas on the subject of love. She professed to agree with him; but, of course, being a sixteen-year-old child, that meant nothing. She was ignorant, and in no way fitted to be the life companion of a great poet. When Shelley left her he took care of her and the two children; her suicide two years later was caused by the fact that she had an unhappy love affair with another man, and was with child by this man.
Here is a problem which will not be solved in our time, nor for a long time to come: what is to be done when two people have loved, and one ceases to love while the other goes on loving? For the present, our only task is to get straight the facts about Shelley’s case; the central fact being that he was damned for holding a revolutionary opinion and acting on it. If all he had wanted was to indulge his passions and keep out of trouble, the way was clear before him; the old Tory baronet, his father, had explained with brutal frankness that he would never pardon a marriage with a woman below Shelley’s rank in life, but he was willing to assume responsibility for the support of any number of illegitimate children the poet might wish to bring into existence. Such was the moral code against which Shelley revolted; such was the world in which he tried to live according to the principles of justice, freedom and love.
He died at the age of thirty, drowned in a storm while sailing a boat; and with him perished the finest mind the English race had produced. I make this statement deliberately, knowing the ridicule it will excite; but I ask you, before you decide: take the men of genius of England one by one, wipe out their lives after the age of thirty, and see what you have left. Will you take Shakespeare? You will know him as the author of “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Love’s Labor Lost” and “The Comedy of Errors,” and possibly “Richard III” and some sonnets. Will you take Milton, with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and “Comus” and “Lycidas,” and nothing else? Will you go to the Continent, and take Goethe, who outlived Shelley? What would you think of Goethe if you had only “Goetz” and “Werther” and a few lyric poems?
Shelley was one among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism, or mysticism of any sort. He fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment. He attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial; and so he is the coming poet of labor. Some day, and that not so far off, the strongholds of class greed in Britain will be stormed, and when the liberated workers take up the task of making a new culture, they will learn that there was one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer. They will honor Shelley by making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters.