‘Alpuente. In wars the least guilty are the sufferers. In these, as in everything, we should contract as much as possible the circle of human misery. The deluded and enslaved should be so far spared as is consistent with security: the most atrocious of murderers and incendiaries, the purveyors and hirers of them, should be removed at any expense or hazard. If we show little mercy to the robber who enters a house by force, and if less ought to be shown to him who should enter it in the season of distress and desolation, what portion of it ought to be extended towards those who assail every house in our country? How much of crime and wretchedness may often be averted, how many years of tranquillity may sometimes be ensured to the world by one well-chosen example! Is it not better than to witness the grief of the virtuous for the virtuous, and the extinction of those bright and lofty hopes, for which the best and wisest of every age contended? Where is the man, worthy of the name, who would be less affected at the lamentation of one mother for her son, slain in defending his country, than at the extermination of some six or seven usurpers, commanding or attempting its invasion? National safety legitimates every mean employed upon it. Criminals have been punished differently in different countries: but all enlightened, all honest, all civilised men, must agree who are criminals. The Athenians were perhaps as well-informed and intelligent as the people on lake Ladoga: they knew nothing of the knout, I confess; and no family amongst them boasted a succession of assassins, in wives, sons, fathers, and husbands: but he who endangered or injured his country was condemned to the draught of hemlock! They could punish the offence in another manner: if any nation cannot, shall that nation therefore leave it unpunished? And shall the guiltiest of men enjoy impunity, from a consideration of modes and means? Justice is not to be neglected, because what is preferable is unattainable. A house-breaker is condemned to die, a city-breaker is celebrated by an inscription over the gate. The murder of thousands, soon perpetrated and past, is not the greatest mischief he does: it is followed by the baseness of millions, deepening for ages. Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too powerful, and provide that it be duly executed. It is just, and it is necessary, that those who pertinaciously insist on so unnatural a state of society, should suffer by the shock things make in recovering their equipoise.’ II. 269.
We have given this tirade, not with any view to comment on the sentiments it conveys, but to justify what we have said of the outrageous spirit that so frequently breaks out in the present work, and that might reasonably ‘condemn the author to the draught of hellebore.’ We believe the attempt to revive the exploded doctrine of tyrannicide is peculiar to the reformed Jacobins. We remember a long and well-timed article in the Friend, some years ago, on this subject; nor do the strong allusions to the same remedy, in a celebrated journal, form an exception to this remark, at a time when a renegado from the same school directed its attacks upon the Corsican hero. These modern monks and literary jesuits, who would fain set up their own fanatic notions against law and reason, and dictate equally to legitimate kings and revolutionary usurpers, find fault with Napoleon for having thrown his sword into the scale of opinion; and now, finding the want of it, sooner than be baulked of their fancy, would (as far as we can understand their meaning) substitute the dagger. We cannot applaud their expedients; nor sympathize with that ‘final hope’ which seems ‘flat despair.’ If these pragmatical persons could have every thing their own way—if they could confer power and take away the abuse of it—if they could put down tyrants with the sword, and give the law to conquerors with the pen—we should not despair of seeing some good result from this new theocracy. The worst we could fear would be from their fickleness, rashness, and inconsiderate thirst for novelty; but they would not, by their ill-timed servility and gratuitous phrensy, help to bring down the iron hand of power upon us, or enclose us in the dungeons of prejudice and superstition! As it is, they have contrived to throw open the flood-gates of despotism—‘to shut exceeds their power:’ they have got rid of one tyrant, to establish the principle in perpetuity, and to root out the very name of Freedom. Those of them who are sincere, who are not bribed to silence by places and pensions obtained by their momentary complaisance and seeming inconsistency, speak out, and are sorry for the part they have taken, now that it is too late. They strike ‘the marble table with their palm’—they call their country recreant and base—they invoke the shade of Leonidas—they apostrophize the spirit of Bolivar—they polish their style like a steel breastplate—they point their sentences like daggers against the bloated apathy of legitimacy—they publish satires on the constitution, and print libels on departed ministers in asterisks—they invent new modes of warfare, and recommend new modes of extermination against despots;—and, in return for all this, the Holy Allies laugh at them, their credulity, their rage, their helplessness, and disappointment. There was one man whom they did not laugh at, but whom they feared and hated; and they persuaded Mr. Landor and others that what they feared and hated above all other things, was out of love to Liberty and Humanity!
Mr. Landor has interspersed some pieces of poetry through these volumes. His muse still retains her implicit and inextricable style. The author, some five-and-twenty years ago, published a poem under the title of Gebir, in Latin and English, and equally unintelligible in both, but of which we have heard two lines quoted by his admirers.
‘Pleas’d they remember their august abodes,
And murmur as the ocean murmurs there.’
This relates to the sound which sea-shells make if placed close to the ear, and is beautiful and mystic, like something composed in a dream. His tragedy of Count Julian we have not seen.
SHELLEY’S POSTHUMOUS POEMS
Vol. xl.] [July 1824.
Mr. Shelley’s style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.
Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry—out of nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): But, in him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination—and was not sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We thank him—but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley’s mind was of ‘too fiery a quality’ to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true—it soared ‘beyond the visible diurnal sphere,’ to the strange, the improbable, and the impossible. He mistook the nature of the poet’s calling, which should be guided by involuntary, not by voluntary impulses. He shook off, as an heroic and praiseworthy act, the trammels of sense, custom, and sympathy, and became the creature of his own will. He was ‘all air,’ disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould. He ransacked his brain for incongruities, and believed in whatever was incredible. Almost all is effort, almost all is extravagant, almost all is quaint, incomprehensible, and abortive, from aiming to be more than it is. Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fireworks in the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor discriminate form. Yet Mr. Shelley, with all his faults, was a man of genius; and we lament that uncontrollable violence of temperament which gave it a forced and false direction. He has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and, in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most. If some casual and interesting idea touched his feelings or struck his fancy, he expressed it in pleasing and unaffected verse: but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system. The fumes of vanity rolled volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy tabernacle of his thought. The success of his writings is therefore in general in the inverse ratio of the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon, and outstripped his powers of execution.