3 9015 OO232 O 19 3
University of Michigan – BUHR


SHELLEY'S NATURE-POETRY,
BY HENRY sweet
To be read at the Society’s Meeting, on Wednesday, May
BEGINNINGS OF NATURE-POETRY : THE RIG-VEDA.
The first germs of those emotions which inspire the
nature-poetry of a Shelley or a Wordsworth must be
sought in the purely physical sensations of pleasure and
pain which man has in common with the higher animals.
The emotions which inspired Shelley in that famous
description of sunrise which opens the second act of his
Prometheus Unbound, can be traced back step by step to
the sensations of a shivering savage basking in the genial
warmth and welcome light which relieve him from the
discomforts and terror of the night. To the emotion of
fear is nearly allied that of wonder and awe; and with
the growth of intellect, wonder would naturally develop
into curiosity and the desire to fathom the mysteries of
nature.
This was the stage of development which had been
reached by the ancient Hindu poets of the Rig-Veda—
generally supposed to be about four thousand years old.
But the spirit—though not the actual language—of most
of these hymns is far older : the Rig-Veda—“Hymn-
Veda”—might almost be called the Bible of the Aryan
race, that race which includes Celts and Teutons as
well as Greeks and Romans. The Rig-Veda is the true
key to the origin of Aryan poetry, mythology, and
religion.
A



é Old Hindu
wº pe of beauty is
Pånd subordinated to, that of the
Æful. We find in the Vedic hymns
s of delight in the beauty of the dawn,
in the Vedas everything is personified---
rgin, of fire, personified as a golden-haired
ning, and, indeed, of everything that is
Ire. But the primitive Aryan would have
ſnd to the beauty of the dawn as he was to
*Sunset, had not the dawn been associated in his
K1 with the sense of relief from the terrors of the night.
So also his admiration of the “golden-haired youth "
was only a part of his gratitude to the “trusty house-
friend,” the “messenger to the gods.” Lightning, too,
was associated with the fertilising rain-clouds. -
The strongest emotions which nature excited in early
Aryan minds were those of awe and wonder, whose first
dawnings are so powerfully brought before us by Words-
worth in a passage of the Prelude quoted by Mr. Myers
in his Wordsworth. In this description, as Mr. Myers re-
marks, “the boy's mind is represented as passing through
precisely the train of emotion which we may imagine to
be at the root of the theology of many barbarous peoples.”
It will, therefore, be worth while to give the passage
1n full:
“I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a Swan ;
And when from behind the craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct, -
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again ;
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree ;















SA/E/C/A2 V’S AVA 7'UA'A'-POP TA’ V.
3
There in her mooring-place I left the bark,
And through the meadows homeward went in grave
And serious mood. But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being ; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness—call it solitude,
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
And Sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.”
The key-note to the Vedic conception of nature is
an overwhelming sense of its strength and man's weak-
ness. The only heroes of Vedic song are the personified
powers of nature—the sky, the storm, the lightning.
Whenever human kings and heroes are mentioned, it
is only to extol the might and goodness of the sky-god
Indra, who delivers them from danger and captivity, and
guides them to victory. So strong is the sense of man's
weakness and helplessness that even animals are re-
garded as his equals, if not his superiors. To the Vedic
poets the bull is “the invincible one,” and the cow is the
“she-invincible.”
They were also deeply impressed by the regularity of
nature's operations—the unfailing succession of day and .
night and of the seasons, the unswerving path of the sun
through the sky. This new sense of ideal law appealed
to their moral as well as their intellectual faculties.
The sublimest of natural objects—the sun–was to them
Something more than a magnified earthly king, whose
power, however great, may be exercised capriciously
and intermittently—he was a king whose laws admitted
of no exception, all-seeing and all-powerful alike in
detecting and in punishing crime.
The intellectual contemplation of nature, as already
remarked, has its source in the emotions of wonder and
curiosity. The Vedic hymns are full of such questions
as, How is it that the sun is not fastened to the sky,
and yet falls not 2 The stars that shine at night, where
do they hide themselves by day 2 Sometimes these
“obstinate questionings” deal with what we should
consider very trivial problems. “How is it that the
A 2.
4. SAHAE/./A. V’S AWA TUA’Aº-POE 7TR V.
dark cow gives white milk 2" exclaims one of the Vedic
poets in wonder and perplexity.
Many of these questions were dismissed as insoluble,
others were solved by the bold analogies and metaphors
which constitute primitive mythology. In one of the
hymns we are told that the sun is a tree, its rays being
the roots, and that King Varuna (the “coverer”—a
personification of the sky) planted it in the groundless
regions of the air. We see a further development Of
this idea in the Yggdrasill or “world-ash” of the Scan-
dinavian mythology. In other hymns we find the sun's
rays regarded as levers or arms with which he is lifted
up at dawn, and as legs with which he marches through
the sky. Shelley's lines in Prometheus (i. I, 65)
“Thou serenest air,
Through which the sun walks burning without beams ”
would have been met by a primitive Aryan with the
serious objection, How could the sun walk without legs
As has often been remarked, what to us is mere poetic
fancy was to them sober scientific truth.
We see, then, that in this primitive stage, poetry,
mythology, religion, and Science were all one—they
were all simply phases of the contemplation of nature.
But this unity could no longer be maintained when
poetry, mythology, religion and Science had once asserted
their independence. When, as was the case among the
Greeks, the primitive Aryan nature-poetry had developed
into epos and drama—the rude beginnings of which we
can see even in the Vedic hymns,—when the old per-
sonifications of sky and sun had been so humanised that
all trace of their origin was lost, then nature itself was
put in the background.
This tendency was intensified by the growing complexity
of Social and political life. It was no longer a struggle
of man against nature, but of man against man. The
sense of beauty, too, is absorbed by the creations of the
plastic arts: the poet of nature yields to the sculptor,
architect, and painter; or rather, he is hardly allowed to
develop at all. Even in lyric poetry descriptions of
nature are introduced only when subordinated to some
human feeling or interest.
SAHE LIAE Y'S AWA TURE-POETRY. 5
CELTIC AND OLD ENGLISH POETRY.
In tracing the growth of nature-poetry in England, it
will be worth while to glance at the characteristic fea-
tures of Celtic and Old English (“Anglo-Saxon”) poetry,
especially as regards their treatment of nature.
We will begin with Celtic literature, whose main cha-
racteristics are familiar to most of us from the brilliant
sketch of Mr. Matthew Arnold. It is, however, to be
regretted that he did not base his conclusions on a study
of the Irish rather than the Welsh literature. The few
remarks I shall offer are founded on the old Irish prose
tales, or Sagas, which, unlike the Welsh, show no traces
of mediaeval French influence, and are, indeed, hardly
touched even by Christianity.
Celtic literature, as every one knows, is distinguished
above all by picturesqueness and vividness of fancy. It
is fantastic, remote from real life, and shows an insatiable
craving for the marvellous. It delights in sudden sur-
prises: it is intensely sensational. In this respect the
American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, is, perhaps, the best
modern type of an Old Irish story-teller. That ghastly
tale of his, The Fall of the House of Usher, is thoroughly
Celtic in its undisguised sacrifice of all considerations of ,
probability and moral sense to the development of a
telling situation.
Fantastic as it is, Celtic literature is hardly ever vague
or formless. It is full of the minutest descriptions,
especially of the personal appearance, features and dress,
of its heroes and heroines. These descriptions are in-
spired by a delicate sense of beauty, shown above all in
the extraordinary development of the colour-sense. The
Irish as well as the Welsh sagas are full of colour-pic-
tures. Thus we have in Irish literature the description
of the young hero, Froech, swimming across the pool
in the river, and carrying the branch of mountain-ash,
whose red berries are contrasted with the whiteness of
his body and the blackness of the pool. The Old Irish
not only had a keen eye for contrasts of colour, but,
what is still more remarkable, their literature is full of
minute descriptions of shades of colour. Thus in the
6 SHELLEY’s NATURE-POETRY
description of the hero Loegaire we are told that he had
hair of three colours: brown at the roots, blood-red in
the middle, and like a diadem of gold on the surface.
There is one famous colour-picture which passed from
Celtic into Old French literature, and so became com-
mon property of the Middle Ages. The Welsh version
of it given by Mr. Arnold shows evident traces of French
influence. An older and purely Celtic form of it occurs
in the Old Irish tale, The Eazile of the Sons of Uisnech.
Derdrin sees her foster-father killing a calf in the snow,
and a raven comes to drink the blood. So Derdrin
wishes she may have a lover as white as the snow, as
red as the blood, and as black as the raven. The Welsh
version tells how “Peredur entered a valley, and at the
head of the valley he came to a hermit’s cell, and the
hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the
night, and in the morning he arose, and when he went
forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night
before, and a hawk had killed a wild fowl in front of the
cell. And the noise of the horse Scared the hawk away,
and a raven alighted upon the blood. And Peredur
stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the
whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to
the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was
blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was
whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were
redder than the blood upon the Snow appeared to him.”
It is instructive to note how utterly wanting the earlier
version is in the romance and “natural magic” of the
later one.
In the Old English poetry almost everything is re-
versed : the minute descriptions, the elaborate com-
parisons, the gorgeous colouring of Celtic romance are
wanting. The absence of the colour-sense is especially
striking. Almost the only colour that is mentioned in
Old English poetry is green. But when the Old English
poets talk of “the green earth,” they never contrast it,
as a modern poet would do, with the blue sky. The
colour blue, indeed, is only mentioned once in Old
English poetry. What pleased our ancestors in green
fields and budding trees was not the beauty of the
colour, but its associations with fertility and plenty ;
SAIELLEY'S ANATURE-POETRY. 7
green with them meant “verdant.” The only other
colour that is at all frequent in Old English poetry is
white. Here again the word does not so much suggest
the specific colour white as the general idea of “bright-
ness'': a “white helmet" is a shining helmet of bronze.
In the Scandinavian mythology Balder is “the whitest
of the gods,” that is, the fairest, the most beautiful. It
is characteristic of the Celts that with them red was
the “beautiful” colour, the word deng having both
meanings in Old Irish. &
The defective colour-sense of the Old Teutons is still
seen in their descendants—the modern Germans. Dr.
Abel in one of his linguistic essays speaks with wonder
of the keen perception of delicate shades of colour shown
by English ladies in shopping, and contrasts it with the
duller perception of his own countrywomen, noting also
the poverty of the German language in expressing dis-
tinctions of colour. All English people, too, are struck
by the poor and hard colouring of German landscape
painters.
But the Dutch, who are quite as pure Teutons as the
Germans, make the same criticism. They attribute the
finer colour-sense of their own painters to the richer
colour of their watery meadows and the varying hues of
sky and cloud seen only in damp climates. May not
similar causes have produced similar effects in England
as well ? In other words, may not the delicate colour-
sense shown by the modern English painters and poets
have been developed through climatic influences inde-
pendently of any supposed Celtic influence or Celtic
ancestry
Inferior as the Old English literature is to the Celtic
in vivid colouring and richness of detail, it surpasses it
in many of the higher flights of imagination : it soars
into regions inaccessible to the quick-witted, but more
superficial Celt. The moral force and earnestness, the
restless enterprise of the old Teutons stamped itself
indelibly on their literature. ln the Seafarer—that
most startlingly modern of all the Old English poems—
the approach of spring, when the earth's bosom becomes
fair again, and the groves resume their flowers, inspires
the youth with no tranquil joy or dreamy voluptuous-
8 SAHAE/L/A. Y'S WA TUA’Aº-POETRY.
ness, but with a longing to venture on the sea, and, like
Shelley's Alastor, “to meet lone Death on the drear
ocean's waste.” The song of the cuckoo is to him even
as the voice of the ill-omened raven : it bodes bitter
heart-sorrow. It is interesting to compare the Seafarer
with Alastor. Alastor braves death in despair of other-
wise attaining his ideal of love and beauty; he lives in
an atmosphere of sublime but unhealthy sentiment. His
gentleness, his beauty have something feminine about
them. The Seafarer, on the other hand, is all manliness
and energy. He casts back many a longing glance at
the joys of earth; but neither the love of woman nor the
sweet sound of the harp, nor the joyous revelry of his
beloved kinsmen avail aught against the mighty impulse
within him : his mind departs out of his breast like a
sea-bird, screams in its lonely flight, returns to him,
fierce and eager, impels him irresistibly over the wide
waste of waters, over the whale's path.
The landscape sense was highly developed among our
Old English ancestors. Nothing in literature is more
vivid than the passages in Beowulf which describe the
“secret land’ haunted by the monster Grendel, with its
misty headlands, its “wolf-slopes,” and the dread lake
with fire gleaming in its depths, overhung with icy
trees—“a joyless wood.” The sense of awe and weirdness
is heightened by one of those touches peculiar to Old
English poetry: “when the heath-stalking stag seeks
that wood, hard-pressed by the hounds, he will give up
his life on the shore sooner than plunge in and hide
his head.”
The elegiac mood predominates in the Old English
descriptions of nature: the desolation of exile, the sad
thoughts of departed glory called forth by the sight
of ancient ruins—these are the favourite motives of their
lyric poets. Nor are purely idyllic descriptions wanting,
such as the beautiful one of the ideal happy island
inhabited by the Phoenix, which reminds us partly of
Tennyson's description of “the island-valley of Avilon,”
partly of Shelley's ideal island in the Euganean Hills
with its “windless bowers,” “far from passion, pain, and
guilt.” Shelley's description of the imagined ruins of
Venice in the same poem, with the sea-mew flying
SHE/AA. Y'S WATURE-POETR V. 9
above, and the palace gate “toppling o'er the abandoned
sea,” recalls as strikingly that aspect of Old English
lyric poetry represented by The Wanderer and the im-
pressive fragment known as The Ruin—really a descrip-
tion of the ruins of the Roman city of Bath. Shelley
heightens the effect, almost as in Beowulf, by “the fisher
on his watery way, wandering at the close of day”
hastening to pass the gloomy shore
“Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep, -
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.”
The “natural magic” of such a description as this is—
or at least, might be—wholly English, wholly Teutonic—
strange as such an assertion may seem to a critic like
Mr. Arnold, whose ideas of the Teutonic spirit are
gained from a one-sided contemplation of modern
German literature at a period when it was still strug-
gling for the mastery of the rudiments of style and
technique, lost in the barbarism of the Thirty Years'
War.
Shelley's poem The Question, is, on the other hand,
as purely Celtic both in its colour-pictures of “green
cow-bind" and the “moonlight-coloured may,” and
“flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, fairer
than any wakened eyes behold,” and its ethereal unreality
and delicate, fanciful sentiment. It need hardly be said
that this “Celtic note” in Shelley no more proves Celtic
race-influence than the “Greek, note ’’ in Keats proves
that Keats was of Greek descent. Shelley looks at
nature with the same eyes as an old Celtic poet because
both were inspired by the same sky and earth, both
loved the same flowers, fields, and forests.
Divergent as the Celtic and Teutonic literatures are,
there is yet a certain affinity between them which comes
out clearly when we contrast them with the southern
literatures of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France.
To any one coming fresh from the northern literatures,
Greek poetry, with all its greater clearness, moderation,
and harmony, has a certain want of picturesqueness—a
sobriety of imagination which sometimes approaches to
H
IO SAHE/AA. Y'S WA TUA’Aº-POETRY.
tameness and baldness. Greek poets show but little of
that command of the weird and supernatural which
impresses us above all in the old Icelandic literature,
and has been so powerfully rendered by Gray in his
paraphrase, The Descent of Odin. Homer's gods and
goddesses are merely human beings on a slightly larger
scale; his account of Ulysses' journey to the infernal
regions stirs in us no emotions of awe or mystery.
AEschylus' description of the Furies in the Eumenides
is equally wanting in the true Supernatural touch, and he
only falls into the horrible and repulsive when he tells
us that “from their eyes drips loathsome gore.”
Shelley's description of the Furies in his Prometheus
is nobler and more impressive. The same tendency
to confound the loathsome with the impressive may be
seen in modern French literature, especially in Balzac-
the father of modern “realism.”
This characteristic difference between the imaginations
of northern and southern nations is no doubt due to the
difference of climate. The “misty moors ’’ of the poet
of Beowulf, the gloomy skies and long winter nights of
the north are enough to explain the trait of weirdness
common to Celtic and Teutonic literature without any
hypothesis of influence on either side. Shelley says of
his Witch of Atlas that it is * ,
“A tale more fit for the weird winter nights
Than for these garish summer days, when we
Scarcely believe much more than we can see.”
Both Celtic and Teutonic literature show the weak
side of their peculiar power in a tendency to exaggerate
the gigantic into the formless—a tendency which is
strongly opposed to the moderation and self-restraint
of Greek art. In the Old Irish tales we have the
shadowy, only half corporeal, monsters which come forth
at night from the lakes, being in fact, nothing but per-
sonifications of mist and cloud. In Old English poetry
we have the gigantic figure of Grendel looming indis-
tinctly through the mists. Such creations would be
impossible in the sunny South, except among the deserts
of Arabia, whose gloomy, Solitary wastes, swept by storms
of dust, explain the striking analogy there is between
the Teutonic and Semitic imagination.
,SA/E/LLE Y'S AWA TURE-POETRY. I I
CHAUCER.
If we turn now to the great English poet of the
middle period—Chaucer—we are struck by the complete
break there between Old and Middle English poetry—
a break which is shown not least in the treatment of
nature,
Social and political progress, together with the over-
whelming influence of French models, had the same
effect in England as elsewhere: nature receded more
and more into the background. It is true that through-
out Middle English literature there is much appreciation
of the gladness and brightness of nature, but there is
generally little individuality in the expression of these
feelings: the poet contents himself with repeating some
simple formula about the fresh flowers and singing birds.
Still, there are in Middle English literature several
examples to the contrary, such as the thirteenth
century poem of The Owl and Nightingale. Many
passages, too, in Chaucer show the minutest observation
of nature. But bright and clear as these pictures are–
as in the tale of Chanticleer—they have lost the magic
touch of the older poetry: there is nothing in Chaucer
to remind us of Beowulf or the Seafarer; and when he
shows any touches of Celtic fancy, he is only availing
himself of the common literary heritage of his period.
Chaucer, with his strong human sympathies, had little
love for wild nature. He cared not to stray far beyond
the habitations of men. He loves gardens and “flowery
green meadows.” His ideal forest, as described in The
Death of Blanche, is very different from Shelley's ideal
forest in Alastor; Chaucer's forest, with its tall trees of
the uniform height of forty or fifty fathoms, symmetri-
cally disposed ten or twelve feet apart, comes nearer our
idea of a rather formal park than that of a forest. His
enumeration of the trees in the Parliament of Birds is
characteristic of the purely human point of view from
which he regarded nature, each tree being distinguished,
not by its own attributes, but solely with reference to
the use made of it by man —
B 2
I2 SAHAE Z/A Y’S AVA 7TUA’Aº-POA. TRY.
“The byldere ok; and ek the hardy assh;
The piler elm, the cofre unto careyne ;
The boxtre pipere; holm to whippes lassh;
The Saylynge fyr ; the cipresse, deth to pleyne;
The shetere ew ; the asp, for shaftes pleyne ;
The olyve of pes; and ek the dronke vyne;
The victor palm ; the laurer, to devyne.”
Compare Shelley, in Alastor, 43 I —
“The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching, frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald Sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang,
Tremulous and pale.”
A sharper contrast cannot be imagined.
SPENSER AND SHAKESPERE.
Leaving the Middle Ages behind, we come now to the
first great poet of the Renascence—Spenser. There is
little that is original or distinctive in his nature-poetry.
He was, of course, a great imitator of Chaucer, and
in a passage of the Faerie Queen (i. I, 8) he has fol-
lowed Chaucer's above-quoted description of the trees
very closely, but with Some significant alterations and
additions:
“The sailing pine ; the cedar proud and tall;
The vine-prop elm ; the poplar never dry;
The builder oak, sole king of forests all ;
The aspen good for Staves; the cypress funeral ” . . .
Here the oak is no longer regarded from the point of
view of a speculative builder who has just purchased “a
well-timbered residential estate,” but a descriptive epithet
is added, and so with many of the other trees.
Shakespere's attitude towards nature is much the same
as Chaucer's, allowing, of course, for the greater range
and depth of Shakespere's genius. Wherever his subject
requires it, he shows an unlimited command not only of
minutely accurate and vivid descriptions of nature, but
SHE/L/LAE Y'S AVA TURE-POE 7/& V. I 3
also of the subtle charm of Celtic—we should rather say,
Welsh—romance. But even in his non-dramatic poetry
there are few traces of what may be called a disinterested
love of inanimate nature. Nature with him is always a
means to an end : either to heighten human emotion,
or as supplying materials for those far-reaching similes
and metaphors in which his restless intellect delighted.
To us, trained by Wordsworth and Shelley to regard
nature with reverence even in her humblest manifesta-
tions, there is something startling in Shakespere's ir-
reverent familiarity. No poet of the present century
would speak of the clouds or of night as Shakespere
does in such passages as these :
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen . . .
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face.” (Sonnet xxxiii.)
“To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke.” (Sonnet xxxiv.)
“Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,"
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.”
(Sonnet xxvii.)
“And see the brave day sunk in hideous night.” (Sonnet xii.)
Compare Spenser (F, Q, i. 5, 20).
“Where grisly night, with visage deadly sad,
That Phoebus' cheerful face durst never view,
And in a foul black pitchy mantle clad . . .
And coalblack steeds yborn of hellish brood.”
* Though Shakspere's main view of night is of its blackness or
hideousness, yet he has passages to the contrary, as in the Merchant
of Venice, V. i. 56—63:
“Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold !
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdst,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims :
Such harmony is in immortal souls.”
See too Juliet's ‘blessed night,’ and remember Marlowe's
“Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars "
I4 SAIA. LLE V S AWA TURE. POETRY.
Shakespere had nothing of that feeling which made
Wordsworth exclaim
“The world is too much with us !” +
or prompted Shelley's invitation:
“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild woods and the downs—
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music, lest it should not find
An echo in another's mind,
While the touch of nature's art
Harmonises heart to heart.”
It is curious to note that though the last two lines are
a paraphrase of Shakespere's “One touch of nature,” the
sentiment they convey is one which would be utterly
unintelligible to Shakespere himself.
In Shakespere's time there was, indeed, no antagonism
between art and nature, between town and country.” To
Shakespere, a street in a town was as much a piece of
nature as a glade in a forest, and to him there was no
incongruity in associating the two ideas together, as
when (A. Y. L. J., ii. 1) he calls the deer in the forest,
“Native burghers of this desert city.”
Hence also Shakespere saw no incongruity in making
heaven “peep through the blanket of the dark,” which
to a modern reader has a downright ludicrous effect.
* Compare Sonnet LXVI. :
“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry . . .
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone.”
* I admit that in Scene iii. Act III. of Cymäe/ine is a good deal
on the antagonism between town and country; but not in my sense:
it is the contrast of the ‘quiet life’ of the country with the ‘sharper,’
pushing, intriguing life of the town, like the Duke's :
“Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?”
(As You Like It, II. i.)
So Touchstone's contrast is of rustic dulness with court amuse-
ments: As You Mike It, III. i. See also Caxton's Curial (from Alain
Chartier's French), and the discussion “Cf cyuile and vn-cyuile
Life,” or The Eng/ish Courtier and the Country-Gentleman, 1586:
Roxburghe Library, 1868.
SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. I5
Akin to this freedom is Shakespere's lavish use of that
bold, imaginative hyperbole in which he is unsurpassed :
“The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the Sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out.” (T. i. 2.)
“The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds;
The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane,
Seems to cast water on the burning bear
And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole.” (Oth. ii. I.)
MILTON.
The essential continuity between Chaucer and Shake-
spere in the treatment of nature makes the gap between
Shakespere and Milton all the more striking. Milton
was, indeed, far in advance of his age in this respect.
As the Puritans anticipated the political and social
changes of the eighteenth century, so also did the great
Puritan poet anticipate its nature-poetry. Milton's
L'Allegro and // Penseroso are, indeed, not only the first
examples in modern English poetry of what the Ger-
mans call stimmungsbilder, “mood-pictures,” but they
have served as models up to the present day. These
poems are the first conscious attempts in English litera-
ture to embody in words the subtle impressions we
receive from solitary communion with nature. So per-
fect is the poet's command of these “nature-moods”
that he is not contented with taking some phase of
nature, and tracing the emotions excited by it, but
reverses the process: he takes some one emotion—such
as melancholy—and calls up at will from external nature
everything that contributes to the effect he is aiming at:
Most wonderful of all is the way in which every emotion
is heightened or toned down into harmony with the rest
of the picture by subtle contrast with its opposite. In
the bright, hot noontide we are led into shady forests;
in the calm stillness of night our thoughts are directed
to the lights of heaven and the busy stir of human life."
In Milton's poetry we see the sense of landscape fully
developed for the first time. He is, indeed, the first
* Brandl: Coleridge, p. 33.
I6 SAHAE/L/LE V’.S AWA TURE-POZTA. V.
English poet to employ the word “landscape” in its
present sense (in L'Allegro): . . . . . . . .
“Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,
Whilst the landscape round it measures.”
As the constituents of the landscape he enumerates
lawns, fallows, mountains, meadows, brooks, rivers, to-
gether with towers and battlements. The inclusion of
these last reminds us that “landscape” was originally
a technical term of the Dutch painters, used to designate
the background and other accessories in a figure-piece.
The word “scenery" was in like manner borrowed
from the technical language of the stage; it does not
seem to have come into general use till the beginning of
the next century. *.
Exquisite as Milton's sense of beauty is, it is cold-
blooded — rather that of a poetic epicure than an
enthusiast. To him a beautiful landscape is a beautiful
landscape, and nothing more. He has but little of the
“sheer inimitable Celtic note ’’ that Mr. Arnold finds in
Shakespere, nor on the other hand does his nature-
poetry show anything of the moral earnestness of
Wordsworth, or the rapt ecstasy of Shelley.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
In the eighteenth century the poetry of nature is
enriched and deepened by two new factors, one moral,
the other intellectual. It was then that the hard,
narrow puritanism of Milton expanded into a new
spirit of humanity and philanthropy, whose influence
in poetry we see steadily widening up to the time of
Shelley. In Milton’s L’Allegro the ploughman “whist-
ling o'er the furrowed land" is simply part of a picture;
in Gray's Elegy the ploughman as he “homeward plods
his weary way ” is an object of pity and sympathy: the
hardships of the poor, and sympathy with their lot are
henceforth sources of poetic emotion. As the century
advanced, the circle of sympathy is widened to include
suffering animals as well as human beings. Another
characteristic feature of the century is the love of chil-
SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. 17
dren, and the growth of the family affections—both of
which are conspicuously absent from Shakespere's
poetry. -
The intellectual tendencies of the eighteenth century
were at first unfavourable to the development of poetic
imagination. But the simplicity, clearness, and direct-
ness of thought and expression achieved by Pope and
his school, the patient, plodding accuracy of Thomson's
descriptions of nature, were necessary links in the chain
of development; and when Gray had turned back to
seek fresh inspiration in the nature-poetry of Milton, the
ground was fully prepared for a Coleridge, a Words-
worth, and a Shelley. In another way, too, Gray was
a pioneer, in advance not only of his own age, but also
of the present one—in his attempts to popularise such
of the masterpieces of northern poetry, both Celtic and
Scandinavian, as were accessible to him. Although
Gray never succeeded in shaking off the false rhetoric
of his age, he knew instinctively where to seek the
antidote. " - •, - . -
The most striking feature of the intellectual life of
the eighteenth century is the rapid development of the
natural Sciences, and their popularisation towards the
end of the century. In our days the practical applica-
tions and consequent utilitarian associations of Science
have somewhat deadened us to the imaginative element
in it, and made it a little difficult for us to realise the
enthusiasm which the electrical and chemical discoveries
of such men as Franklin, Priestley, and Davy roused
even among the most frivolous of their contemporaries.
One inevitable result of that growth of large towns
which went hand in hand with increased material pros-
perity, was the development of an antagonism between
town and country life which soon began to express
itself in literature. This antagonism showed itself in
two opposite forms.
In the beginning of the century it took the form of a
cultured contempt for the boorishness and intellectual
narrowness and stagnation of country life. This feeling
lasted through the whole century down to the beginning
of the present one, and was especially persistent among
the literary critics, until their opposition was broken
C
18 SA/E/C/A. V’S AVA TURE-FOA. Tº Y.
down by the triumph of Wordsworth and the Lake
School. -
But in the latter half of the century the antagonism
between town and country took the opposite form of a
revolt against the artificiality and insincerity of town
life. On the Continent the return to nature was elevated
into a religion, and preached as a gospel by Rousseau.
In England, where art had never so completely lost
touch with nature as on the Continent, the new tenden-
cies worked themselves out in a more moderate and
practical spirit. For our present purpose it is especially
important to note the reform in gardening and laying
out parks, which aimed at following instead of distorting
nature, as in the older Italian style. From England it
spread to the Continent. The park at Munich is still
called “the English garden.” The eighteenth centur
landscape-gardening certainly paved the way for that
love of wild nature which became general towards the
end of the century.
This love of wild nature, which was greatly popularised
by the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school—in
which crime, mystery, brigands, ruined castles, and
primeval forests are delightfully jumbled together—
showed itself in an appreciation of the rugged scenery
of mountains and moors, and a delight in open and
Solitary space, however barren and desolate—feelings
which often developed into an austere love of barrenness
and desolation for their own sake.
All these are feelings which would have been un-
intelligible to Shakespere and his contemporaries. It is
very doubtful if Shakespere would have seen any beauty
in Keats's picture of
“The new soft-fallen mask -
Of Snow upon the mountains and the moors,”
and it is certain he would not have sympathised with
Shelley's feeling (/u/ian and Maddalo, 14):
“I love all waste
And Solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless as we wish our souls to be.”
SA/EIAAF V’S AWA TURE-POETR Y. 19
So far from seeing any beauty in moorland, Shake-
spere singles it out for especial contempt:
“Now would I give a thousand furlongs of Sea for an acre of
barren ground, long [ling PJ heath, brown [broom PI furze, any-
thing.” (T., i I.) - .
To be blown about in winds," which to us moderns is
rather an exhilarating idea than otherwise, is to him the
awfullest doom that superstition can imagine :
“To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world.” (M. M., iii. I.)
“Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight ! .
Blow me about in winds !” (Oth., v, 2,)
It is instructive to compare the nearest parallel pas-
sage in Shelley (Cenci, v. 4, 57), which may, indeed,
easily be a reminiscence of those quoted above :
“Sweet heaven, forgive weak thoughts . If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world !”
Similar passages in Shelley are:
“Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world P” (Cenci, i. 3, 106.)
“Sheltered by the warm embrace of thy soul
From hungry space.” (Prom., iv., 479.)
It is evident that the modern poet's conception of
desolation and negation has to be made more abstract:
he cannot bring in anything so concrete as blowing
winds. .
It need hardly be said that this love of the wilder
aspects of nature was of slow growth, and was only
gradually evolved out of the primitive emotions of awe
* I do not forget
“The merry wind
Blows off the shore”
º º Comedy of Errors, IV. i. 9o, 91 ; or Prospero's promise to
Tiel : -
“Thou shalt be as free . . .
As mountain winds.” (Tempest, I. ii. 497–8.)
- C 2
20 SHAEL/LE V’S AVA TURA2-P of: TR Y.
and fear. Indeed when we find eighteenth-century
tourists dwelling on the awful wildness and horrible
desolation of the Derbyshire Peak or the Cheddar Cliffs
—scenery which most of us, spoilt by the Alps and
Pyrenees, would consider rather tame and mild—we
are inclined to take them too literally, and to forget
that in that self-conscious age people were apt to
accentuate their newly-found pleasure in the sublime
by a little occasional exaggeration, just as the luxurious
tourist of the present day likes to dwell on the mostly
imaginary hardships of “roughing it.” But it must also
be remembered that throughout the eighteenth century
travelling at the best was never free from hardship and
danger, and that every heath and waste place was
associated with traditions of crime and violence. These
associations would naturally linger even after their
causes had ceased to exist.
SHELLEY'S CHARACTERISTICS.
To all these manifold influences of the century of his
birth Shelley was acutely sensitive, and they are all re-
flected in his poetry. The question, How far he suc-
ceeded in giving poetical expression to the social and
political ideals of his age, and whether his poetry, as
poetry, benefited or not thereby, is one which does not
concern us here. There can, on the other hand, be no
doubt that his enthusiastic studies in philosophy and
natural Science—superficial as the latter were, were an
essential factor in his poetic development, especially
as regards his poetry of nature. Not that he was in any
way a cross between a poet and a man of science. Shelley
was no Jules Verne—he was not even a Plato. He was
a poet, and nothing else, although it is possible that
had he lived longer he would, like Coleridge, have turned
more and more to philosophy, if indeed, he had not taken
to practical politics. But poet as he was, he was above
all an intellectual—we might almost say, a scientific—
poet. -
Akin to the intellectual temperament—though unfor-
tunately not always associated with it—is the love of
SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. a
truth. This Shelley had in a high degree. He had,
above all, the virtue of intellectual honesty—a rare
virtue everywhere, and especially rare among practical-
minded, compromise-loving Englishmen. To Shelley a
thinker who was afraid to go the whole length of his
intellectual tether was as contemptible as any other kind
of coward. He himself showed his rare combination of
intellectual and moral strength in the fearless consistence-
with which he carried out his principles in whatever
regions of theory or practice they led him into. His
strength of character was shown not less strikingly in the
resolutely agnostic attitude he took on subjects which he
believed to be beyond human ken. He was not the man
to seek consolation, as John Stuart Mill advises us to do,
in the cultivation of religious beliefs which our reason
refuses to sanction; while on the other hand he was
equally free from the dogmatism with which many
philosophers and men of science have attempted to define
the boundaries of the knowable and unknowable.
Hence the vagueness with which, both in his poetry
and prose, he has expressed himself on such questions
as the existence of a Deity and the immortality of the
soul. Hence also the want of any one central view of
nature in his poetry. I do not understand why Mr.
Stopford Brooke attributes this feature of Shelley's
philosophy and poetry to a supposed love of the vague
and indefinite for their own sake. I find no trace of
indefiniteness in Shelley's expression of his views on
those questions of philosophy, religion, art, morality,
and politics which are within the range of human intel-
lect. On the contrary, they form a gospel of life as
definite as it is consistent and comprehensive. If
Shelley refuses to commit himself to Wordsworth’s
belief that
“Every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes,”
or to model all his poetry on the lines of a definite sys-
tematic pantheism, it is simply because he did not con-
sider such beliefs to be capable of proof or disproof in
the present state of our knowledge, and therefore con-
tented himself with vague indications of his pantheistic .
22 SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY.
A
jl
J
|
leanings, cautiously expressed, as in the conclusion of
the Invitation —
“And all things seem only one
In the universal Sun.”
Another aspect of Shelley's intellectual temperament
is its ideality and tendency to abstraction. This ten-
dency is shown even more in his delineation of human
character and action than in his treatment of nature.
His treatment of human nature is rarely sympathetic.
The sensitiveness of his organisation made him shrink
with feminine horror from all cruelty and violence, and
his clear, truthful intellect made him impatient of injus-
tice, hypocrisy, and conventionality. But somehow his
impassioned philanthropy fails to touch our hearts. His
enthusiasm is not contagious : it dazzles our imagina-
tion, but it leaves us cold. Shelley is singularly wanting
in pathos, except in a few cases where he is drawing
directly on his own emotions and experience, or giving
an idealised portrait of himself, as in Alastor or the song
of the third spirit in the first act of Prometheus (“I sat
beside a sage's bed ” . . .), in both of which the pathos
is inspired by this very want of sympathy—by the poet's
sense of his own loneliness and isolation from his fellow
men. Even when he descends from the lofty heights of
abstract philanthropy to express sympathy or pity for
Some one human being, as in Adomais and Epipsychidiom,
the frigid emotion contrasts painfully with the brilliance
of his imagery. The only burst of warm spontaneous
feeling in these poems is the self-pity with which he
describes himself in Adomažs. -
Shelley's incapacity to realise a character distinct from
his own is shown not least in that one of his creations which
at first sight seems most vigorously objective—Count
Cenci. In creating a character Shelley had only two
alternatives: either to reproduce himself, or to create an
abstraction. In the present case he is obliged to adopt
the latter alternative : Count Cenci is an abstraction.
Indeed, so completely is he an abstraction that we fail
to realise him as a moral agent at all—as far, at least, as
Shelley's presentment of him is concerned : we know,
from the plot of the story, that he is a villain, but Shelley
SAHE/AA. V’S WA TURE-POETRY. 23
certainly does not help us to realise it. The villains of
real life or of Shakespere's dramas are a mixture of good
and bad ; often they are strong and noble natures with
some apparently insignificant warp of fate or character ;
and they generally have some motive for their crimes or
follies. But Shelley's Count Cenci is wholly bad, and his
conduct is wholly without motive. Shelley's idea of
constructing a villain was to combine every imaginable
depravity into one abstraction. Shelley's Count Cenci
is really a personification of blind destructiveness: it
would be almost as absurd to call him a villain, as it
would be to attribute villainy to a ravening tiger or a
devastating whirlwind ; he is not a psychological, but
what might be called an “elemental” villain.
Shelley's real sympathies are with inanimate nature.
Here he is at home. Here he is unique and supreme.
He is indeed “the poet of nature” in a truer sense than
Wordsworth is. Wordsworth is really the poet of the
homely, the common-place in nature as in man. What-
ever in nature harmonises with his own narrow sym-
pathies he assimilates and reproduces with a power all
his own. But whenever nature refuses to lend herself to
his moral lessons and similes, he does not scruple to
lecture and bully her. He is very severe on the clouds.
He patronises the stock-dove—“that was the song, the
song for me !"—and snubs the nightingale. Even the -
daisy gets an occasional rap on the knuckles, and is told
not to be too conceſted. THis humäTSympathies are
equally limited. He loves little girls and old men, and
dotes on idiots, but ignores boys and old women, and
detests men of science—“philosophers ” as he calls them.
His sympathies in inanimate nature are mainly confined
to a limited group of concrete objects—mainly birds
and flowers; he cares little for the phenomena of
nature.
Shelley, on the other hand, seeks to penetrate into the
very heart of nature in all her manifestations, without
regard to their association with human feeling. While
in his treatment of man he is all subjectivity, in his
treatment of nature he is often purely objective. In
such a poem as The Cloud, there is not only no trace of
Wordsworthian egotism, but the whole description of
} .2
| :

24 SHEI/A Y'S WATURE-POETRY.
the cloud is as remote from human feeling as it could
well be, consistently with the poetic necessity for per-
sonification: the cloud is personified, but it is personified
as abstractly as possible. As Mr. Brooke says: “Strip
off the imaginative clothing from the cloud, and science
will support every word of it.”
The range of Shelley's sympathies is bounded only
by the universe itself. He combines forests, mountains,
rivers, and seas into vast ideal landscapes ; he dives
into the depths of the earth, soars among clouds and
storms, and communes “with the sphere of sun and
moon.”
Shelley has a strong sense of structure. Mr. Brooke
speaks of his pleasure in “the intricate, changeful, and
incessant weaving and unweaving of Nature's life in a
great forest.” Nothing, indeed, is more characteristic of
Shelley's mind than his constant use of this very word
“weave.” The passage just quoted from Mr. Brooke's
essay seems to have been suggested by Shelley's words
in Åosa/ind and Helen (129):
“Through the intricate wild wood
A maze of life and light and motion is woven.”
The following examples, grouped roughly under heads,
will illustrate Shelley's varied use of the words weave
and woof: º
Leaves : -
“A hall . . . o'er whose roof
Fair clinging weeds with ivy pale did grow,
Clasping its grey rents with a verdurous woof,
A hanging dome of leaves, a canopy moon-proof.”
(L. and C., 6, 27.)
“A wood
Whose bloom-inwoven leaves now scattering fed
The hungry storm.” (Z. and C, 6, 46.)
“The woven leaves
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day.”
(Alastor, 445.)
Clouds:
“The woof of those white clouds.” (L. and C., I, 5.)
“Through the woof of shell-inwoven clouds” (L. and C., I, 52.)
“As the burning threads of woven cloud
Unravel in pale air.” (Prom., ii. 1, 23.)
“The mists of night entwining their dim woof.” (Z. and C., 5, 53.)
SA/E/C/A. Y'S WA TUA’Aº-POF TRY. 25
Wºma! :
“The sinuous veil of woven wind.” (A lastor, 177.)
Light and colour:
“Winds which feed on sunrise woven.” (Z. and C., 5, 44.)
“The bright air did weave intenser hues.” (Z. and C., 3, 3.)
“Like rainbows woven there [in the air].” (Z. and C, 6, 55.)
“The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove.” (Cloud, 71.)
Sound:
“When the warm air weaves among the fresh leaves soft music.”
(A’. and H., 588.)
“Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought ; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.” (Alastor, 153.)
“But now, oh weave the mystic measure
Of music, and dance, and shapes of light,
Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure,
Like the clouds and sunbeams unite.” (Prom., 4, 77.)
Zanguage :
“He knew his soothing words to weave with skill.”
(L. and C., 4, 6.)
“A woof of happy converse frame.” (Z. and C., 5, 54.)
“Hymns which my soul had woven to freedom.” (Z. and C., 2, 28.)
“Woven hymns night and day.” (A/astor, 48.)
“In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.”
(To Wordsworth, Forman, i. 27.)
It is remarkable that the phrase “to weave a hymn " is
frequent in the Veda.
Thought and feeling :
“Unconscious of the power through which she wrought
The woof of such intelligible thought.” (Z. and C., 2, 34.)
“And though the woof of wisdom I know well
To dye in hues of language.” (Z. and C., 4, 17.)
“Yet in my hollow looks and withered mien
The likeness of a shape for which was braided
The brightest woof of genius, still was seen.”
- (Z. and C., 4, 30.)
D
26 SAA L/LE V’S AWA TURE.POA. Tº V.
“Their [the Greek women’s] eyes could have entangled no heart
in soul-inwoven labyrinths.” (On Love.)
77/2e :
“A . . . speech with pauses woven among.” (Z. and C., 5, 52.)
Bristence:
“The web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and Sea.”
- (Adonaïs, 54.)
Movement and action :
“A lake whose waters wove their play
Even to the threshold of that lonely home.”
(Z. and C., 4, 3.)
“Weave the dance.” (Prom., 4, 69.)
“Woven caresses.” (R. and H., Io91 ; Prom., 4, Io;.)
Cause, make :
“Their will has wove the chains that eat their hearts.”
(Z. and C., 4, 26.)
“Have woven all the wondrous imagery
Of this dim spot which mortals call the world.”
(Earth Søirit, Forman, ii. Io9.)
“She unwove the wondrous imagery
Of second childhood's swaddling-bands.” (W. of A., 70.)
The passage first quoted from Rosa/ind and Helen also
comes under this head.
It is noticeable that in the more familiar style of the
Metter to Maria Gisborne (6, I54), Shelley uses spin
instead of weave :
“I . . . sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought—
No net of words in garish colours wrought. . . .
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name.”
“We spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life.”
In a passage already quoted (L. and C, 4, 30) he sub-
stitutes &raid for the sake of the rhyme. So also in
Zaon and Cythma, 5, 24:
“She stood beside him like a rainbow braided
Within some storm.”
SAHE/AA. Y'S WATURE-POETRY. 27
Shelley's love of the changing and fleeting aspects of
nature—the interest with which he watched the forma-
tion of mist and cloud, and the shifting hues of dawn
and Sunset—is, like his sense of structure, a natural
result of the half scientific spirit with which he regarded
nature, for it is in the changing phenomena of nature
that her real life lies. According to Mr. Brooke, Shelley's
love for the changeful in nature is the result of the in-
herent changefulness of his temperament. But of this
I can see but little in his life. He was impulsive enough
—for without impulsiveness he would hardly have been
a poet—but not fickle or undecided in his feelings and
principles: there was in him nothing of that swaying to
and fro between two extremes, which we see not only
in self-seeking politicians, but in sincere enthusiasts as
well. Mr. Brooke himself admits that Shelley “loved
deeply a few great conceptions,” adding, however, that
he “wearied almost immediately of any special form in
which he embodied them.” But the other critics would
hardly agree with this view. Mr. Salt, in his Shelley &
Primer (p. 41), remarks that “the repetition of certain
images and words is one of Shelley's most marked
characteristics,” giving numerous examples.
Shelley's love of natural phenomena sometimes shows
itself in naïve expressions of delight and simple com-
parisons which remind us of the nature-poetry of the
Veda. Thus in The Witch of Atlas, 27 :
“Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is—
Each flame of it is like a precious stone
Dissolved in ever-moving light.”
In the Veda, Agni, the fire-god, is described as a
beautiful, golden-haired youth, adorned like a wooer
with many Colours, equally beautiful on all sides, with
his face turning every way at once.
The description of fire in his Prometheus (ii. 4, 66)
shows how Shelley could pass at will from the primitive
Aryan to the modern point of view :
“The tamed fire, which, like some beast of prey,
Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath the frown of man.”
The most effective way of dealing poetically with the
forces of nature is, of course, to personify them. All
28 SHEZ/A. Y'S WATURE-POETRY.
poets feel this. All poets are, therefore, more or less
mythologists. But their personifications assume very
different forms, according to the circumstances which
surround them and the nature of their own genius.
With the ancient Hindu poets the personification of the
powers of nature was so direct and spontaneous that,
although associated with religious feelings, it had hardly
developed into mythology. Even when they call Agni
the “golden-haired youth " or the “messenger to the
gods,” they never let us forget that these names are
simply figurative expressions for “fire.” It is quite
otherwise in a fully developed mythology, such as that
of the Greeks and Romans, or our own Teutonic fore-
fathers. Zeus, Jupiter, Woden, and the rest of them
were distinct personalities hardly distinguishable from
human beings, whose connection with the powers of
nature could only be realised with an effort, if at all.
No Greek could have guessed that Athene was a per-
Sonification of the lightning, though he would have had
no great difficulty in identifying her father Zeus with
the sky.
The traditional personifications of Greek mythology
became, of course, more and more fossilised as they
were handed on to the Roman poets, and from them to
the poets of the Middle Ages and Renascence, until at
last such figures as “bluff Boreas” became mere verbal
nonentities, and “Flora’ survived only as a scientific
term.
Both Chaucer and Shakespere are full of this tra-
ditional mythology. Thus Chaucer has in the Death of
Blanche—
“For both Flora and Zephirus,
They two that make floures growe,
Had mad her dwellyng ther, I trowe.”
And, indeed, he loses no opportunity of displaying his
knowledge of classical mythology.
Shakespere has in The Tempest (iv., I, and v., 1):
“When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are foundered
Or Night kept chained below.”
“Ye elves . . . and ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune.”
SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. 29
In Shakespere these mythological names are so worn
down that he uses them simply as synonyms: Neptune
with him is the sea, and nothing more. -
Even Wordsworth still shows traces of the old-fashioned
conventional mythology: -
“Blithe Flora from her couch upstarts,
For May is on the lawn.”
“When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening of his radiant face.”
It is characteristic of Shelley that he has no trace of
this conventional mythology. He never brings in the
figures of classical mythology incidentally, but only
when they are the subject of his poetry, and his hand-
ling of them in such cases is always fresh and original,
as in his Hymn to Apollo—the most perfect reproduction
of the spirit of Greek mythology that we have in modern
literature. His conception of Jupiter in his Prometheus
is quite new and original : he makes him the personi-
fication of all that hinders the free development
of the human mind, which latter is personified by
Prometheus. -
We see, then, that even where Shelley is trammelled
by traditional mythology, he reveals something of that
“myth-making ” faculty in which he stands alone among
modern poets—the only one who at all approaches him
in this respect being his contemporary, the Swedish poet
Stagnelius. When Shelley is free to follow his own
fancy, he instinctively creates nature-myths of a strangely
primitive type, unlike anything in Greek or any other
fully developed mythology, but showing remarkable
similarity to the personifications of the Veda. Shelley
himself says in his preface to the Prometheus : - -
“The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many
instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the
human mind, or from those external actions by which they are
expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante
and Shakespere are full of instances of the same kind ; Dante
indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But
the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the
sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual
use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher
merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my
readers should impute this singularity.” -
3O SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETR Y.
Modestly as Shelley here speaks of his own originality—
of whose extent he was probably unconscious—he clearly
hints that his power of personification is not entirely the
result of the study of Greek mythology, but contains
elements of original fancy.
Although no one has hitherto taken the trouble to
point out in detail the analogy between Shelley's per-
sonifications of nature and those embedded in primitive
mythologies, yet most of his critics have not failed to
see in this one of the characteristic features of his
genius. Mr. Symonds says in his Shelley: “We feel
ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while
we read the description of Oceanus, and the raptures of
the earth and moon [in Prometheus Unbound].” Mr.
Stopford Brooke says: “The little poem on the dawn
[“The pale stars are gone . . .”] might have been con-
ceived by a primitive Aryan.”
It is not only Shelley critics who have been struck by
this characteristic of his poetry. Mr. Tylor in his
Anthropology (p. 290), after remarking that the modern
poet “still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which
to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense,”
goes on to quote as an instance the opening lines of
Shelley's Queen Maff
“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother, Sleep
One pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When throned on Ocean’s wave
It blushes o'er the world; ”
which he then goes on to analyse : “Here the likeness
of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of
calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illus-
trate the notion of paleness, the dawn of redness; while
to convey the idea of dawn shining on the sea, the
simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its
reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and
on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in
which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but
simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts,
would talk in metaphors taken from nature.”
SAHE/AA. Y'S WA TUA’E-AE’OE TR V. 3 I
One of the best examples of Shelley's myth-making
faculty is the little poem, The World's Wanderers:
“Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now 2
“Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray
Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now P
“Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow P”
Two of the most striking images in this poem appear
also in The Bay of Lerici (Forman, ii. 280):
“She left me at the silent time
When the moon had ceased to climb
The azure path of Heaven's steep,
And like an albatross asleep,
Balanced on her zwings of light,
Hovered in the purple night,
Ere she sought her ocean 7tes?
In the chambers of the West.”
Compare also
“The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep :
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows ;
Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed sleep.’
(Stanzas, Forman, i. 24.)
“When weary meteor lamps repose” (R. and H., 551.)
“Some star of many a one
That climbs and wanders through steep night.” ---
(Prom., ii. 2, 14.
j
“Art thou pale for wearyness -
Cf climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth P” . . .
(To the Moon, Forman, ii. 225.
It would be possible to parallel the passage about
death and sleep from other modern poets—though only
imperfectly—but The World's Wanderers is as remote
as anything can well be from modern thought and
Sentiment. Its imagery and its strange un-human pathos
32 SAHE/AA. V’’S AVA TURE-POAZ 7TR V.
are alike primitive and elemental. The same sympathy
with the heavenly bodies in their wanderings through
space has been expressed by some of the older Greek lyric
poets, but the conception of the star's rays as wings can
hardly be paralleled outside of the Veda, where, as we
have seen (p. 4), the rays of the sun were regarded as
the limbs with which it moved through the sky.
There are some striking mythological elements in
To AWight, although the poem is otherwise quite modern
and subjective. Death is here the brother of Night, who
is the father of Sleep, the “sweet, filmy-eyed child.”
The image of Night emerging from the “misty Eastern
cave " of sunset, with which Shelley opens the poem, is
one which could have occurred to him alone of modern
poets. It is frequent in his poetry:
“Sun-rise from its Eastern caves.” (R. and H., 54.1.)
“The mists in their Eastern caves unrolled.” (A. and H., 1230.)
Compare also
“Like an autumnal night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear
The golden day.” (Adonais, 23.)
“When the night is left behind
In the deep East, dim and blind.”
.-- - (Izzzyitation, 62.)
In The World's Wanderers he asks the star, “In what
cavern of the night will thy pinions close now 2 ” The
same image recurs in the next stanza: “In what depth
of night or day seekest thou repose now 2° The
image of a cave is also used by Shelley to express
the idea of Source or cause, very strikingly in The
Cloud, 82:
“Out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb
I arise.” . . . .
Other examples are
“Those . . . . fair spirits
Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought.”
(Pront., i. I, 658.)
SA/E//.A. Y'S WA TURE-POETRY.
s
3
With which may be compared
- . . . . “The responses . . . .
Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul,
Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll.”
(Prom., i. I, 805.)
“Love . . . . like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being.”
. (Prom., 4, 378.)
The simile in the third stanza of The World's Wan-
derers—“like the world's rejected guest"—appears to
have been a favourite one of Shelley's, for it appears
again in To Night, where it is said of day that he
lingered “like an unloved guest.” -
The curious use of the word “nest" in The World’s
Wanderers and The Bay of Lerici, which reappears in
The Recollection :
“The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home,”
is perhaps a reminiscence of Wordsworth's
p p .
“The sun is quenched, the sea-fowl gone to rest,
And the wild storm hath somewhere found a nest.”
In the Veda, the waters, let loose by Indra (p. 36), are
compared to birds flying to their nests. -
It is interesting to compare Milton's description of
the moon in L’Allegro, 66, with the passages quoted
above, and to observe how essentially different his
treatment is, in spite of some resemblance in detail :
“To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heavens' wide pathless way,
And oft as if her head she bowed,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.”
The leading idea of The World's Wanderers appears
also in Shakespere's Venus and Adonis:
“Look, the world’s comforter, with weary gait,
His day's hot task hath ended in the west.”
34 SHEL/LAE Y'S WATURE-POETR V.
One of the most primitively mythological of Shelley's
shorter poems is that on the dawn (Prom., 4, 1), already
alluded to (p. 30): -
“The pale stars are gone !
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.”
In the fragment Insecurity (Forman, ii. 266) the dawn
itself is compared to a fawn:
“The young and dewy dawn
Bold as an unhunted fawn
Up the windless heaven has gone.”
In the Veda the stars flee away like thieves before
the all-seeing Sun, and the comparison of the Sun to a
wolf or other ravenous animal is frequent in savage
mythologies. .
Otherwise Shelley's sun-mythology has little that is
distinctive about it. Such an epithet as the “all-seeing ”
sun is the common property of all poets, from those of
the Veda down to Shakespere and Shelley. Shelley's
comparison of the sun's rays to “shafts” (L. and C.,
3, 20; Prome., iii. 3, II:8) is also common mythological
and poetic property. -
The slight prominence given to the sun in Shelley's
mythology, as compared with its overwhelming pre-
dominance in all primitive mythologies is a characteristic
result of the changed feelings with which we moderns
regard nature. The old half-utilitarian associations
which made sunshine and daylight the most beautiful
and glorious of all phenomena, and night and darkness
the most terrible and hideous—associations still retained
by Shakespere (p. 13)—has given way to a more refined,
more dilettante way of looking at nature, which ignores
everything but the beautiful, and finds beauty in the
awe and mystery of darkness as well as in the splendour
of light. This reaction is carried so far, that a modern
poet is able to reverse the old contrast, and to turn
SAIA. L/LA. Y'S WA TUA’Aº-AO E 7AC V. 35
with a sigh of relief from the garish day to the “star-
inwrought” night. -
To a modern poet the setting of the sun calls forth
none of those painful emotions with which it was asso-
ciated in the minds of our savage ancestors, but rather
suggests peace, and rest from the toils of the day; and
so a modern poet is able to give himself up without
reserve to the enjoyment of
“Sunset and its gorgeous ministers.”
In the Veda, which contains whole books of hymns to
the dawn, there is not a single description of Sunset.
Even in Chaucer! and Shakespere there do not seem to
be any descriptions of sunset.” In Shelley's poetry, on
the other hand, the sunsets get the upper hand.
Shelley's love of cloudland has often been dwelt on.
To him the clouds are the daughters of the sun and
the sea :
“Those fair daughters,
The clouds, of Sun and Ocean, who have blended
The colours of the air since first extended
It cradled the young world.” (L. and C., 2, 5.)
“Earth and Heaven,
The Ocean and the Sun, the clouds their daughters.”
(Z. and C., 9, 35.)
* “Parfourmed hath the sonne his ark diourne;
No lenger may the body of him soiourne
On thorisonte, as in that latitude.
Night with his mantel, that is derk, and rude,
Gan oversprede themesperie aboute” . . .
(Cant. Tales, Merchant, 388–392, ed. Tyrwhitt.)
* Dramatic poetry would not admit of elaborate ones. Those
that occur are slight. Take two :
“The weary sun hath made a golden set,
And, by the bright track of his fiery car,
Gives signal of a goodly day to-morrow.”
(Rich. //7. IV. iii. 19—21.)
“O setting sun,
As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,
So in his red blood Cassius' day is set:
The sun of Rome is set.” (Jul. Casar, V. iii. 63.)
36 SHE//A Y'S WA 7TURE-POETR Y.
He compares them to sheep, whose shepherd is the
wind : - -
“Multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind.” (Prom., ii. 1, 145.)
In the Veda the rain-clouds are regarded as cows
with heavy udders.
Shelley is fond of comparing clouds to rocks and
mountains :
“When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon.” (Summer and Winter, Forman, ii. 209.)
“Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
Or to some toppling promontory proud
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire | " (Hellas, 957.)
“She would often climb
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack
Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime.”
(W. of 4, 55.)
Such comparisons are common to poets of all ages.
The very word “cloud" itself originally meant “rock,” a
meaning which it kept as late as the thirteenth century.
The Old English c/ild was evidently first applied to the
heavy cumulus, and then to clouds generally.
In the Veda, cloud-mythology plays a prominent part.
The rain-clouds—personified as cows—are supposed to
be shut up in the rocky mountains of cloud by the
demons of drought—the “driers,” the “envelopers” or
“coverers,” the “throttlers” or “dragons,” the “misers,”
etc. The hero-god Indra slays the demons with his
thunderbolt, sets the waters free to flow in beneficent
streams over the parched earth below, demolishes the
“nine and ninety fortresses,” and drives out the cows
from the caves where they were hidden—with which
compare Shelley’s “caverns of rain.” - -
“The wings of the wind" is a familiar Old Testament
SHEZLE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. 37
metaphor, and is common in most mythologies. Shelley
employs it freely:
{{ Languid storms their pinions close.” (R. and H., 552.)
“Ye whirlwinds, who on poised wings hung mute 1” (Prom, 1,66)
“The noontide plumes of summer winds.” (Prom., ii. 1, 37.)
It is characteristic of the breadth of Shelley's imagi-
nation that it is as much at home in the depths of the
earth as among the clouds and stars. His is not—
like the Veda's—a purely aerial mythology. His restless
intellect strives, in his own words (Prom., 4, 279) to : -
“Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart;
Infinite mine of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline Columns poised
With vegetable silver overspread ;
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs
. . . The melancholy ruins .
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble .
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human . . . and over these,
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains,” . . . -
The same ideas are expressed with more concentration
in the Earth Spirit's speech in the The Unfinished Drama
(Forman, ii. IO3), which, although in form a close imita-
tion of the well-known lines which open Milton's Comus
—“Before the starry threshold of Jove's court my
mansion is . . . above the smoke and stir of this dim
spot, which men call earth’—is otherwise original:
“Within the silent centre of the earth
My mansion is ; where I have lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery -
Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world ;
Infinite depths of unknown elements . .
Massed into one impenetrable mask;
Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins
Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.
And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven,
I have wrought mountains, Seas, and waves, and clouds,
And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns
In the dark space of interstellar air.”
38 SHELLE V’S AWA TURE-POETRY.
This ideal subterranean landscape—which forms a
strange contrast to the ideal forest landscape in Alastor—
may help us to realise that gloomy Northern imagination
which gave birth to the dvergar, or dwarfs of Scandi-
navian mythology—those dark, mis-shapen beings,
malicious and revengeful, yet wise and helpful, skilled
above all in working metals.
Shelley was especially fascinated by those stupendous
manifestations of the earth's inner life—volcano and
earthquake, which latter he generally personifies:
“Yon volcano's flaming fountains.” (Prom., ii. 3, 3.)
“Is this the scene
Where their earthquake demon taught her young ruin P”
(Mont Blanc, 71.)
“The earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds,
When the rocks split and close again behind.”
(Prom. I, 38.)
“Springs of flame which burst
Where'er Swift earthquake stamps.” (Z. and C., 5, I.)
Shelley's personifications of fire and of night have
already been noticed incidentally (pp. IO, 27). His
personifications of winter (Sensitive Plant, 3, 94), of
death—whom, as we have seen (p. 30), he makes the
brother, sometimes of Sleep, sometimes of Night—and
of the different emotions and workings of the mind,
resemble those of other poets.
He gives wings (R. and H., 767; the Two Spirits,
Forman, ii. 207) and “lightning feet” (Prom., I, 734) to
desire. So also he calls dreams the “passion-winged
ministers of thought" (Adonais, 9). Compare Prom., iii.
3, 145,
“Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams,”
which was probably suggested by Milton's L'Allegro,
I46:
“And the waters murmuring . . .
Entice the dewy-winged Sleep.
And let some strange mysterious Dream
Wave at its wings, in aéry stream
Of lively portraiture displayed,
Softly on my eyelids laid.”
SHAE/L/LAE Y'S WATURE-POETRY. 39
Of all abstractions the one oftenest personified by
poets of all periods is Time. Even the Vedic poets
show the beginnings of this personification. The ab-
stract conception of time seems to have been realised
most clearly by them in the unfailing recurrence of the
dawn. They contrast the eternal youth and beauty of
the dawn—that fair maiden brilliant with gold and
jewels—and the ruthless cruelty with which she “wears
away the generations of men.”
The same idea of the cruelty of time is much dwelt
on by Shakespere. In Sonnet xvi. he calls him “this
bloody tyrant Time”; in Lucrece he calls him “mis-
shapen Time,” “injurious shifting Time.” But in another
place in the same poem he dwells on the more favourable
side of Time's character : “Time's glory is . . . to un-
mask falsehood, and bring truth to light . . . to cheer the
ploughman with increaseful crops.” -
Shelley's favourite comparison of time is to a sea or
r1Ver :
“Behind Terror and Time conflicting drove and bore,
On their tempestuous flood the shrieking wretch from shore . . .
That Ocean’s wrecks . . . the ghosts which to and fro
Glide o'er its dim and gloomy strand.” (L. and C., 2, 6.)
“Time's fleeting river.” (Zifferty, 6.)
This comparison is worked out with great force in
Time (For man, ii. 232), where the “flood” is again per-
sonified as a howling monster, which latter is thus an
indirect personification of time itself.
“ Unfathomable Sea whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow,
Claspest the limits of mortality
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore ;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea P”
The question, Why should we have to go back to the
Veda for parallels to Shelley's treatment of nature, is
easily answered. Shelley, though a poet, looked at nature
with the eyes of a scientific investigator. So did the
primitive Aryans. Brought as they were face to face with
4O SHELLEY'S WATURE-POETR Y
nature, and surrounded by mysterious powers of good and
evil, the first condition of existence for them was a know-
ledge of the laws by which those powers are governed.
When the first elements of this knowledge had been
achieved, civilisation advanced chiefly on political and
social lines, and intellectual energy was absorbed more
and more by literature. Then, after a long torpor, men
awakened to the conviction that their future progress
would depend mainly on their further advance in the
knowledge of nature. Hence it is that extremes meet,
and that the modern lover of nature—whether as poet
or man of science—feels himself in some respects nearer
to the primitive barbarism of the Veda than to the
scholars of Greece and Rome, or even his own Chaucer
and Shakespere. - . -
We may now turn to a characteristic feature of
Shelley's nature-poetry—his treatment of light and
colour. * , t $.
Shelley's love of light has been well brought out by
Mr. Symonds, who remarks –“It has been said Shelley,
as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque ; and
there is much in Prometheus to justify this opinion.
The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker
shadows are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems
to be continually radiated from the objects to which he
looks: and in this radiation of many-coloured lights the
outline itself is apt to become a little misty.” It will be
worth while to follow his treatment of light more into
detail. -
We should expect Shelley to be keenly sensitive to the
effects of light in motion. The following are pictures of
flashing and intermittent light: -
“Ocean's dazzling spray . . . .
Spangles the wind with lamp-like waterdrops.”
- (Proºn., ii. 3, 30.)
“As the bare green hill,
When some soft cloud vanishes in rain,
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky.” (Prom , 4, 182.)
“As in a brook, fretted with little waves,
By the light airs of spring—each ripplet makes
A many-sided mirror for the sun.” -
- (Or/heus, 59; Forman, ii. 220.)
SAHAEL/LAE Y'S AVA TURE-POETRY. 4. I
The second passage may well be a reminiscence of
AEschylus' “Innumerable laughter of ocean.”
Compare also the following passages from Shelley's
Letters:
“The deep glens, which are filled with the
Flashing light of the waterfalls.” (Forman, iv. 3.)
“The sea-water, furiously agitated by the wind,
Shone with sparkles like stars.” (Forman, iv. II.)
Shelley loves also to depict the alternations of light
and shade: J
“And 'twas delight
To see far off the sunbeams chase the shadows.”
(Z. and C., 12, 36.)
“The path that wound
The vast and knotted trees around,
Through which slow shades were wandering.”
(R. and H., IO2.)
“The sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below.”
(Prom., I, 27.)
Compare Fragments on Beauty, 2 :
“The shadows of the clouds are spotting the
Bosoms of the hills.”
A similar effect is described in Alastor, 3 Io:
“The wind swept strongly from the shore,
Blackening the waves.”
Shelley's use of the words shade and shadow is often
peculiar. These words with him do not necessarily
imply darkness, but simply diminished light. This is
clearly shown in the song of the Third Spirit in Prome-
theus (I, 732):
“When a Dream with plumes of flame
To his pillow hovering came, . . .
And the world awhile below
Wore the shade its lustre made.”
As a Dream or Spirit could not cast a snade, the word
must here signify the dispersed, diminished lustre of the
“plumes of flame.”
42 SA/E/L/A. Y'S WA TUA’A.AOE 7'R P.
In Alastor, I23:
“When the moon
Filled the mysterious hall with floating shades,”
shades may, of course, have its usual meaning, but the
passage would be more forcible if we suppose that here,
too, shades means “shades of light” or “faint, uncer-
tain light.” When the moon rises, it is more natural to
think of its light than of the shade cast by that light.
Compare:
“The dim and horned moon hung low, and poured
A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge
That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist
Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank
Wan moonlight even to fulness.” (Alastor, 602.)
“Through a dark chasm to the east, in the long perspective of a
portal glittering with the unnumbered riches of the subterranean
world, shone the broad moon, pouring in one yellow and unbroken
stream her horizontal beams.” (Assassins.)
When Shelley calls the sea “heaven's ever-changing
shadow,” he includes the bright reflection of the sky as
well as the shadows of dark clouds: shadow, in fact, is
here equivalent to “reflection.”
Shelley has a keen eye for atmospheric effects of light
and colour:
“I [the air] had clothed
Since Earth uprose
Its wastes in colours not their own.” (Prom., I, 82.)
“The bright air o'er every shape did weave intenser hues.”
(Laon and Cythma, 3, 3.)
“As from the all-surrounding air
The earth takes hues obscure and strange
When storm and earthquake linger there.”
(Rosa/ind and Helen, 729.)
“Two . . wings . . dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere.”
(Witch of Atlas, 37.)
“Where the air is no prism . . .
And the cavern crags wear no radiance of heaven.”
(Prom., ii. 3, 74.)
“The clouds . . . who have blended
The colours of the air since first extended,
It cradled the young world.” (Zaon and Cythma, 2, 5.)
SAHAE/L/A2 Y’S AWA TUA’Aº-AOE 7 R V. 43
“Like joy which riseth up,
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The deserts of our life.” (Prom., ii. 1, 10.)
Compare the following passages from the Letters:
“From the boat the effect of the scenery was inexpressibly
delightful. The colours of the water and the air breathe over all
things here [Baiae] the radiance of their own beauty.” (Forman
iv. I7.)
“The water of this pool . . is as transparent as the air,
so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem as if trembling in
the light of noonday.” (Forman, iv. 8)
Shelley gives us some beautiful pictures of light seen
through foliage:
“The green light which shifting overhead
Some tangled bower of vines around me shed.”
(Z. and C., 2, I.)
“The stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue.”
(Sensitive Plant, I, 41.)
“ Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noon-tide kindles through the woven leaves.”
(Promi., ii. 2, 75.)
He gives us a different picture of transmitted light in :
“The hill
Looks hoary through the white electric rain.”
(Letter to M. G., I23.)
But the most elaborate and vivid of Shelley's light-
pictures are those which deal with reflection. In his
Fragments on Beauty he asks:
“Why is the reflection in that canal more beautiful than the
objects it reflects P The colours are more vivid, and yet blended
with greater harmony; the opening from within into the soft and
tender colours of the distant wood, and the intersection of the
mountain lines, surpass and misrepresent truth.”
The following are examples of reflected light:
“He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom.” (Prom., I, 743.)
44 SAHA: //A. Y'S WA TUA’Aº-POE 7 R V.
“The ... mountains . . . from icy spires
Of sunlike radiance fling the dawn.” (Prom., ii. 3, 28.)
“Upon that rock a mighty column stood
And when the shades of evening lie
On earth and ocean, its curved summits cast
The sunken daylight far through the aërial waste.”
(Z. and C., 3, 12.)
Of reflected colour:
“As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather . . the aërial crimson falls,
Flushing her cheek.” (Prom., 1,467.)
But this may possibly be an example of transmitted
colour.
Pictures of objects reflected in water are very numerous
in Shelley's poetry, especially in Alastor; there are many
examples in Prometheus also, and, indeed, throughout
his poetry generally.
“Her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O'er a dim well, move, though the star reposes.”
(Z. and C, 6, 33.)
“As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.”
(Prome, 4, 193)
“His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.”
(Alastor, 200.)
“I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake
Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined
I saw two halcyons clinging downward
© tº and in the deep there lay
Those lovely forms imaged as in the sky.”
(Prom., iii. 4, 80.)
“Banks whose yellow flowers
For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes
Reflected in the crystal calm.” (A lastor, 406.)
“The rivulet . . through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept,
Reflecting every herb and drooping bud
That overhung its quietness.” (A/astor, 500.)
“The pools where winter rains
Image all their roof of leaves.”
(Invitation, 50.)
SAHE/AA. Y'S AWA TURAE-POETR Y. 45
“The pools . . . each seemed as 'twere a little sky . .
In which the forests grew as in the upper air.”
(Recollection, 53.)
The most elaborate is that in Alastor, 457 :
“Beyond, a well,
Dark, gleaming and of most translucent wave,
Images all the woven boughs above,
And each depending leaf, and every speck
Of azure sky, darting between their chasms;
Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,
Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon,
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon.”
In Prometheus, ii. 1, 17, two of Shelley's favourite
elements—reflection in water and changing, intermittent
light and colour—are combined in the most beautiful
of all his dawn-pictures:
“The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it : now it wanes : it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air :
'Tis lost and through yon peaks of cloudlike Snow
The roseate sun-light quivers.”
Wordsworth's contrast of intermittence and per-
manence of reflection in his description of Peele
Castle :
“Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there ;
It trembled, but it never passed away,”
evidently impressed Shelley, for he repeats this image—
so characteristic of Wordsworth, so uncharacteristic of
himself—in his own poetry:
“Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay . . .
It trembled, but it never passed away.”
(Evening, Forman, ii. 260.)
46. SA/E/C/LAE Y'S WATURE-POETRY.
Shelley's love of brightness is shown in his identifica-
tion of colour with light: *. -
“Budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms, -
Which star the winds with points of coloured light,
As they rain through them.” (Prom., iii. 3, I37.)
An expansion of Alastor, 484 :
- “Soft mossy lawns,
. . . Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms
Minute, yet beautiful.”
Like most modern poets, Shelley has a strong sense of
colour-contrast :
“Orange and lemon groves . . . whose golden globes contrasted
with the white walls and dark green leaves.” (Zetters, Forman,
iv. I9.)
- º “Bright golden globes
Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven.”
$ (Prom., iii. 3, 139.)
“Those bright leaves, whose decay,
Red, yellow, or ethereally pale, -
Rivals the pride of summer.” (Alastor, 584.)
“When red morn made paler the pale moon.”
- (Alastor, I37.)
“When the waves beneath the starlight flee
O'er the yellow sands with silver feet.”
(R. and H., 782.)
He has the old Celtic contrast of blood and snow :
“Blood stains the Snowy foam of the tumultuous deep.”
- - (Z. and C., I, II.)
If we turn now to Shelley's predecessors, we find—as
we should expect—Colour-contrast fully developed in
Milton : -
“Russet lawns and fallows gray.
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.”
Another Puritan poet—Andrew Marvell—has antici-
pated the first-quoted colour-contrast of Shelley in his
Bermudas :
“He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night.”
SHELLE Y'S WATURE-POETR Y. 47
I have not any examples of colour-contrast in Chaucer
or Shakespere to hand, but they could no doubt easily
be found. -
Milton seems to have the first examples of transmitted
and interrupted light. The two classical passages are
in L'Allegro and // Penseroso :
“Many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade.”
“Storied window richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.”
But I cannot recall any examples of reflected light in
Milton. I have noted one in Shakespere :
“When Phoebe doth behold
Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with silver pearl the bladed grass.”
Even Wordsworth's pictures of reflected light are not
remarkable either for elaborateness or beauty:
“Let . . . the swan on still St. Mary's lake
Float double, swan and shadow.”
“And lo these waters, steeled
By breezeless air to smoothest polish, yield
A vivid repetition of the stars.”
The poetry of
“Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there ;
It trembled, but it never passed away,”
lies rather in the thought than the picture itself.
The following are examples of Wordsworth's treatment
of transmitted light:
“And while those lofty poplars gently wave
Their tops, between them comes and goes a sky
Bright as the glimpses of eternity.”
“How delicate the leafy veil
Through which yon house of God
Gleams mid the peace of this deep dell !”
He has one beautiful picture of changing colour:
“He spoke of plants that hourly change
Their blossoms through a boundless range
Of intermingling hues ; with budding, fading, faded flowers
They stand, the wonder of the bowers,
From morn to evening dews.”
48 SAHAE/./A. V’S AWA TURAE-POETRY.
This description seems however to be partly a remi.
niscence of some passage in a book of travels. The
third line evidently suggested part of Shelley's descrip-
tion in Prom., iii. 3, 137 (p. 46, above).
Of all English poets the one whose treatment of light
bears the closest resemblance to Shelley's is Coleridge.
“The smoke from cottage chimneys, tinged with light,
Rises in columns.” (The Picture.)
“The sea . . . . the slip of smooth clear blue
Betwixt two isles of purple shadow.” (Zimetree Bower.)
“Like a summer shower,
Whose dews fling sunshine from the noontide bower.”
(The Visionary Hoffe.)
“Through my half-closed eyelids I behold
The Sunbeams dance, like diamonds on the main.”
- (Eolian Harð.)
“The roaring dell o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the midday sun.”
(Lêmefree Bozºyer.)
“. . . . In the wood
. . . . Mid the chequer-work of light and shade.”
(Æemorse, 2, I.)
The last evidently a reminiscence of Milton’s “chequered
shade.” ---
Coleridge's affinity to Shelley is shown especially in
his descriptions of transmitted light and colour:
“And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleams through thy bright transparence 1 ° (River Offer.)
“The upright flax,
When through its half-transparent stalks at eve
The level sunset glimmers with green light.”
- “Pale beneath the blaze [of the sun.]
Hung the transparent foliage.” (Limefree Bower.)
And in his elaborate pictures of reflection in water :
“The woodbine bower,
Whose rich flowers, swinging in the morning breeze,
Over their dim, fast-moving shadows hung,
Making a quiet image of disquiet
In the Smooth, Scarcely-moving river-pool.” (A ee/sake.)
“And thou too, dearest Stream no pool of thine
. . . . did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe,
The face, the form divine . . . . .
SAHE/AA. Y'S WA TURE-POETRY. 49
The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks
The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow . . . .
Scatters them on the pool . Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world So fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shapes the other . . . .
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror; and behold
Each wild-flower on the marge inverted there,
And there the half-uprooted tree—but where,
O where, the virgin's Snowy arm, that leaned
On its bare branch P” (The Picture.)
These two passages may well have suggested Words-
worth's favourite image of trembling but persistent
reflection. Coleridge has another very elaborate picture
of reflection in Remzorse, 2, I :
“There’s a lake in the midst,
And round its banks tall wood that branches over,
And makes a kind of faery forest grow
Down in the water. At the further end
A puny cataract falls on the lake ;
And there, a curious sight | you see its shadow
For ever curling, like a wreath of smoke,
Up through the foliage of those faery trees.”
But Coleridge does not appear to have—any more
than Wordsworth or Milton—any examples of reflected
light or colour as distinguished from the reflection of
definite objects: Shelley's picture of the “lake-reflected
sun” illumining the “yellow bees in the ivy-bloom’
seems to be entirely his own.
It can hardly be a mere chance—this exceptional
development of the sense of light in the two most intel-
lectual poets of their age. Shelley himself associates
light with intellect—remarkably enough, with especial
reference to Coleridge—in the Letter to Maria Gisborne,
2O2 :
“You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre, and the pure,
Intense radiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
• A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.”
5O . SA/EZ/E Y'S WA 7'URE-POETR Y.
This association has, indeed, stamped itself on the
language of everyday life, which contrasts a “bright”
mind with a “dull” one, and calls the age of ignorance
“the Dark Ages.”
The similarity between the two poets in their treatment
of light does not seem to be the result of imitation on the
part of the younger poet: the agreement is in spirit, not
in detail. The love of light in Coleridge and Shelley
sprang naturally from their intellectual temperament,
and was fostered by their surroundings. Coleridge
learnt to observe and love the effects of transmitted
and reflected light in the shady lanes, and by the rivu-
lets and pools of his native Devon, while Shelley learnt
the same lessons in the woods of Marlow and in his
boat on the Thames,
jº y ST-
RICHARD CLAY AND SONs,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
NOTES ON “THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE."
BY JOHN TODHUNTER, M.D.
(Read before the SHELLEY SOCIETY, February 9th, 1887.)
PERHAPS I may be allowed to introduce the present
paper on The 7'riumph of Life, with a brief extract from
my own Study of Shelley, as I wish what I have to say
this evening to be taken as an addendum to the rather
unsatisfactory notice of the poem to be found in that
volume.
“The poem,” I have there said, “is nothing less than
the epic of human life—the tragic story of the Prome-
thean struggle of the Spirit of Man against the dis-
integrating forces of the world—only begun indeed, but
begun on Such a scale, and with such a mastery of
handling, that the fragment stands, like the torso of a
Phidian god, the revelation of regions new and fair in the
world of man's creation.”
The Triumph of Life was, as we know, the last
important work on which Shelley was engaged at the
time of his premature death, the historical drama, King
Charles J., of which such remarkable fragments have
been rescued from his note-books by Mr. Rossetti,
having been thrown aside for this great philosophical
poem. In The Triumph of Zife and King Charles /. we
have the first-fruits of the mature genius of Shelley—
and both are unfortunately but fragments. The un-
finished drama stands in some such relation to the
unfinished epic as 7%e Cenci to Promet/aeus (Vitóound ;
44 AWOTES OW “THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.”
but even The Cenci scarcely foreshadows the easy strength
of style and the breadth and variety of character-drawing
in King Charles /., while the Prometheus is, in its whole
method of regarding the problems of man's destiny,
distinctly immature as compared with The Triumph of
Zife. In these last two poems Shelley touches ground
in the actual world, and with no unsure foot, as he never
did before.
As a mere piece of poetical composition, The Triumph
of Zife is a masterpiece among Shelley's longer poems.
For sustained majesty of verse, concentration of diction,
and a certain Dantesque intensity of vision, it stands
alone among his works. If we compare the terga rāma
of this poem with that of Prince Athanase, it will be
seen what progress the poet has made in mere crafts-
manship. For imaginative description, combined with
subtle and Sustained music, it would be hard to match
the prelude. Every word seems to shine and palpitate
in the rare atmosphere of the verse. The very spirit of
a glorious dawn vitalises the whole.
In the vision which this prelude so solemnly intro-
duces, the poet sees a dusty public way thronged with
a great concourse of people. This no doubt typifies
human life in this world, as opposed to the ideal life
typified in those
“fountains, whose melodious din
Out of their mossy cells for ever burst,”
or actual as opposed to possible life. The multitude,
deaf to the music of these fountains,—
“Some flying from the thing they feared, and some
Seeking the object of another's fear,”
and leaving the true nutriment of life to hunt after vain
shadows— -
“Pursued their serious folly as of old.”
Then follows the fine description of the entry of the
chariot of Life — -
“A cold glare intenser than the moon,
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light
The Sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon
When on the sunlit limits of the night
AVO 7 FS OW “ TA/E TR/UMPA/ OF 7./FAZ.” 45
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might,
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark aether from her infant’s chair,
So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood, and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb;
And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape
Was bent, a dim and faint aetherial gloom
Tempering the light.”
This personage, compared by Shelley to the “ghost
of its dead mother ” borne by the young moon, is Life,
phenomena/ life, the “vegetable life” of Blake, which
shuts the soul into the dungeon of the body, with the
five senses for loopholes of Outlook.
Who the charioteer may be who guides “the wonder-
winged team ” which draws the car of Life is not so easy
to come at. He has four faces with banded eyes, and
possibly these lines from Hellas may throw some light
on him :—
“ The world’s eyeless charioteer,
Destiny is hurrying by.”
The passage which follows is certainly obscure, pro-
bably corrupt —
‘‘Little profit brings
Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,
Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere
Of all that is, has been, or will be done.”
Mr. Rossetti's suggestion that “that with banded
eyes” is equivalent to the charioteer is ingenious, and
would give the sense that if not blind the charioteer
(Destiny, or whatever it may be) could transcend the
phenomenal sphere. It may be interesting to note
that the moon is here, as in Epipsychidiom, a type of the
phenomenal, the Sun of the ideal; but here the sun is
eclipsed by the moon.
Whatever be the interpretation of particular passages,
the general sense of the extant fragment of 7%e Triumph
of Zäſe is clear enough ; though what the entire scope of
the completed poem would have been is somewhat diffi-
cult to conjecture. The great interest of the fragment
46 AWO TAES O/V “ 7TP/AE 7/C/UMAEA OF Z/PA.”
lies in the fact that, so far as it goes, it is distinctly
pessimistic in tone, as no other poem of Shelley's is.
In the cycle of earlier poems treating of man's destiny
which culminates in Prometheus, the ideal is represented
as finally triumphant over the real. The victory is a
comparatively easy one, as custom and superstition are
supposed to be the great enemies which hold man's soul
in chains. Once convince his reason and arouse his will,
and his chains are burst for ever. The primitive vital
force of the golden age of Nature comes back with a
rush, like a river long dammed up resuming its ancient
channel. Shelley has not even learned, with Words-
worth, that—
“Custom lies upon us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life,”
and scarcely surmised that there may be a bond upon
us deeper still—not only almost, but quite as deep
as life.
In The Triumph of Life he has learnt from experience,
and got a deeper insight into the nature of evil. He
takes Rousseau as his guide and the interpreter of
his vision—the Rousseau of the Confessions, bearing
the scars of real life, not merely the philospher of
roseate dreams of the regeneration of man. He takes
him because he is an idealist, but an idealist disillusioned.
The tragedy of idealism is finely expressed in Rous-
seau's melancholy reply to the question, “Who are those
chained to the car 2'-
“The wise,
The great, the unforgotten,-they who wore
Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light,
Signs of thought’s empire over thought—their lore
Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might
Could not repress the mystery within,
And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night
Caught them ere evening.”
Yet it is evident that Rousseau does not regard his
own failure as absolute:—
“If I have been extinguished yet there rise
A thousand beacons from the spark I bore.”
He contrasts his own fate and that of Voltaire, whom
AVO 7 AES OAV “ TA/A2 TA’/UMAPA/ OF 7./FAZ.” 47
he apparently classes with “hoary anarchs and dema-
gogues” because he was a spirit of negation —
“For in the battle Life and they did wage
She remained conqueror. I was overcome
By my own heart alone, which neither age
Nor tears, nor infamy, nor now the tomb,
Could temper to its object.”
This acknowledgment that some defect in himself, not
merely in his outward circumstances, caused his defeat,
is noteworthy.
The account which he gives of his youth passed in the
presence of a spirit who makes the phenomenal world
seem like a dream, is full of Shelley's loveliest poetry.
She hovers above the waters of a rivulet, whose murmurs
make a music which lulls the aching of the soul in the
presence of evil, so that even Shelley himself would
“forget thus vainly to deplore
Ills which if ills can find no cure from thee.”
She is a vision of the Asia of Prometheus Unóound, of
that goddess revealed through Nature, who is archetypal
Nature—the spirit of the Cosmos, or Eternal Beauty.
From her Rousseau demands a key to the riddle
Of life :
“Show whence I came, and where I am, and why,”
and for answer she gives him to drink of her crystal
cup. He drinks, and she gradually fades, but for a
while remains as a dim presence, more felt than seen,
even after the car of Life enters with stunning music,
and draws Rousseau into the circle of its influence, to
leave him the gnarled and withered thing that Shelley
finds him. His description of the haunting of the world
with spectral forms—phantoms of dead and dying
personalities, which persist as ideas, customs, dogmas,
Superstitions, is splendid.
“The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air
Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers
A flock of vampyre bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian isle.”
There is one passage in this description which is
rather obscure. After speaking of the phantoms which
48 AVO 7TES OAV “ THAE TR/U///2// OF 7./A.A.”
haunt kings, priests, lawyers, statesmen, &c., Rousseau
goes on — -
“And others, like discoloured flakes of snow
On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,
Fell and were melted by the youthful glow
Which they extinguished; and like tears they were
A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained
In drops of sorrow.”
I take this to refer not merely to nuns, but to
other women whom an external code of morality,
which veils their real nature, compels to live, possibly
“lamenting some enforced chastity,” and certainly
stunted in spiritual and intellectual growth.
And this brings us back to that important passage,
in an earlier part of the poem, which deals with the
ravages wrought by love (or rather its false counterpart)
in the world. For, I take it, the description of the
dancing crowd, “tortured by their agonising pleasure,”
distinctly points to sensual love, the Venus Pandemos,
as “the fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure was soothed
by mischief since the world begun.” She is taken as
the supreme type of those lower appetites, the gratifi-
cation of which subjects mankind to the yoke of Life.
Maidens and youths meet and mingle in the dance,
and fall senseless ; and the car passes over them,
leaving them
“Old men and women foully disarrayed.”
Disillusion and despair or apathy are the result of
their indulgence in this “agonising pleasure.” That
Shelley includes marriage of even the higher type as
falling far short of ideal love is evident from the whole
drift of Epipsychidion, in which Mary is the incarnation
of respectable affectionate domestic union. Such union
does not satisfy the poetic imagination, because it lacks
the fervour and exaltation of passion. How far this
ideal is capable of realisation does not concern the
idealist. His business is persistently to demand and
attempt impossibilities. Nothing less than a perfect
union of body, Soul, and Spirit can satisfy him, and
therefore he demands it in what Byron calls “the nym-
pholepsy of a fond despair.” He turns from the lower
AWOTES ON “ TA/A, TA’/UMPA/ OF // FAE.” 49
forms in impatience and disgust—from the dull lust of
men and the dull chastity or good-natured self-surrender
of women—from all the phases of abortive desire which
rend our hearts with sickening excitement, or drug
them into torpid sloth—with a cry for some great
transfiguring passion which would be indeed the life
of life.
The eloquent words of Emilia Viviani, which I give in
her Own Sonorous Italian, give utterance to this disgust
and this cry, which are the burden of modern woman-
hood and the main burden of Shelley's poetry —
“Ma quanto tu sei profanato, O Amore quali oltraggi fanno i figli
della terra al tuo nome divino. Sovente agli affetti i piu illeciti, alle azioni
le piu vituperose, al delitto (oh attentatoesecrando) all’istesso delitto si da
il nome diamore, si Osa dire che egli lo ha cagionato. Ahi empi ! Sacri-
leghi ! inaudita bestemmia voi che non potete risenterlo, non comprendete
neppure ció che la parola amore significhi. Amore vuol di virtu, amore
ispira virtù ed e la sorgente delle azioni le piu magnanime, della vera
felicità. Amore é un fuoco, che brucciando non distrugge, una mista di
piacere e di pena, una pena che porta piacere, un ESsenza eterna, Spirituale,
Infinita, pura, celestiale. Questo si è il vero, il solo amore, quel senti-
mento che Soltanto put reimpire intieramente il vuoto dell’ anima, quel
vuoto Orribile peggior della morte.”
Shelley is right in regarding love as one of the most
potent of Spiritual forces—a force which must regenerate
or destroy Society. The right relationship between the
sexes is by far the most important of social problems
with which the great revolution, into the vortex of
which we are hastening, has to deal. The next century
will be the century of women, and it depends mainly
upon them whether the relaxation of the marriage bond
which is inevitable is to result in a mere sexual orgie, or
in Something like the higher union of which Shelley
sings. For men the time has come when they must
learn a new lesson in self-control or cease to be men.
In the revolt against the old morality of restriction,
in which
“Priests with black gowns,
Were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars
Our joys and desires,”
much cant is talked nowadays about the evil of
asceticism ; but without asceticism there can be no
progress. Asceticism is the strait gate by which we
50 AWOTES OW “ 7 HAE TRIUMPA/ OF LIAEAE.”
must enter the kingdom—not the kingdom itself, but
the gate. Self-control may be a poor creature in itself,
but it is the nurse of all noble passion. But beside self-
control we need an immense increase of that imaginative
sympathy between men and women which is already
springing up. Love speaks through each lover in a
tongue more or less unknown to the other, and needs an
interpreter. There is a pathetic ring in Mary Wollstone-
craft's words to Imlay, “You must appeal to my senses
through my imagination—with you, I fear it is
different.”
In conclusion I must again ask you to excuse a
quotation from my own book, as it expresses what
I feel as to the probable scope of The Triumph of Life
had it ever been completed.
“The poem ends abruptly with the grand query :
‘Then what is life 2'' I cried. What the answer would
have been, and how far it would have been the true
one, Shelley has never returned to tell us. That the
apparently unredeemed despair of this early portion of
his Epic of Man would have had some more hopeful
sequel; that The 7 riumph of Life would have been no
mere triumph of that lower life which is death, may be
inferred from the whole tenour of his writings. Perhaps
Some vision of the divine Love might have appeared to
irradiate the gloom of this mortal world. Rousseau
says that the bat-like Swarm of personal emanations
or phantom ideas was
‘‘ ‘A wonder worthy of the rhyme
Of him who from the lowest depths of hell,
Thro’ every paradise, and through all glory,
Love led serene, and who returned to tell
The world of hate and awe the wondrous story
How all things are transfigured except Love.’
“We are indeed made to feel, with Prometheus, that
“all hope is vain but love. If love be not the aspira-
tion of the human soul toward Some vital spirit of the
universe ; if it be not the earnest of something “eternal
in the heavens which faileth not, then life is indeed
“a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.” We are but the slaves of the harlot Pleasure
or the prisoners of the stern jailor Duty.” r
3.
l.
SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD,
A Lecture delivered to the SHELLEY SoCIETY, on Wednesday, October 12th,
- 1887, by DR. R. “GARNETT.
SHELLEY undoubtedly possessed every quality necessary
to constitute a perfect hero of romance, and it is a matter
of some surprise that writers of fiction have not hitherto
made more use of him. It is far from improbable that
he will still figure in many works of imagination, but if so,
it will probably be as the centre of ideal groups widely
different from the actual environment of his life. The time
when his real history could be made the subject of a novel
has gone by, the real incidents of his life are too well
known for the romancer to tamper with, even if, which
is not the case—he could hope by so doing to render
them more romantic. There was a time of twilight,
when they were so obscure or variously related as to
invest a true history with some of the prerogatives of
fiction. It was then that a man of genius, whose own
career, if less adventurous than Shelley's, was even more
exceptional, essayed to shadow the poet forth to the public
through the medium of a romance. This was no less a
person than Lord Beaconsfield ; and it is a matter of con-
siderable interest to ascertain how he performed his task,
and what qualifications he possessed in the shape of
special sympathy or special information. A further in-
quiry worth making is how far his study of Shelley
reacted upon this remarkable man himself, and what
traces, if any, it has left in his writings.
It must at first sight seem a visionary endeavour to
establish any sort of affinity between Shelley and Lord
Beaconsfield. The differences between the characters
of the two men are so real and palpable that they
cast the actual though partial resemblance entirely
\
X.
; : \
SHEL/A. Y. AND LORD BEACOMSFIELD. 103
into the shade. The dissimilarity of their respective
careers is so great that it appears useless to look for
any likeness. We do not sufficiently remember that
Shelley's was merely the beginning of a career, and that,
though nothing could have prevented Lord Beaconsfield
from being a distinguished man, the particular kind of dis-
tinction he attained might have been metamorphosed by
circumstances. If the elder Disraeli had not forsaken
the faith of his fathers, the younger Disraeli would not
have entered Parliament until far advanced in middle life,
when the Corn Law question had been solved, and there
would have been no leap to power for him from the pros-
trate body of Sir Robert Peel, as the fox sprang out of
the well on the goat's shoulders. Debarred from practical
politics, Disraeli might have given free course to those
revolutionary tendencies of his nature which the necessi-
ties of political life suppressed, and been famous as the
keen, steady, and ruthless assailant of many things which,
as matters turned out, his destiny enlisted him to defend.
Shelley, on his part, would very probably have entered
Parliament if he had lived to the period of the Reform Bill,
and though he could no more have been a great parlia-
mentary tactician than Disraeli could have been a great
poet, he would have been equally eminent as an orator,
his parliamentary career would have been distinguished
by just that persistent indomitable resolution which made
Disraeli what it would never have made Shelley. If the
ideals of the two men seem at first sight almost antag-
onistic, there is one very important point in which they
coincide. Which of the heroines of modern fiction would
Shelley have most admired 2 We learn from Peacock
that his favourite among the heroines he did know was
Brockden Brown's Constantia Dudley; and the same quali-
ties which fixed his preference on her would have guided
him to the Theodora of Disraeli's Lothair. She is in truth
one of the noblest creations of modern novelists; she
impersonates all the traits which Shelley specially valued
in women; she is a maturer Cythna, a Cythna of flesh and
blood. What is equally to the point, she is her creator's
ideal also. Disraeli usually deals with his characters with
an easy familiarity and, except when he is depicting a .
personal enemy, with amiable indulgence. He sees their
to SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.
foibles, nevertheless, and takes care that these shall not
escape the reader. In Theodora alone there is nothing
of this. She has captivated her creator, as Galatea capti-
vated Pygmalion. There is not a single touch of satire
in the portrait ; it plainly represents the artist's highest
conception of woman, which proves to be essentially the
same as Shelley's. - -
More might be said on the points of contact between
the poet and the statesman, but time is short and
criticism long. We must confine ourselves to facts
capable of positive verification, and consider— ... •
(1) The external evidence of Disraeli's acquaintance
with Shelley. . * -
(2) Disraeli's estimate of Shelley as deduced from the
portrait of the latter which he has given in Veneţia.
(3) Traces of Shelley's influence on Disraeli's
writings. - . - -
There is one great contemporary poet whom Lord
Beaconsfield undoubtedly admired with enthusiasm. It
is known with what eagerness he exerted himself in his
latter days to promote the erection of a monument to
Byron. In so doing he both expressed a conviction and
discharged a debt. Byron had prompted Contaring
Fleming, a higher and purer ideal than Vivian Grey.
Byron had seen much in his Eastern wanderings, and
by his Hebrew Melodies had constituted himself in
some sort the laureate of Disraeli's own race. Whoever
is interested in Byron, is interested in Shelley, if only as
a member of the former's circle; and although Disraeli’s
knowledge of the real relations of the two poets was no
doubt defective, he knew enough to be aware that they
consorted as intellectual peers, But in truth he had
special means of information. Readers of Shelley's
letters will remember his account of Byron's valet, Tita
Falcieri, “a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard,
who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most
good-natured looking fellow I ever saw.” This person-
age had actually come into the service of the elder
Disraeli. He had remained with Byron until his
master's death, had then been taken into service by
Hobhouse, and successively passed into the households
of both the Disraelis, closing his life in the enjoyment of
#
SHELLE Y AND LORD BEACONSFIELD. IO5.
otium cum dignitate as messenger at the India Office.
He was with Shelley at Lerici, for a time, and is recorded
to have had many anecdotes of him ; and we may be sure
that his last master would not neglect such a source of
information when writing the remarkable novel of which
we are to speak immediately, in which Byron and
Shelley are introduced. One other Shelleyan influence
on Disraeli must not be omitted. This is Bulwer Lytton,
most intimately connected with Disraeli for several years
after the latter's return from the East. Bulwer's esti-
mate of Shelley, though too far in advance of the period
to be termed conventional, was still shallow and in-
adequate. “You evidently admire him as a poet,” he
wrote to Jefferson Hogg, “far more than I think criticism
warrants us in doing. He is great in parts; but, the
Cenci excepted, does not, in my opinion, effect a great
whole.” As editor of the AVeze, Monthly, however, Bulwer
was the means of giving Hogg's reminiscences to the
would ; he was also on very friendly terms with Mrs.
Shelley, and he cannot have failed to stimulate the
curiosity which his friend and contributor had already
begun to entertain on the subject. -
To these sources of information may be added another,
of which it will be more convenient to speak further on.
When therefore, about the middle of 1836, Disraeli
sat down to write Venetia, he was not ill prepared to
speak of Shelley in so far as knowledge of his history
and character went ; and, as will be shown by and by, he
possessed no inconsiderable acquaintance with his writ-
ings. In drawing Shelley's portrait, however, he resorted
to a device which may almost be said to have been
habitual with him. He did not wish his personages to
appear mere servile transcripts of reality, and as inven-
tion was by no means his forte, and he actually was
indebted for the pith and marrow of his novels to the
observation of life, he was accustomed to avoid this
imputation by fusing two characters into One, or rather
by borrowing traits from one personage which he some-
what inartificially joined on to another. Thus in
Endymion, one of the leading characters is compounded
of Cobden and Bright, certainly in unequal proportions.
Having, therefore, in Venetia to introduce Byron as Lord
Ioff SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.
Cadurcis, and Shelley as Marmion Herbert, he cuts
Byron's relations with Lady Byron and “Ada, sole
daughter of my house and heart,” off from the character
of Cadurcis, and superimposes them upon Herbert,
leaving the rest unaltered. “The voice is the voice of
Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau’’; the situa-
tion is Byronic, but the characteris Shelleyan. Looking
at the character apart from the situation, we find that
Herbert is drawn in conformity with the most orthodox
Shelleyan tradition, precisely as Mrs. Shelley and Tre-
lawny and Hogg and Medwin have agreed to represent
the poet. Not only is Shelley thus delineated with
substantial accuracy, but the development of his mind
and the history of his writings are followed with a close-
ness which shows that Disraeli had taken pains to master
the biographical information accessible to him. The
picture of Herbert's personal appearance is Shelley's,
with a few picturesque touches superadded, and re-
presenting him at a more advanced age than he actually
reached. “His stature was much above the middle
height, though his figure, which was remarkably slender,
was bowed ; not by years, certainly, for his countenance,
though singularly pallid, still retained traces of youth.
His hair, which he wore very long, descended over his
shoulders, and must originally have been of a light
auburn colour, but was now severely touched with grey.
His countenance was very pallid, so colourless, indeed,
that its aspect was almost unearthly ; but his large
blue eyes still glittered with fire.” In another passage,
Herbert is said to have “looked like a golden
phantom,”—a phrase which seems very likely to have
been adopted from some one who had actually seen
Shelley.
Herbert, in his entrance upon life, is thus delineated :
“Young, irresistibly prepossessing in his appearance,
with great eloquence, crude but considerable knowledge,
an ardent imagination, and a generous and passionate
soul.” Like Shelley, Herbert goes to Eton and Oxford,
where “his college life passed in ceaseless controversy
with his tutor.” He is not expelled the university, which
would have interfered with the plot of the novel; but as
he is supposed to have quitted it in his nineteenth year,
SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD. 107
he can hardly have taken a degree. Like the Shelley of
Hogg's reminiscences, he is described as “a proficient in
those scientific pursuits which were then rare,” and after
leaving the university secludes himself in his laboratory and
his dissecting room as well as his study. “While thus
engaged, he occasionally flattered himself that he might
discover the great secret which had perplexed genera-
tions,” an evident allusion to Frankenstein. He thus
confirms himself in all the heresies which his Oxford
tutor supposed himself to have shaken, and becomes
moreover “a strenuous antagonist of marriage, which he
taught himself to esteem, not only as an unnatural tie,
but as eminently unjust towards that softer sex who had
so long been the victims of man.” But, as in Shelley's
case, poetry gets the upper hand of philosophy. The
youthful poem attributed to Herbert is a fusion of two of
Shelley's works. When we read that “he called into
creation that Society of immaculate purity and unbounded
enjoyment which he believed was the natural inheritance
of unshackled man,” we are reminded of Queen Maff,
but “the stanzas, glittering with refined images, and
resonant with subtle symphony,” are a description, and
a very good description, of the Revolt of /s/am. With
this poem also corresponds the further trait: “In the hero
he pictured a philosopher, young and gifted as himself;
in the heroine, his idea of a perfect woman.” It is added,
not unjustly as regards even the Revolt of /s/am, but
with still closer application to Prometheus Unbound:
“These peculiar doctrines of Herbert, which, undis-
guised, must have incited so much odium, were more or
less developed and inculcated in this work; nevertheless
they were necessarily so veiled by the highly spiritual
and metaphorical language of the poet that it required
some previous acquaintance with the system enforced to,
be able to discover and recognise the esoteric spirit of
his Muse.” The fate, therefore, of Herbert's early
writings is represented as different from Shelley's, but
not wholly unlike what Shelley's might have been if he
had not begun with Queen Maë. “The public,” it is
said, “read only the history of an ideal world and of
creatures of exquisite beauty, told in language that alike
dazzled their fancy and captivated their ear. They were
108 SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.
lost in a delicious maze of metaphor and music, and
were proud to acknowledge an addition to the glorious
catalogue of their poets in a young and interesting
member of their aristocracy.” After, however, Herbert's
rupture with his wife, the particulars of which, as already
intimated, are borrowed from the history of Byron, “his
works were little read and universally decried. The
general impression of the English public was that
Herbert was an abandoned being of profligate habits;
and as scarcely any one but a sympathetic spirit ever
read a line he wrote, for, indeed, the very sight of his
works was pollution, it is not very wonderful that this
opinion was so generally prevalent. A calm inquirer
might perhaps have suspected that abandoned profligacy
is not very compatible with severe study, and might
have been of opinion that a solitary sage may be the
antagonist of a priesthood without denying the existence
of a God. But there never are calm inquirers.”
This passage, as well as the general character of the
portrait, entitles, I think, Lord Beaconsfield to a place
among the honourable list of those who have defended
Shelley when the unfavourable estimate of his character
was by far the preponderating one. In fact, hardly any
exception can be taken to his portrait, except its defec-
tiveness in points with which it was hardly possible that
he should have been acquainted. His literary estimate
is less sound, yet even its incompleteness is in a sense
welcome as proving that his judgment of the man was
not disabled by his admiration of the poet. “There
is,” he makes Herbert say, “a radical fault in my poetic
mind, and I am conscious of it. I am not altogether
void of the creative faculty, but mine is a fragmentary
mind. I produce no whole. Unless you do this you
cannot last ; at least you cannot materially affect your
species.” This, it will be noticed, is an echo of Bulwer's
remark in his letter to Hogg already quoted, and would
seem to indicate that the quality of Shelley's genius had
formed the subject of discussion between Disraeli and
his friend. The very conversation, however, between
Herbert and Cadurcis, from which these observations was
taken, shows that if Disraeli was not a disciple of Shelley
or an adequate appraiser of his genius, he was yet a
SHELLAE Y AAWD LORD BEACOMSAT/AEI/O. 109
student of his writings, for the most striking passages—
with a freedom which would justly have subjected Disraeli
to the imputation of plagiarism if he had not put them
into the mouth of Shelley himself—are taken out of one
of the least known of his works. “And yet,” says Cadurcis,
“the age of Pericles has passed away. Sólve me the
problem why so unparalleled a progress was made during
that period in , literature and the arts, and why that
progress, so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a
check and became retrograde 2° “It is a problem left
to the wonder and conjecture of posterity,” said Herbert.
“Nothing of the Athenians remains except their genius;
but they fulfilled their purpose. The wrecks and frag-
ments of their subtle and profound minds obscurely
suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole.”
The conversation is pursued for some time in the same
strain, and, like the above passage, is derived nearly
verbatim from Shelley's Discourse on the Mammers of
the Ancients, which was not published in an authorised
shape for three years after the appearance of Venetia.
But a fragment, including these sentences, had, in 1833,
been given to the world by Medwin in the Shelley
Papers, and Disraeli must not only have studied this
little ephemeral book with some care, but have had it in
his possession when he wrote Venezia. A still more
striking quotation comes from the same source. The
reader of Shelley who remembers that the Defence of
Poetry was not published until 1840, may well start when
he comes upon one of its most memorable dicta in the
middle of Veneţia : “Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.” He may be thrilled, as Bertha
in Tieck's wonderful tale is thrilled when the knight, to
whom she has been recounting her history, startles her
with the name of the little dog, Strohmian, which she
has never told, for she has herself forgotten it. But
the explanation is simple. The remark which closes
Shelley's Defence of Poetry is one which he frequently
made in conversation, and Medwin, who often heard it
from him, has repeated it in the Shelley Papers. Yet
another citation from an unpublished work is also to
be traced to Medwin’s Shelley Papers. After deplor-
ing the fragmentary character of his own productions,
I IO SAHE/AA Y AAWD LORD BEACOMSF/E/CD.
as already mentioned, Herbert says, “What I admire in
you, Cadurcis, is that, with all the faults of youth, of
which you will free yourself, your creative power is
vigorous, prolific, and complete; your creations rise fast
and fair, like perfect worlds.” This is from the Sonnet
to Byron, originally published in an imperfect form by
Medwin in the Shelley Papers, where Shelley speaks
(to use Medwin’s imperfect text, the only one accessible
to Disraeli) of
“My soul, which, as a worm may haply show
A portion of the Unapproachable,
Marks his creations rise as fast and fair
As perfect worlds at the Creator's will.”
It was probably about the same time that this was
written (January 1822) that Shelley wrote to Gisborne of
Byron's latest compositions: “What think you of Lord
Byron now 2 Space wondered less at the swift and fair
creations of God when He grew weary of vacancy, than
I at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a
decaying body. So l think, let the world envy while it
admires, as it may.” Disraeli's representation of Herbert,
then, admiring without envy the more popular pro-
ductions of his friend Cadurcis, and awarding him an
unmerited superiority of genius, as well as the pre-
eminence in contemporary reputation, is perfectly in
accordance with fact. Was there any source from which
he could have derived it besides the confused and not
always reliable indications of Medwin 2 I think there
may have been. There was a man, then prominent in
London society, who had known Byron and Shelley
equally well, and had a perfect knowledge of the senti-
ments they respectively entertained for each other. I
have been but once in the late Mr. Trelawny's company,
but that single occasion was enough to convince me of
the inexhaustibility of his stores of Byronic and Shelleyan
anecdote, and of the general trustworthiness of his views
of Shelley. I am not sure that as much could be said
of his estimate of Byron, or of the members of the Pisa
circle in general. But in Shelley's case no spleen or
disappointment or fancied slight had marred the
original clearness of his view, and I feel as sure that his
SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD. 111
report of Shelley's feelings towards Byron would be
mainly correct, as that Disraeli, deeply interested in both
poets as he was, must have turned Trelawny's acquaint-
ance to account. Trelawny was intimate with Disraeli's
friends, Lady Blessington and Count D'Orsay, and that
Disraeli knew him about the time that he was writing
Venetia, appears from a letter in his correspondence,
dated July, 1836, introducing an excellent bon-mot of
James Smith's : “What do you think of Spain 2
Trelawny, who is a republican, is in raptures. ‘The
Spaniards, he says, “are in advance of all countries;
they have got their constitution of 1812.’ Says James
Smith, ‘I wish I had got mine.’” -
The catastrophe of Veneţia is the catastrophe of
Shelley, in which Byron is also involved. The scene is
laid at Lerici; the details are perfectly accurate, and
mainly derived from Trelawny's account in Leigh Hunt's
Byron and His Contemporaries, supplemented, I imagine,
with particulars gleaned in conversation. Byron plays
the part of Williams. “Lord Cadurcis was a fine
swimmer, and had evidently made strong efforts for
his life, for he was partly undressed. While Captain
Cadurcis leant over the body, chafing the extremities in
a hurried frenzy and gazing intently on the countenance,
a shout was heard from one of the stragglers who had
recently arrived. The sea had washed on the beach
another corpse, the form of Marmion Herbert. It would
appear that he had made no struggle to save himself, for
his hand was locked in his waistcoat, where, at the
moment, he had thrust the Phado, showing that he
had been reading to the last, and was meditating on
immortality when he died.” -
It must, I fear, be admitted that Venetia is almost the
weakest of Lord Beaconsfield's novels as a work of
fiction, and that such interest as it possesses is mainly
biographical. It is so close a copy of reality that the
structure seems loose and inartificial, and the sequence
of events capricious. The really artistic novelist is
an eclectic artist who chooses out of life the events
susceptible of treatment in fiction, and imparts to them
the logical concatenation which the ordinary littlenesses
of life interrupt or obscure. Disraeli has simply copied,
II 2 SA/EZZZY AND LORD BEACONSF/EZ D.
and, except by the rather clumsy device of fixing a piece
of Byron upon Shelley, has made hardly an endeavour
to combine or diversify. The domestic bereavement of
Lord Lyndhurst, to whom the book is dedicated, has, he
says, restrained him from offering any account of “the
principles which had guided me in its composition.”
This must have been a meagre catalogue at best ; but the
biographer redeems the novelist, and he is right in claim-
ing credit for the endeavour “to shadow forth, though but
in a glass darkly, two of the most renowned and refined
spirits that have adorned these our latter days.”
There is but one of Lord Beaconsfield's works in
which it would be reasonable to seek for any con-
siderable trace of the influence of Shelley, and in this
we find it. Disraeli's Revolutionary Epic could hardly
have been produced without some inspiration from the
poet who had written the true revolutionary epic of the
age in The Revolt of Islam. Disraeli's epic bears its
obligations to Shelley blazoned upon its front. Demo-
gorgon, in Milton an anarch old, had been promoted by
Shelley to the rank of a Deity, the ultimate ground, in
fact, of divine existence. Disraeli adopts the idea. His
Demogorgon is the all-wise spirit before whom Magros
and Lyridon, the contending genii of the mediaeval and
the modern order, Faith and Freedom, appear to plead
their respective causes. The antagonism of these genii
is clearly derived from the Eagle and Serpent of The
A'evolt of /s/am. The manner in which they present
themselves, it must be owned, bears a somewhat burlesque
resemblance to the contention of Michael and Satan in
Byron's Vision of Judgment. Which is Michael and
which is Satan is hard to tell; nor, perhaps, had the
author fully satisfied himself. For it is a marked
peculiarity of Disraeli that to the revolutionary tempera-
ment which enabled him to write such audacious persi-
flage as The Infernal Marriage and to draw such
characters as Theodora, he united a genuine reverence
for the beauty of the ancient order—its chivalry, its
feudalism, its monasticism ; and it is to a great extent
this doubleness of nature which renders his works so
interesting, and earns pardon for two of the worst defects
an author Can have—flippancy and meretriciousness.
SAELLEY AAWD LORD BEACOMSAT/AEZD. I 13
Magros and Lyridon plead their causes before Demo-
gorgon's throne with considerable rhetorical force,
though without much poetry, the entire situation pre-
senting a perfect analogy to that unfinished Prologue to
A ſellas, in which Christ and Mahomet play the same
part of advocates, but which Disraeli cannot have seen.
Demogorgon informs the genii, in a line which but for
its lack of melody might have been borrowed from
Shelley,
“In man alone the fate of man is placed,”
and bids them mark the career of a mortal, in whom,
it is hinted, they will find their respective aims reconciled.
This is no other than Napoleon, the child of a Revolution
yet the founder of an Empire. Napoleon is accordingly
introduced, leading the French from victory to victory
up to the gates of Milan ; but here Disraeli’s inspiration,
or rather the ambition which had simulated inspiration,
deserted him. He published what he had written in the
apparent hope that it might yet be revived by popular
applause, but prefaced his work with a declaration which
few versifiers even would make, and certainly no poets:
“I am not one who finds consolation for the neglect of
my contemporaries in the imaginary plaudits of a more
sympathetic posterity.” The public having declined to
interest itself in the Revolutionary Epic, the author
redeemed the pledge given in his preface, and, with or
without a pang, “hurled his lyre to limbo.” He was, in
truth, no poet, and in attempting an enterprise which
Shelley himself would have found difficult, he had ab-
surdly misconceived both the nature and the extent of
his powers. Yet, notwithstanding frequent bombast and
frequent bathos, and every possible indication of an
essentially prosaic nature masquerading in the garb of
verse, there is a freedom and largeness of treatment
about the Revolutionary Epic which redeems it from
contempt; and at a time when imitators of Shelley were
generally copying his style alone, it is not unrefreshing
to find another order of followers neglecting the style
* He says, however, in the preface to the second edition, that in
1837 he corrected the poem with the intention of completing it, but
was prevented by his election to Parliament.
II.4 SA/AEI./LE Y A/V/O LOA*/O AEAA COAVSAT/A2//X.
to lay hold of the ideas. It is due to Disraeli to observe
that the style of his verse, if much less individual than
that of his prose, is still distinctively his own, and that
he is but rarely found deliberately imitating the diction
of others. Though few close verbal parallels can be
adduced, there is, nevertheless, sufficient general resem-
blance in particular passages to evince that Shelley was
not unfamiliar to him. Section 2 I of Book I. is clearly
suggested by Shelley's description of the Coliseum, which
Medwin had published in the Shelley Papers. A passage
in Section 45 is copied, consciously or unconsciously,
from a corresponding passage in Prometheus Unbound;
and the comparison affords an instructive example of
the difference between false poetry and true poetry:—
DISRAELI.
- “Omens dire
Struck cold the heart of man, and made all gaze
With silent speech upon each other's face,
Waiting who first should tell the thought all feared.
Steeples were blasted by descending fire;
Ancestral trees, that seemed the types of Time,
Were stricken by strong winds, and in an hour
The growth of ages shivered ; from their base
Fell regal statues, fountains changed to blood,
And in the night, lights strange and quivering Scudded
Across the sky.”
SHELLEY.
“Then, see those million worlds which burn and roll
Around us—their inhabitants beheld
My spheréd light wane in wide Heaven; the sea
Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire
From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow
Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown;
Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains ;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads
Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled:
When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm,
And Famine ; and black blight on herb and tree.”
These passages occur in the first division of the
Revolutionary Epic, where Magros pleads before Demo-
gorgon's throne in the cause of established institutions.
The speech of the revolutionary genius Lyridon is
naturally still more Shelley-like, but the affinity is diffi-
SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSFIELD. 115
cult to exhibit by any process short of reading both
poets, being rather one of sentiment than of diction. It
may be illustrated by a passage from Disraeli himself—
the receipt for concocting punch in Vivian Grey, where,
along with other precepts more easy of observance by
mortals, the pupil is directed to catch the aroma of a
pound of tea. “You perceive, my Lord,” says Vivian,
“that the whole difficulty lies in catching the aroma.”
The aroma of Queen Mað is very fairly caught in this
portion of the Revolutionary Epic, but when you try to
analyse it, it evaporates: it cannot, like Mr. Browning's
murex, be made into an extract—
“Flasked and fine,
And priced and saleable at last.”
We come, however, to Shelleyan diction as well as
Shelleyan sentiment in passages like this:—
“There too is seen,
Last in that radiant host, yet brightest there,
A form that should be Woman ; but methinks
The slave hath lost her fetters. Frank, and pure
From Custom's cursed taint, behold her now
Indeed the light and blessing of all life.”
There are also frequent reminiscences of Alastor.
The following passage, for instance, picturesque if it had
but been original, is a curious mosaic of pieces of de-
scription from that poem, too familiar to need quotation
to the members of the Shelley Society:—
“There was a spot,
. It seemed the cradle of some mighty deed : -
Tall mountains rose, with shining trees o'erspread,
And cleft with falling rivers, with a wind -
Solemn, the solemn circus of the woods
Filling, and flinging freshness on their boughs:
A virgin growth, whose consecrated bark
No axe had grazed, but on the unsullied turf
For many a flowing age their fruit had fallen,
• Spoils of the squirrel or the fearless bird;
Or gentler banquet for some gentle fawn:
And, in the centre rose a natural mound,
Verdant and soft, with many a flower bedecked,
Beauteous and bright and strange. With pious care
Upon this fragrant couch I placed my charge.”
; 16 SHELLEY AND LORD BEACONSF/EZD.
Alasfor was then a scarce poem, the first edition being
exhausted, and the reprint in the Posthumous Poems
having been withdrawn. It is probable that Disraeli read
it in the Galignani edition, for we find proof of his
acquaintance with another poem of Shelley's included in
that edition, but rare in England. He says:
“Kings and Nations
Gaze on each other with a blended glance
Of awe and doubt.”
This is from He//as—
“Obedience and Mutiny
Like giants in contention planet struck,
Stand gazing at each other.”
Imitation, it has been said, is the sincerest flattery.
It is to be remembered that this practical appreciation of
Shelley's work was manifested more than two years before
Disraeli began to write Venetia, and that, accordingly,
we have every right to consider the introduction of
Shelley into the novel a genuine testimony of the interest
with which his character and genius had inspired the
writer, and not the mere resource of a novelist in quest
of a plot. So clear a deliverance from a person of Lord
Beaconsfield’s eminence conspicuously marks a stage in
the history of public opinion respecting Shelley. If far
from coming up to the claims justly advanced on
Shelley's behalf by the members of his own circle,
or the author of Pauline, or the young enthusiasts
who had taken him up at Cambridge, it is as great
an advance on the condescension of Moore as that
was on the verdict of the Quarterly Review. On the
whole, therefore, it is an episode in English literary
history to be looked back upon with satisfaction. The
principal gainer by it is, of course, Lord Beaconsfield
himself, whose imitation of Shelley's poetry, if not
always felicitous, at least indicates discernment; and
whose estimate of his character proves that he had made
his way through prejudice and misrepresentation to a
substantially accurate conception of the actual man.
Putting Lord Beaconsfield's personal controversies aside,
his dealings with men of letters as a man of letters
SHELLEY A/V/D LORD BAEA CONSF/E/CD. I 17
were almost invariably to his honour; and this episode
is among the most honourable. Yet it makes for the
honour of Shelley himself that among the first to exhibit
sensitiveness to his influence and appreciation of his
character, should have been a brilliant and original
person who hardly less than himself contributed to
redeem our age from the imputation of commonplace.
.*'），';';,¢; ， ; :：:
• ¡ ¿ $¢ £ © ® : *
????:??
· § ¶ • ¡ ¿
|||
||||
|
|
||||
3 90 15 O2013 O293
::+...+?***************
*$（'&
ſą
..！» .ſ（）;
¿??¿ {
*（.*?）&&
**
ſ. . . "
&’. º.º.º.
--> **-*
--------~~~3.4 °



º x: 3;
¿
º:
§§§§
Ķ
∞∞∞
tº
º