^3 JL JL JZj X.^ jl^ jlIj X I 
 
 SYDNEYWATERLG^M. A I 
 
 ."rrcfj: 
 
 TOT." 
 
 THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS 
 
 ■u 
 
 ■■■•iHnamm
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 SHELI^EY 
 
 By ^DNEY^WATERLOW, M.A. 
 
 >i 
 
 LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK 
 67 LONG ACRE, W.C, AND EDINBURGH 
 NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.
 
 LjC 
 
 X 
 
 !'i 
 
 l^f 
 
 V
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAaB 
 
 I. SHELLEY AND HIS AGE .... 7 
 
 n. PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 38 
 
 in. THE POET OF REBELLION, OF NATURE, AND 
 
 OF LOVE 70 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . .90 
 
 INDEX 92 
 
 8G0353
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 
 
 In the case of most great writers our interest in them 
 as persons is derived from our interest in them as 
 writers ; we are not very curious about them except 
 for reasons that have something to do with their art. 
 With Shelley it is different. During his life he 
 aroused fears and hatreds, loves and adorations, that 
 were quite irrelevant to hterature ; and even now, 
 when he has become a classic, he still causes excite- 
 ment as a man. His lovers are as vehement as ever. 
 For them he is the " baimer of freedom," which, 
 
 " Torn but flying, 
 Streams like a thunder-cloud against the wind." 
 
 He has suffered that worst indignity of canonisation 
 as a being saintly and superhuman, not subject to 
 the morahty of ordinary mortals. He has been 
 bedaubed with pathos. Nevertheless it is possible 
 still to recognise in him one of the most engaging 
 personahties that ever lived. What is the secret of 
 this charm ? He had many characteristics that 
 belong to the most tiresome natures ; he even had
 
 S SHELLEY 
 
 the qualities of the man as to whom one wonders 
 whether partial insanity may not be his best excuse — 
 inconstancy expressing itself in hysterical revulsions 
 of feeling, complete lack of balance, proneness to 
 act recklessly to the hurt of others. Yet he was 
 loved and respected by contemporaries of tastes very 
 different from his own, who were good judges and 
 intolerant of bores — by Byron, who was apt to care 
 httle for any one, least of all for poets, except him- 
 self ; by Peacock, who poured laughter on all en- 
 thusiasms ; and by Hogg, who, though slightly 
 eccentric, was a Tory eccentric. The fact is that, 
 with all his defects, he had two quahties which, com- 
 bined, are so attractive that there is scarcely any- 
 thing they will not redeem — perfect sincerity without 
 a thought of self, and vivid emotional force. All 
 his faults as well as his virtues were, moreover, derived 
 from a certain strong feehng, coloured in a peculiar 
 way which will be explained in what foUows — a sort 
 of ardour of universal benevolence. One of his 
 letters ends with these words : " Affectionate love 
 to and from all. This ought to be not only the 
 vale of a letter, but a superscription over the gate 
 of life " — ^words which, expressing not merely Shelley's 
 opinion of what ought to be, but what he actually 
 felt, reveal the ultimate reason why he is stiU loved, 
 and the reason, too, why he has so often been ideaUsed. 
 For this universal benevolence is a thing which 
 appeals to men almost with the force of divinity, 
 still carrying, even when mutilated and obscured by 
 frailties, some suggestion of St. Francis or of Christ.
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 9 
 
 The object of these pages is not to idealise either 
 his hfe, his character, or his works. The three are 
 inseparably connected, and to understand one we 
 must understand all. The reason is that Shelley is 
 one of the most subjective of writers. It would be 
 hard to name a poet who has kept his art more free 
 from all taint of representation of the real, making it 
 not an instrument for creating something life-hke, 
 but a more and more intimate echo or emanation 
 of his own spirit. Iri_stud ying his writings we shall 
 see how they flow Jrom his dominating em otion .of 
 lQye_for hisJeU ow-men ;. and the jdrama of his Mo^ 
 displayed against _tbg_background_of^he_tiBafi^jwiU - 
 inTturn throw Hght on that emotion. His benevolence 
 took many forms — none perfect, some admirable, some 
 ridiculous. It was too universal. He never had a clear 
 enough perception of the real quahties of real men and 
 women ; hence his loves for individuals, as capricious 
 as they were violent, always seem to lack something 
 which is perhaps the most valuable element in human 
 affection. If in this way we can analyse his tem- 
 perament successfully, the process should help us 
 to a more critical understanding, and so to a fuller 
 enjoyment, of the poems. 
 
 This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of 
 the Romantic Movement in Enghsh Hterature, ap- 
 peared in an age which, following on the series of 
 successful wars that had established British power 
 all over the world, was one of the gloomiest in our 
 history. If in some ways the England of 1800-20 
 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it lagged
 
 10 SHELLEY 
 
 far behind. The Industrial Revohition, which was 
 to turn us from a nation of peasants and traders into 
 a nation of manufacturers, had begun ; but its chief 
 fruits as yet were increased materiaUsm and greed, 
 and poHtically the period was one of blackest re- 
 action. Alone of European peoples we had been 
 untouched by the tide of Napoleon's conquests, 
 which, when it receded from the Continent, at least 
 left behind a framework of enlightened institutions, 
 while our success in the Napoleonic wars only con- 
 firmed the ruhng aristocratic families in their grip 
 of the nation which they had governed since the 
 reign of Anne. This despotism crushed the humble 
 and stimulated the high-spirited to violence, and is 
 the reason why three such poets as Byron, Landor, 
 and Shelley, though by birth and fortune members 
 of the ruling class, were pioneers as much of pohtical 
 as of spiritual rebellion. Unable to breathe the 
 atmosphere of England, they were driven to hve in 
 exile. 
 
 It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmos- 
 phere to-day. A foreign critic ^ has summed it up 
 by saying that England was then pre-eminently the 
 home of cant ; while in politics her native energy 
 was diverted to oppression, in morals and rehgion 
 it took the form of hypocrisy and persecution. 
 Abroad she was supporting the Holy Alliance, 
 throwing her weight into the scale against all move- 
 ments for freedom. At home there was exhaustion 
 
 ^ Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his Main Currents of 
 Nineteenth Century Literature.
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 11 
 
 after war ; workmen were thrown out of employ- 
 ment, and taxation pressed heavily on the poor. 
 The landed class, which had fattened on high rents 
 
 ^ and the high price of com, was made cruel by fear ; 
 for the French Revolution had sent a wave of panic 
 through the country, not to ebb until about 1830. 
 Suspicion of republican principles — which, it seemed, 
 led straight to the Terror — frightened many good 
 men, who would otherwise have been reformers, into 
 supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism. 
 The elder generation of poets had been republicans 
 in their youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolu- 
 tion that it was " bliss to be alive " in that dawn ; 
 Southey and Coleridge had even plaimed to found a 
 communistic society in the New World. Now all 
 three were rallied to the defence of order and pro- 
 perty, to Church and Throne and Constitution. 
 From their seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and 
 Wordsworth praised the royal family and celebrated 
 England as the home of freedom ; while Thomson 
 wrote " Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though they 
 never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were 
 not slaves — or all of them who were not gentlemen — 
 to a home-grown tyranny more blighting, because 
 more stupid, than that of Napoleon. England had 
 
 '^ stamped out the Irish rebellion of 1798 in blood, had 
 forced Ireland by fraud into the Union of 1800, and 
 was stranghng her industry and commerce. Catho- 
 lics could neither vote nor hold office. At a time 
 when the population of the United Kingdom was 
 some thirty millions, the Parliamentary franchise
 
 12 SHELLEY 
 
 was possessed by no more than a million persons, 
 and most of the seats in the House of Commons 
 were the private property of rich men. Representa- 
 tive government did not exist ; whoever agitated for 
 some measm-e of it was deported to Austraha or 
 forced to fly to America. Glasgow and Manchester 
 weavers starved and rioted. The press was gagged 
 and the Habeas C!orpus Act constantly suspended. 
 A second rebellion in Ireland, when Castlereagh 
 " dabbled his sleek young hands in Erin's gore," 
 was suppressed with unusual ferocity. In England 
 in 1812 famine drove bands of poor people to wander 
 and pillage.. Under the criminal law, still of medieval 
 cruelty, death was the punishment for the theft of 
 a loaf or a sheep. The social organism had come to 
 a deadlock — on the one hand a starved and angry 
 populace, on the other a vast Church-and-King 
 party, impregnably powerful, made up of aU who 
 had " a stake in the country." The strain was not 
 to be reUeved until the Reform Act of 1832 set the 
 wheels in motion again ; they then moved painfully 
 indeed, but still they moved., ' Meanwhile Parliament 
 was the stronghold of selfish interests ; the Church 
 was the jackal of the gentry ; George III, who lost 
 the American colonies and maintained negro slavery, 
 was on the throne, until he went mad and was 
 succeeded by his profligate son. 
 Shelley said of himself that he was 
 
 " A nerve o'er whicli do creep 
 The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 13 
 
 and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in 
 his life and in his verse. He was the eldest son of 
 a Sussex family that was loyally Whig and moved 
 in the orbit of the CathoHc Dukes of Norfolk, and 
 the talk about emancipation which he would hear at 
 home may partly explain his amazing invasion of 
 Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen years old, 
 with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation 
 and the repeal of the Union Act — subjects on which 
 he was quite ignorant. He addressed meetings, 
 wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets 
 " consisting of the benevolent and tolerant deduc- 
 tions of philosophy reduced into the simplest lan- 
 guage." Later on, when he had left England for 
 ever, he still followed eagerly the details of the 
 struggle for freedom at home, and in 1819 composed 
 a group of poems designed to stir the masses from 
 their lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was 
 in office, with Sidmouth as Home Secretary and 
 Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary, a pair whom he 
 thus pillories : 
 
 *' As a shark and dog-fish wait 
 Under an Atlantic isle, 
 For the negro ship, whose freight 
 Is the theme of their debate, 
 
 "Wrinkling their red gills the while — 
 
 Are ye, two vultures sick for battle. 
 
 Two scorpions under one wet stone, 
 Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, 
 Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, 
 Two vipers tangled into one."
 
 c 
 
 14 SHELLEY 
 
 The jtnost effective of these bitter poems is The 
 Masque of Anarchy, called forth by the^" Peterloo 
 Massacre " at Manchester on August 16, 1819, when 
 hussars had charged a peaceable meeting held in 
 support of Parliamentary reform, killing six people 
 and wounding some seventy others. Shelley's frenzy 
 of indignation poured itself out in the terrific stanzas, 
 written in simplest language so as to be miderstood 
 by the people, which tell how 
 
 " I met murder on the way — 
 He had a mask like Castlereagh — 
 Very smooth he looked, yet grim ; 
 Seven blood-hounds followed him." 
 
 The same year and mood produced the great 
 sonnet, England in 1819 — 
 
 " An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king. 
 Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow 
 Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring ; " 
 
 and to the same group belongs that not quite successful 
 _essay in sinister humour, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), 
 suggested by the grunting of pigs at an Italian fair, 
 and burlesquing the quarrel between the Prince 
 Regent and his wife. When the Princess of Wales 
 (CaroHne of Brunswick- WoKenbiittel), after having 
 left her husband and perambulated Europe with a 
 paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession 
 as George IV, to claim her position as Queen, the 
 royal differences became an affair of high national 
 importance. The divorce case which followed was 
 like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of the dis- 
 tempers of the age. Shelley felt that sort of disgust
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 15 
 
 which makes a man rave and curse under the attacks 
 of some loathsome disease ; if he laughs, it is the 
 laugh of frenzy. In the sUght Aristophanic drama 
 of Swellfoot, which was sent home, pubhshed, and at 
 once suppressed, he represents the men of England 
 as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted 
 hog's-wash as their tyrant, the priests, and the 
 soldiers will allow them. At the end, when the pigs, 
 roUicking after the triumphant Princess, hunt down 
 their oppressors, we cannot help feehng a httle sorry 
 that he does not gUde from the insistent note of 
 piggishness into some gentler mood : there is a rasp- 
 ing quality in his humour, even though it is always 
 on the side of the right. He wrote one good satire 
 though. This is Peter Bell the Third (1819), an attack 
 on Wordsworth, partly Uterary for the dulness of his 
 writing since he had been sunk in clerical respecta- 
 bility, partly pohtical for his renegade flunkeyism. 
 
 In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern 
 Europe began to Uft in the south. After Napoleon's 
 downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-16) had 
 parcelled Europe out on the principle of disregarding 
 national aspirations and restoring the legitimate 
 rulers. This system, which could not last, was first 
 shaken by revolutions that set up constitutional 
 governments in Spain and Naples. Shelley hailed 
 these streaks of dawn with joy, and uttered his 
 enthusiasm in two odes — the Ode to Liberty and 
 the Ode to Naples — the most splendid of those 
 cries of hope and prophecy with which a long line 
 of Enghsh poets has encouraged the insurrection
 
 16 SHELLEY 
 
 of the nations. Such cries, however, have no visible 
 effect on the course of events. Byron's Jingles could 
 change the face of the world, while aU Shelley's pure 
 and lofty aspirations left no mark on history. And 
 so it was, not with his repubhcan ardours alone, but 
 with all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced 
 his contemporaries outside his immediate circle ; the 
 pubHc only noticed him to execrate the atheist, the 
 fiend, and the monster. He felt that " his name 
 was writ on water," and languished for want of 
 recognition. His life, a Hghtning-flash across the 
 storm-cloud of the age, was a brief but crowded record 
 of mistakes and disasters, the classical example of 
 the rule that genius is an infinite capacity for getting 
 into trouble. 
 
 Though poets must " learn in suffering vnat they 
 teach in song," there is often a vein of c medy in 
 their lives. If we could transport our elves to 
 Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a certain 
 afternoon in the early spring of 1811, we should 
 behold a scene apparently swayed entirely by the 
 Comic Muse. The member for Shoreham, Mr. 
 Timothy Shelley, a handsome, consequential gentle- 
 man of middle age, who piques himself on his 
 enlightened opinions, is expecting two giests to 
 dinner — his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. J. 
 Hogg, who have just been sent down from Oxford 
 for a scandalous affair of an atheistical squib. When 
 the young men arrive at five o'clock, Mr. Shelley 
 receives Hogg, an observant and cool-headed person, 
 with graciousness, and an hour is spent in con-
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 17 
 
 versation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, " in an 
 odd, unconnected manner, scolding, crying, swear- 
 ing, and then weeping again." After dinner, his son 
 being out of the room, he expresses his surprise to 
 Hogg at finding him such a sensible fellow, and asks 
 him what is to be done with the scapegrace. " Let 
 him be married to a girl who A\ill sober him." The 
 wine moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley becomes 
 maudhn and tearful again. He is a model magis- 
 trate, the terror and the idol of poachers ; he is 
 highly respected in the House of Commons, and the 
 Speaker could not get through the session without 
 him. Then he drifts to reUgion. God exists, no 
 one can deny it ; in fact, he has the proof in his 
 pocket. Out comes a piece of paper, and arguments 
 are reaci^aloud, which his son recognises as Paley's. 
 " Yes, tl j>y are Palley's arguments, but he had them 
 from me, j almost everything in Palley's book he had 
 from me." The boy of nineteen, who Ustens fuming 
 to this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In 
 appearance he is no ordinary being. A shock of 
 dark brown hair makes his small round head look 
 larger than it really is ; from beneath a pale, freckled 
 forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a stag's, 
 beam ai;* earnestness which easily flashes into en- 
 thusiasm ; the nose is small and turn-up, the beard- 
 less hp? girUsh and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops, 
 and has an air of feminine fragility, though his bones 
 and joints are large. Hands and feet, exquisitely 
 shaped, are expressive of high breeding. His ex- 
 pensive, handsome clothes are disordered and dusty, 
 
 B
 
 18 SHELLEY 
 
 and bulging with books. When he speaks, it is in 
 a strident peacock voice, and there ia an abrupt 
 clumsiness in his gestures, especially in drawing- 
 rooms, where he is ill at ease, Uable to trip in the 
 carpet and upset furniture. Complete absence of 
 self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are evi- 
 dent in every tone ; it is clear that he is an aristo- 
 crat, but it is also clear that he is a saint. 
 
 The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would 
 have been impossible in a well-regulated university, 
 but Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have fitted 
 easily into any system. Bom at Field Place, Hors- 
 ham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792, simultaneously 
 with the French Revolution, he had more than a 
 drop of wildness in his blood. The long pedigree of 
 the Shelley family is full of turbulent ancestors, and 
 the poet's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, an eccentric old 
 raiser who Hved until 1815, had been married twice, 
 on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already 
 at Eton Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Con- 
 temptuous of authority, he had gone his own way, 
 spending pocket-money on revolutionary hterature, 
 trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical 
 experiments. As often happens to queer boys, his 
 school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him 
 with blows and cries of " Mad Shelley." But the 
 holidays were happy. There must have been plenty 
 of fun at Field Place when he told his sisters stories 
 about the alchemist in the attic or " the Great Tor- 
 toise that hved in Wamham Pond," frightened them 
 with electric shocks, and taught his baby brother to
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 19 
 
 say devil. There is something of high-spirited fun 
 even in the raptures and despairs of his first love for 
 his cousin, Harriet Grove. He tried to convert her 
 to repubhcan atheism, until the family, becoming 
 alarmed, interfered, and Harriet was disposed of 
 otherwise. " Married to a clod of earth ! " exclaims 
 Shelley. He spent nights " pacing the churchyard," 
 and slept with a loaded pistol and poison beside him. 
 He went into residence at University CoUege, 
 Oxford, in the Michaelmas term of 1810. The world 
 must always bless the chance which sent Thomas 
 Jefferson Hogg a freshman to the same college at 
 the same time, and made him Shelley's friend. The 
 chapters in which Hogg describes their life at Oxford 
 are the best part of his biography. Jn these hvely 
 pages we see, with all the force of reahty, Shelley 
 working by fits in a fitter of books and retorts and 
 " galvanic troughs," and discoursing on the vast 
 possibifities of science for making mankind happy ; 
 how chemistry will turn deserts into cornfields, and 
 even the air and water will yield fire and food ; how 
 Africa will be explored by balloons, of which the 
 shadows, passing over the jungles, will emancipate 
 the slaves. In the midst he would rush out to a 
 lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that 
 it was all about " stones, stones, stones " ! The 
 friends read Plato together, and held endless talk 
 of metaphysics, pre-existence, and the sceptical 
 philosophy, on winter walks across country, and all 
 night beside the fire, until Shelley would curl up 
 on the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy
 
 20 SHELLEY 
 
 because he was left to himself. With all his thoughts 
 and impulses, Ol-controUed indeed, but directed to 
 the acquisition of knowledge for the benefit of the 
 world, such a student would nowadays be a marked 
 man, applauded and restrained. But the Oxford of 
 that day was a home of " chartered laziness." An 
 academic circle absorbed in intrigues for preferment, 
 and enUvened only by drunkenness and immorahty, 
 could offer nothing but what w^as repugnant to 
 SheUey. He remained a soHtary until the hand of 
 authority fell and expelled him. 
 
 He had always had a habit of writing to strangers 
 on the subjects next his heart. Once he approached 
 Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwards Mrs. 
 Hemans), who had not been encouraging. Now half 
 in earnest, and half with an impish desire for dia- 
 lectical scores, he printed a pamphlet on The Neces- 
 sity of Atheism, a single foolscap sheet concisely 
 proving that no reason for the existence of God can 
 be vahd, and sent it to various personages, including 
 bishops, asking for a refutation. It fell into the 
 hands of the college authorities. Summoned before 
 the council to say whether he was the author, Shelley 
 very properly refused to answer, and was peremptorily 
 expelled, together with Hogg, who had intervened in 
 his behalf. 
 
 The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a 
 house where a wall-paper with a vine-trellis pattern 
 caught Shelley's fancy. Mr. Timothy SheUey ap- 
 peared on the scene, and, his feelings as a Christian 
 and a father deeply outraged, did the worst thing
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 21 
 
 he could possibly have done— he made forgiveness 
 conditional on his son's giving up his friend. The 
 next step was to cut off suppUes and to forbid Field 
 Place to him, lest he should corrupt his sisters' 
 minds. Soon Hogg had to go to York to work in 
 a conveyancer's of&ce, and Shelley was left alone 
 in London, depressed, a martyr, and determined to 
 save others from similar persecution. In this mood 
 he formed a connection destined to end in tragedy. 
 His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among 
 the girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen- 
 year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. Shelley 
 became intimate with the Westbrooks, and set about 
 saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy 
 face, a neat figure, and a gUb school-girl mind quick 
 to catch up and reproduce his doctrines. The child 
 seems to have been innocent enough, but her elder 
 sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as 
 a bait to entangle the future baronet ; she played 
 on SheUey's feelings by encouraging Harriet to 
 beheve herself the victim of tyranny at school. 
 Still, it was six months before he took the final step. 
 How he could save Harriet from scholastic and dom- 
 estic bigotry was a grave question. In the first place, 
 hatred of " matrimoniahsm " was one of his principles, 
 yet it seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman 
 into the risks of iUicit union ; in the second place, 
 he was at this time passionately interested in another 
 woman, a certain Miss Kitchener, a Sussex school- 
 mistress of repubHcan and deistic principles, whom 
 he ideaHsed as an angel, only to discover soon, with
 
 22 SHELLEY 
 
 equal falsity, that she was a demon. At last Harriet 
 was worked up to throw herself on his protection. 
 They fled by the northern mail, dropping at York a 
 summons to Hogg to join them, and contracted a 
 Scottish marriage at Edinburgh on August 28, 1811. 
 The story of the two years and nine months during 
 which SheUey Hved with Harriet must seem insane 
 to a rational mind. Life was one comfortless picnic. 
 When SheUey wanted food, he would dart into a 
 shop and buy a loaf or a handful of raisins. Always 
 accompanied by EHza, they changed their dwelling- 
 place more than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, 
 Keswick, Dublin, NantgwiUt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, 
 TanyraUt, Killamey, London (Half Moon Street and 
 PimHco), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and Windsor, 
 successively received this fantastic household. Each 
 fresh house was the one where they were to abide for 
 ever, and each formed the base of operations for 
 some new scheme of comprehensive beneficence. 
 Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley em- 
 barked on the construction of an embankment to 
 reclaim a drowned tract of land ; Queen Mob was 
 written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales ; 
 and from L?eland, where he had gone to regenerate 
 the country, he opened correspondence with WilHam 
 Godwin, the philosopher and author of Political 
 Justice. His energy in entering upon ecstatic per- 
 sonal relations was as great as that which he threw 
 into philanthropic schemes ; but the relations, Hke 
 the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting 
 means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly.
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 23 
 
 Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable 
 qualities, quickly became "a blind and loathson^e 
 worm that cannot see to sting " ; Miss Kitchener, 
 who had been induced to give up her school and 
 come to Uve with them " for ever," was discovered 
 to be a " brown demon," and had to be pensioned 
 off. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted 
 apart, and he found consolation in a sentimental 
 attachment to a Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, 
 ComeHa Turner, ladies who read ItaUan poetry with 
 him and sang to guitars. Harriet had borne him a 
 daughter, lanthe, but she herself was a child, who 
 soon wearied of philosophy and of being taught 
 Latin ; naturally she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a 
 settlement. Egged on by her sister, she spent on 
 plate and a carriage the money that Shelley would 
 have squandered on humanity at large. Money 
 difiiculties and negotiations with his father were the 
 background of all this period. On March 24, 1814, 
 he married Harriet in church, to settle any possible 
 question as to the legitimacy of his children ; but 
 they parted soon after. Attempts were made at 
 reconcihation, which might have succeeded had not 
 Shelley during this summer drifted into a serious 
 and relatively permanent passion. He made financial 
 provision for his wife, who gave birth to a second 
 child, a boy, on November 30, 1814 ; but, as the 
 months passed, and Shelley was irrevocably bound 
 to another, she lost heart for life in the dreariness of 
 her father's house. An Irish ofiicer took her for his 
 mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was found
 
 24 SHELLEY 
 
 drowned in the Serpentine. Twenty days later 
 Shelley married his second wife. 
 
 This marriage was the result of his correspondence 
 with William Godwin, which had ripened into inti- 
 macy, based on community of principles, with the 
 Oodwin household. The philosopher, a short, stout 
 old man, presided, with his big bald head, his leaden 
 complexion, and his air of a dissenting minister, 
 over a heterogeneous family at 41 Skinner Street, 
 Holbom, supported in scrambling poverty by the 
 energy of the second Mrs. Godwin, who carried on a 
 business of pubhshing children's books. In letters 
 of the time we see Mrs. Godwin as a fat httle woman 
 in a black velvet dress, bad-tempered and untruthful. 
 " She is a very disgusting woman, and wears green 
 spectacles," said Charles Lamb. Besides a small 
 son of the Godwins, the family contained four other 
 members — Clara Mary Jane Clairmont and Charles 
 Clairmont (Mrs. Godwin's children by a previous 
 marriage), Fanny Godwin (as she was called), and 
 Mary Godwin. These last two were the daughters 
 of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of The Rights of 
 Women, the great feminist, who had been Godwin's 
 first wife. Fanny's father was a scamp called 
 Imlay, and Mary was Godwin's chQd. 
 
 Mary disliked her stepmother, and would wander 
 on fine days to read beside her mother's grave in 
 Old St. Pancras Chm-chyard. This girl of seventeen 
 had a strong if rather narrow mind ; she was im- 
 perious, ardent, and firm-willed. She is said to 
 have been very pale, with golden hair and a large
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 25 
 
 forehead, redeemed from commonplace by hazel eyes 
 which had a piercing look. When sitting, she ap- 
 peared to be of more than average height ; when she 
 stood, you saw that she had her father's stumpy 
 legs. Intellectually, and by the soHdity of her 
 character, she was better fitted to be Shelley's mate 
 than any other woman he ever came across. It was 
 natural that she should be interested in this bright 
 creature, fallen as from another world into their 
 dingy, squabbling family. If it was inevitable that 
 her interest, touched with pity (for he was in despair 
 over the collapse of his life with Harriet), should 
 quickly warm to love, we must insist that the rapture 
 Avith which he leaped to meet her had some founda- 
 tion in reaHty. That she was gifted is manifest in 
 her ^vritings — chiefly, no doubt, in Frankenstein, 
 composed when she had Shelley to fire her imagina- 
 tion ; but her other novels are competent, and her 
 letters are the work of a vigorous intellect. She had 
 her Hmitations. She was not quite so free from con- 
 ventionahty as either he or she believed ; but on 
 the whole they were neither decei\Tiig themselves 
 nor one another when they pHghted faith by Mary 
 Wollstonecraft's grave. With their principles, it was 
 nothing that marriage was impossible. Without the 
 knowledge of the elder Godwins, they made arrange- 
 ments to elope, and on July 28, 1814, crossed from 
 Dover to Calais in an open boat, taking Jane Clair- 
 mont with them on the spur of the moment. Jane 
 also had been unhappy in Skinner Street. She was 
 about Mary's age, a pert, oUve-complexioned girl,
 
 26 SHELLEY 
 
 with a strong taste for life. She changed her name 
 to Claire because it sounded more romantic. 
 
 Mrs. Godwin pursued the fugitives to Calais, but 
 in vain. Shelley was now laiuiched on a new life 
 with a new bride, and — a freakish touch — accom- 
 panied as before by his bride's sister. The more his 
 life changed, the more it was the same thing — the 
 same plunging without forethought, the same dis- 
 regard for all that is conventionally deemed necessary. 
 His courage is often praised, and rightly, though we 
 ought not to forget that ignorance, and even obtuse- 
 ness, were large ingredients in it. As far as they had 
 any plan, it was to reach Switzerland and settle on 
 the banks of some lake, amid subHme mountain 
 scenery, " for ever." In fact, the tour lasted but 
 six weeks. Their difficulties began in Paris, where 
 only an accident enabled Shelley to raise funds. 
 Then they moved slowly across war-wasted France, 
 Mary and Claire, in black silk dresses, riding by turns 
 on a mule, and Shelley walking. Childish happiness 
 glows in their journals. From Troyes Shelley wrote 
 to the abandoned Harriet, in perfect good faith, 
 pressing her to join them in Switzerland. There were 
 sprained ankles, dirty inns, perfidious and disobhging 
 drivers — the ordinary misadventures of the road, 
 magnified a thousand times by their helplessness, and 
 all transfigm-ed in the purple hght of youth and the 
 intoxication of hterature. At last they reached the 
 Lake of Lucerne, settled at Brunnen, and began 
 feverishly to read and write. Shelley worked at a 
 novel called The Assassins, and we hear of him
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 27 
 
 *' sitting on a rude pier by the lake " and reading 
 aloud the siege of Jerusalem from Tacitus. Soon 
 they discovered that they had only just enough 
 money left to take them home. Camp was struck 
 in haste, and they travelled down the Rhine. When 
 their boat was detained at Marsluys, all three sat 
 writing in the cabin — Shelley his novel, Mary a story 
 called Hate, and Claire a story called The Idiot — until 
 they were tossed across to England, and reached 
 London after borrowing passage-money from the 
 captain. 
 
 The winter was spent in poverty, dodging creditors 
 through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic 
 embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant 
 credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness 
 to beheve merely because a thing was impossible, 
 made him the prey of every impostor. Knowing 
 that he was heir to a large fortune, he would sub- 
 sidise any project or any grievance, only provided 
 it were wild enough. Godwin especially was a run- 
 ning sore both now and later on ; the philosopher 
 was at the beginning of that shabby degringolade which 
 was to end in the ruin of his self-respect. In spite 
 of his anti-matrimonial principles, he was indignant 
 at his disciple's elopement with his daughter, and, 
 in spite of his philosophy, he was not above abusing 
 and sponging in the same breath. The worst of these 
 difficulties, however, came to an end when Shelley's 
 grandfather died on January 6, 1815, and he was 
 able, after long negotiations, to make an arrange- 
 ment with his father, by which his debts were paid
 
 28 SHELLEY 
 
 and he received an income of £1000 a year in con- 
 sideration of his abandoning his interest in part of 
 the estate. 
 
 And now, the financial muddle partly smoothed 
 out, his genius began to bloom in the congenial air 
 of Mary's companionship. The summer of 1815, 
 spent in rambles in various parts of the country, saw 
 the creation of Alastor. Early in 1816 Mary gave 
 birth to her first child, a boy, WilUam ; and in the 
 spring, accompanied by the baby and Claire, they 
 made a second expedition to Switzerland. A httle 
 in advance another poet left England for ever. 
 George Gordon, Lord Byron, loaded with fame and 
 lacerated by chagrin, was beginning to bear through 
 Europe that " pageant of his bleeding heart " of 
 which the first steps are celebrated in Childe Harold. 
 Unknown to Shelley and Mary, there was already a 
 link between them and the luxurious " pilgrim of 
 eternity " rolling towards Geneva in his travelling- 
 carriage, with physician and suite : Claire had visited 
 Byron in the hope that he might help her to em- 
 ployment at Drury Lane Theatre, and, instead of 
 going on the stage, had become his mistress. Thus 
 united, but strangely dissimilar, the two parties 
 converged on the Lake of Geneva, where the poets 
 met for the first time. Shelley, though jarred by 
 Bjo-on's worldliness and pride, was impressed by his 
 creative power, and the days they spent sailing on 
 the lake, and wandering in a region haunted by the 
 spirit of Rousseau, were fruitful. The Hymn to 
 Intdlectual Beauty and the lAnes on Mont Blanc
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 29 
 
 were conceived this summer. In September the 
 Shelleys were back in England. 
 
 But England, though he had good friends like 
 Peacock and the Leigh Hunts, was full of private 
 and pubHc troubles, and was not to hold bim long. 
 The country was agitated by riots due to unemploy- 
 ment. The Government, frightened and vindictive, 
 was multiplying trials for treason and blasphemous 
 libel, and Shelley feared he might be put in the 
 pillory himself. Mary's sister Fanny, to whom he 
 was attached, killed herself in October ; Harriet's 
 suicide followed in December ; and in the same 
 winter the Westbrooks began to prepare their case 
 for the Chancery suit, which ended in the permanent 
 removal of Harriet's children from his custody, on 
 the grounds that his immoral conduct and opinions 
 unfitted him to be their guardian. His health, too, 
 seems to have been bad, though it is hard to know 
 precisely how bad. He was liable to hallucinations 
 of all kinds ; the line between imagination and 
 reality, which ordinary people draw quite definitely, 
 seems scarcely to have existed for him. There are 
 many stories as to which it is disputed how far, if 
 at all, reahty is mixed with dream, as in the case 
 of the murderous assault he beheved to have been 
 made on him one night of wind and rain in Wales ; 
 of the veiled lady who offered to join her life to his ; 
 of the Englishman who, hearing him ask for letters 
 in the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, 
 *' What, are you that damned atheist Shelley ? " 
 and felled him to the ground. Often he would go
 
 30 SHELLEY 
 
 half frantic with delusions — as that his father and 
 uncle were plotting to shut him up in a madhouse, 
 and that his boy WiUiam would be snatched from 
 him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him 
 than flesh and blood. Convinced that he was 
 wasting with a fatal disease, he would often make 
 his certainty of early death the pretext for aban- 
 doning some ill-considered scheme ; but there is 
 probably much exaggeration in the spasms and the 
 consumptive symptoms which figure so excitedly in 
 his letters. Hogg relates how he once plagued him- 
 self and his friends by beheving that he had elephan- 
 tiasis, and says that he was really very healthy. 
 The truth seems to be that his constitution was 
 naturally strong, though weakened from time to 
 time by neurotic conditions, in which mental pain 
 brought on much physical pain, and by irregular, 
 infrequent, and scanty meals. 
 
 In February 1817 he settled at Mario w with Mary 
 and Claire. Claire, as a result of her intrigue with 
 Byron — of which the fruit was a daughter, Allegra, 
 born in January — was now a permanent charge on 
 his affectionate generosity. It seemed that their 
 wanderings were at last over. At Marlow he busied 
 himself with pohtics and philanthropy, and wrote 
 The, Revolt of Islam. But, partly because the climate 
 was unsuitable, partly from overwork in visiting and 
 helping the poor, his health was thought to be 
 seriously endangered. In March 1818, together with 
 the five souls dependent on him — Claire and her 
 baby, Mary and her two babies (a second, Clara, had
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 31 
 
 been bom about six months before) — he left Eng- 
 land, never to return. 
 
 Mary disliked hot weather, but it always put 
 Shelley in spirits, and his best work was done be- 
 neath the sultry blue of ItaHan skies, floating in a 
 boat on the Serchio or the Arno, baking in a glazed 
 cage on the roof of a Tuscan villa, or lying among 
 the ruins of the Ck)liseum or in the pine- woods near 
 Pisa. Their ItaHan wanderings are too intricate to 
 be traced in detail here. It was a chequered time, 
 darkened by disaster and cheered by friendships. 
 Both their children died, Clara at Venice in 1818, 
 and WnHam at Rome in 1819. It is impossible not 
 to be amazed at the heedlessness — the long journeys 
 in a rough foreign land, the absence of ordinary pro- 
 vision against ailments — which seems to have caused 
 the death of these beloved Httle beings. The birth 
 in 1819 of another son, Percy (who survived to be- 
 come Sir Percy Shelley), brought some comfort. 
 Claire's troubles, again, were a constant anxiety. 
 SheUey worked hard to persuade Byron either to 
 let her have Allegra or to look after his daughter 
 properly himself ; but he was obdurate, and the 
 child died in a convent near Venice in 1822. Shelley's 
 association with Byron, of whom, in Julian and 
 Maddalo (1818), he has drawn a picture with the 
 darker features left out, brought as much pain as 
 pleasure to aU concerned. No doubt Byron's splenetic 
 cynicism, even his parade of debauchery, was largely 
 an assumption for the benefit of the world ; but 
 beneath the frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of
 
 32 SHELLEY 
 
 his intimate conversation, beneath his care' ' ' 
 tivation of the graces of a Regency buck, .. , ^ 
 fundamentally selfish and treacherous. Provided no 
 serious demands were made upon him, he enjoyed 
 the society of Shelley and his circle, and the two 
 were much together, both at Venice and in the 
 Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa, where, with a menagerie 
 of animals and retainers, Byron had installed himself 
 in those surroundings of Oriental ostentation which it 
 amused him to affect. 
 
 A more unalloyed friendship was that with the 
 amiable Gisborne family, settled at Leghorn ; its 
 serene cheerfulness is reflected in Shelley's charming 
 rhymed Letter to Maria Gisborne. And early in 1821 
 they were joined by a young couple who proved 
 very congenial. Ned Wilhams was a half-pay 
 Ueutenant of dragoons, with literary and artistic 
 tastes, and his wife, Jane, had a sweet, engaging 
 manner, and a good singing voice. Then there was 
 the exciting discovery of the Countess EmiHa 
 Viviani, imprisoned m a convent by a jealous step- 
 mother. All three of them— Mary, Claire, and 
 Shelley— at once fell in love with the dusky beauty. 
 Impassioned letters passed between her and Shelley, 
 in which he was her " dear brother " and she his 
 " dearest sister " ; but she was soon found to be a 
 very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as 
 the instrument chosen by chance to inspire Epi- 
 psychidion. Finally there appeared, in January 
 1822, the truest-hearted and the most lovable of all 
 Shelley's friends. Edward John Trelawny, a cadet
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 33 
 
 -luo '^f^-jjjgjj^ family, " with his knight-errant aspect, 
 'Mi?k,' 'handsome, and moustachioed," was the true 
 buccaneer of romance, but of honest English grain, 
 and without a trace of pose. The devotion with 
 which, though he only knew Shelley for a few months, 
 he fed in memory on their friendship to the last day 
 of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else can, 
 the force of Shelley's personal attraction ; for this 
 man Uved until 1881, an almost sohtary survivor 
 from the Byronic age, and his life contained matter 
 enough to swamp recollection of half-a-dozen poets. 
 It seems that, after serving in the navy and desert- 
 ing from an East Indiaman at Bombay, he passed, 
 in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredible 
 experiences narrated in his Adventures of a Younger 
 Son ; and all this before he was twenty-one, for in 
 1813 he was in England and married. Then he dis- 
 appeared, bored by civiHsation ; nothing is known 
 of him until 1820, when he turns up in Switzerland 
 in pursuit of sport and adventure. After Shelley's 
 death he went to Greece with Byron, joined the 
 rebel chief Odysseus, married his sister Tersitza, and 
 was nearly killed in defending a cave on Mount 
 Parnassus. Through the subsequent years, which 
 included wanderings in America, and a narrow 
 escape from drowning in trying to swim Niagara, 
 he kept pressing SheUey's widow to marry him. 
 Perhaps because he was piqued by Mary's refusal, 
 be has left a rather unflattering portrait of her. He 
 was indignant at her desire to suppress parts of 
 Queen Mob ; but he might have admired the honesty 
 
 o
 
 34 SHELLEY 
 
 with which she retained Epipsychidion, although 
 that poem describes her as a " cold chaste moon." 
 The old sea-captain in Sir John Millais' picture, 
 " The North- West Passage," now in the Tate Gallery 
 in London, is a portrait of Trelawny in old age. 
 
 To return to the Shelley s. It was decided that 
 the summer of 1822 should be spent with the 
 Williamses, and after some search a house just 
 capable of holding both famihes was found near 
 Lerici, on the east side of the Bay of Spezzia. It 
 was a lonely, wind-swept place, with its feet in the 
 waves. The natives were half-savage ; there was 
 no furniture, and no facility for getting provisions. 
 The omens opened badly. At the moment of moving 
 in, news of Allegra's death came ; Shelley was shaken 
 and saw visions, and Mary dishked the place at first 
 sight. Still, there was the sea washing their terrace, 
 and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of 
 his poems in which a boat does not figure, though 
 it is usually made of moonstone) ; and, while Williams 
 fancied himself as a navigator, Trelawny was really 
 at home on the water. A certain Captain Roberts 
 was commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, 
 where Byron also was fitting out a yacht, the Bolivar. 
 When the Ariel — for so they called her — arrived, 
 the friends were defighted with her speed and handi- 
 ness. She was a thirty-footer, without a deck, 
 ketch-rigged.i Shelley's health was good, and this 
 June, passed in bathing, saihng, reading, and hearing 
 
 1 Professor Dowden, Life of Shelley, vol. ii., p. 501, says 
 " schooner-rigged." This is a landsman's mistake.
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 35 
 
 Jane sing simple melodies to her guitar in the moon- 
 light, was a gleam of happiness before the end. It 
 was not so happy for Mary, who was ill and oppressed 
 with housekeeping for two families, and over whose 
 relations with Shelley a film of querulous jealousy 
 had crept. 
 
 Leigh Hmit, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man 
 of letters, was coming out from England with his 
 wife ; on July 1st Shelley and Williams sailed in the 
 Ariel to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them 
 into the gi'ound-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa. 
 His business despatched, Shelley returned from Pisa 
 to Leghorn, with Himt's copy of Keats's Hyperion 
 in his pocket to read on the voyage home. Though 
 the weather looked threatening, he put to sea again 
 on July 8th, with Williams and an Enghsh sailor-boy. 
 Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht, 
 but was turned back by the authorities because he 
 had no port-clearance. The air was sultry and still, 
 with a storm brewing, and he went down to his cabin 
 and slept. When he awoke, it was to see fishing- 
 boats running into harbour under bare poles amid 
 the hubbub of a thunder-squall. In that squall the 
 Ariel disappeared. It is doubtful whether the \m- 
 seaworthy craft was merely swamped, or whether, 
 as there is some reason to suppose, an Italian felucca 
 ran her down with intent to rob the Enghshmen. 
 In any case, the calamity is the crowning example of 
 that combination of bad management and bad luck 
 which dogged Shelley all his life. It was madness to 
 trust an open boat, manned only by the inexperienced
 
 36 SHELLEY 
 
 Williams and a boy (for Shelley was worse than 
 useless), to the chances of a Mediterranean storm. 
 And destiny turns on trifles ; if the Bolivar had been 
 allowed to sail, Trelawny might have saved them. 
 
 He sent out search-parties, and on July 19th 
 sealed the despairing women's certainty of disaster 
 by the news that the bodies had been washed ashore. 
 Shelley's was identified by a copy of Sophocles in 
 one coat-pocket and the Keats in another. What 
 Trelawny then did was an action of that perfect 
 fitness to which only the rarest natures are prompted : 
 he charged himself with the business of burning the 
 bodies. This required some organisation. There 
 were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials 
 had to be assembled — the fuel, the improvised fur- 
 nace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour 
 upon the P3n:e. In his artless Records he describes 
 the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body was 
 given to the flames on a day of intense heat, when 
 the islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the 
 background the marble-flecked Apennines gleamed. 
 Byron looked on until he could stand it no longer, 
 and swam off to his yacht. The heart was the last 
 part to be consumed. By Trelawny's care the ashes 
 were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. 
 
 It is often sought to deepen our sense of this 
 tragedy by speculating on what Shelley would have 
 done if he had hved. But, if such a question must 
 be asked, there are reasons for thinking that he 
 might not have added much to his reputation. It 
 may indeed be an accident that his last two years
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS AGE 37 
 
 were less fertile in first-rate work than the years 
 1819 and 1820, and that his last unfinished poem, 
 The Triumph of Life, is even more incoherent 
 than its predecessors ; " yet, when we consider the 
 nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant. 
 His song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled 
 afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles in middle 
 life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other 
 resource. Some men suffer spiritual upheavals and 
 eclipses, in which they lose their old selves and 
 emerge with new and different powers ; but we 
 may be fairly sure that this would not have hap- 
 pened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would 
 always have returned to much the same impressions ; 
 for his mind, of one piece through and through, had 
 that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be ob- 
 served in violently unstable characters. The colour 
 of his emotion would have fluctuated — it took on, 
 as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy ; but 
 there is no indication that the material on which it 
 worked would have changed.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PRINCIPAL WHITINGS 
 
 The true visionary is often a man of action, and 
 SheUey was a very peculiar combination of the two. 
 He was_a dreamer, but Jie never dreamed merely for 
 the sake of dreaming ; he always rushed to translate 
 his dreams into acts. The practical side oT him was 
 so strong that he might have been a great statesman 
 or reformer, had not his imagination, stimulated by" 
 a torrential fluency of language, overborne his will. 
 He was Hke a boat (the comparison would have 
 pleased him) built for strength and speed, but im- 
 mensely oversparred. His life was a scene of in- 
 cessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters, 
 diaries, and pamphlets, his translations from Greek, 
 Spanish, German, and ItaHan, and remembering that 
 he died at thirty, and was, besides, feverishly active 
 in a multitude of affairs, we fancy that his pen can 
 scarcely ever have been out of his hand. And not 
 only was he perpetually writing ; he read glutton- 
 ously. He would thread the London traffic, nourish- 
 ing his unworldly mind from an open book held in 
 one hand, and his ascetic body from a hunch of 
 bread held in the other. This fury for Kterature 
 seized him early. But the quahty of his early work 
 
 38
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 39 
 
 was astonishingly bad. An author while still a 
 schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, written for 
 the most part when he was seventeen years old, 
 called Zastrozzi, the mere title of which, with its 
 romantic profusion of sibilants, is eloquent of its 
 nature. This was soon followed by another hke it, 
 St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian. Whether they are 
 adaptations from the German ^ or not, these books 
 are merely bad imitations of the bad school then in 
 vogue — the flesh-creeping school of skeletons and 
 clanking chains, of convulsions and ecstasies, which 
 Miss Austen, though no one knew it, had killed with 
 laughter years before.^ " Verezzi scarcely now shud- 
 dered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and 
 motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which 
 twined themselves in his long and matted hair, 
 almost ceased to excite sensations of horror " — that 
 is the kind of stuff in which the imagination of the 
 young Shehey rioted. And evidently it is not con- 
 sciously imagined ; Kfe really presented itself to him 
 as a romance of this kind, with himself as hero — a 
 hero who is a hopeless lover, bHghted by premature 
 decay, or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and 
 sorrows of mankind to all eternity. This attitude 
 found vent in a mass of sentimental verse and prose, 
 much of it more or less surreptitiously pubHshed, 
 
 ^ So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his 
 edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says that he did 
 not begin learning German until 1815. 
 
 ^ Northanger Abbey, satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, was 
 written before 1798, but was not published until 1818.
 
 40 SHELLEY 
 
 which the researches of specialists have brought to 
 light, and which need not be dwelt upon here. 
 
 But very soon another influence began to mingle 
 with this feebly extravagant vein, an influence which 
 purified and strengthened, though it never quite 
 obHterated it. At school he absorbed, along with 
 the official tincture of classical education, a violent 
 private dose of the philosophy of the French Revolu- 
 tion ; he^ discovered that all that was needed to 
 abohsh all the evil done under the sun was to destroy 
 bigotry, intolerance, and persecution as represented 
 by ' reHgious and monarchical institutions. At first 
 this influence combined with his misguided hterary 
 passions only to heighten the whole absm-dity, as 
 when he exclaims, in a letter about his first dis- 
 appointed love, " I swear, and as I break my oaths, 
 may Infinity, Eternity, blast me — never wiU I for- 
 give Intolerance ! " The character of the romance 
 is changed indeed ; it has become an epic of human 
 regeneration, and its emotions are dedicated to the 
 service of mankind ; but stiU it is a romance. The 
 results, however, are momentous ; for the hero, 
 being a man of action, is no longer content to write 
 and pay for the printing : in his capacity of liberator 
 he has to step into the arena, and, above all, he has 
 to think out a philosophy. 
 
 An early manifestation of this impulse was the 
 Irish enterprise already mentioned (p. 13). Public 
 affairs always stirred him, but, as time went on, it 
 was more and more to verse and less to practical 
 intervention, and after 1817 he abandoned argument
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 41 
 
 altogether for song. But one pamphlet, A Proposal 
 for putting Reform to the Vote (1817), is characteristic 
 of the way in which he was always labouring to do 
 something, not merely to ventilate existing evils, 
 but to promote some practical scheme for aboHshing 
 them. Let a national referendum, he says, be held 
 on the question of reform, and let it be agreed that 
 the result shall be binding on ParUament ; h^ him- 
 self will contribute £100 a year (one-tenth of his 
 income) to the expenses of organisation. He is in 
 favour of annual Parhaments. Though a behever 
 in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by 
 degrees ; it would not do to aboHsh aristocracy and 
 monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the 
 hands of men rendered brutal and torpid by ages of 
 slavery ; and he proposes that the pajmaent of a 
 smaU sum in direct taxes should be the qualification 
 for the parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, 
 was not in the sphere of practical pohtics at the time, 
 but its sobriety shows how far Shelley was from 
 being a vulgar theory-ridden crank to whom the 
 years bring no wisdom. 
 
 Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that 
 " intolerance " was the cause of all evil, and, in the 
 same flash, that it could be destroyed by clear and 
 simple reasoning. Apply the acid of enlightened 
 argument, and rehgious behefs will melt away, and 
 with them the whole rotten fabric which they support 
 — crowns and churches, lust and cruelty, war and 
 crime, the inequality of women to men, and the 
 inequahty of one man to another. With Shelley, to
 
 42 SHELLEY 
 
 embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it at 
 once. The first thing, since religion is at the bottom 
 of all force and fraud, was to proclaim that there is 
 no reason for beheving in Christianity. This was easy 
 enough, and a number of impatient argumentative 
 pamphlets were dashed off. One of these. The Neces- 
 sity of Atheism, caused, as we saw (p. 20), a revolu- 
 tion in his life. But, while Christian dogma was 
 the heart of the enemy's position, there were out- 
 works which might also be usefully attacked : — there 
 were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease 
 and devastating passion ; there were despotism and 
 plutocracy, based on commercial greed ; and there 
 was marriage, which, irrationally tyrannising over 
 sexual relations, produces unnatural cehbacy and 
 prostitution. These threads, and many others, were 
 all taken up in his first serious poem. Queen 31 ah 
 (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank 
 verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of lanthe 
 is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the 
 confines of the universe, where the past, present, 
 and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's 
 gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones ; 
 Ahasuerus, " the wandering Jew," is introduced ; 
 the consummation on earth of the age of reason is 
 described. In the end the faury's car brings the 
 spirit back to its body, and lanthe wakes to find 
 
 " Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, 
 Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love, 
 And the bright beaming stars 
 That through the casement shone."
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 48 
 
 Though many poets have begun their careers with 
 something better than this, Queen Mah will always 
 be read, because it gives us, in embryo, the whole of 
 Shelley at a stroke. The melody of the verse is thin 
 and loose, but it soars from the ground and spins 
 itself into a series of etherial visions. And these 
 visions, though they look utterly disconnected from 
 reahty, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate 
 interest in science. In this respect the sole difference 
 between Queen Mah and such poems as The West 
 Wind and The Cloud is that, in the *'prose of 
 the notes appended to Queen Mah, with their dis- 
 quisitions on physiology and astronomy, deter- 
 minism and utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is 
 exphcit. These notes are a queer medley. We may 
 laugh at their crudity — their certainty that, once 
 orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument, the 
 millennium will begin ; what is more to the purpose 
 is to recognise that here is something more than the 
 ordinary dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There 
 is a flow of vigorous language, vividness of imagina- 
 tion, and, above all, much conscientious reasoning 
 and a passion for hard facts. His wife was not far 
 , wrong when she praised him for a *' logical exact- 
 ness of reason." The arguments he uses are, mdeed, 
 all second-hand, and mostly fallacious ; but he knew 
 instinctively something which is for ever hidden 
 I from the mass of mankind — the difiPerence between 
 I an argument and a confused stirring of prejudices. 
 Then, again, he was not content with abstract 
 generahties : he was always trying to enforce his
 
 44 SHELLEY 
 
 views by facts industriously collected from such 
 books of medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, 
 chemistry, and history as he could get hold of. For 
 instance, he does not preach abstinence from flesh 
 on pure a priori grounds, but because " the orang- 
 outang perfectly resembles man both in the order 
 and number of his teeth." We catch here what is 
 perhaps the fundamental paradox of his character — 
 the combination of a curious rational hardness with 
 the coldest and most romantic ideaUsm. For all its 
 airiness, his verse was thrown ofE by a mind no 
 stranger to thought and research. 
 
 We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic 
 achievement, and it will be well before going further 
 to underline the connection, which persists all through 
 his work and is already so striking in Queen Mah, 
 between his poetry and his philosophical and re- 
 ligious ideas. 
 
 Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet. But 
 his philosophy was much more definite than Cole- 
 ridge's ; it gave substance to his character and edge 
 to his mtellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be dis- 
 tinguished from the emotion generating his verse. 
 There is, however, no trace of originahty in his 
 speculative writing, and we need not regret that, 
 after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a 
 poet, he decided against philosophy. Before finally 
 settling to poetry, he at one time projected a com- 
 plete and systematic account of the operations of 
 the human mind. It was to be divided into sections 
 — childhood, youth, and so on. One of the first
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 45 
 
 things to be done was to ascertain the real nature of 
 dreams, and accordingly, with characteristic passion 
 for a foundation of fact, he turned to the only facts 
 accessible to him, and tried to describe exactly his 
 own experiences in dreaming. The result showed 
 that, along with the scientific impulse, there was 
 working in him a more powerful antagonistic force. 
 He got no further than telling how once, when walk- 
 ing with Hogg near Oxford, he suddenly turned the 
 corner of a lane, and a scene presented itself which, 
 though commonplace, was yet mysteriously con- 
 nected with the obscurer parts of his nature. A 
 windmill stood in a plashy meadow ; behind it was 
 a long low hill, and " a grey covering of uniform 
 cloud spread over the evening sky. It was the 
 season of the year when the last leaf had just fallen 
 from the scant and stunted ash." The manuscript 
 concludes : "I suddenly remembered to have seen 
 that exact scene in some dream of long — Here I 
 was obUged to leave off, overcome with thrilling 
 horror." And, apart from such overwhelming surges 
 of emotion from the depths of sub-consciousness, he 
 does not seem ever to have taken that sort of interest 
 in the problems of the universe which is distinctive 
 of the philosopher ; in so far as he speculated on the 
 nature and destiny of the world or the soul, it was 
 not from curiosity about the truth, but rather be- 
 cause correct views on these matters seemed to him, 
 especially in early years, an infallible method of 
 regenerating society. As his expectation of heaven 
 on earth became less confident, so the speculative
 
 46 SHELLEY 
 
 impulse waned. Not long before his death he told 
 Trelawny that he was not inquisitive about the 
 system of the universe, that his mind was tranquil 
 on these high questions. He seems, for instance, to 
 have oscillated vaguely between behef and disbeUef 
 in personal life after death, and on the whole to have 
 concluded that there was no evidence for it. 
 
 At the same time, it is essential to a just appre- 
 ciation of him, either as man or poet, to see how all 
 his opinions and feehngs were shaped by philosophy, 
 and by the influence of one particular doctrine. 
 This doctrine was Platonism. He first went through 
 a stage of devotion to what he calls " the sceptical 
 philosophy," when his writings were full of schoolboy 
 echoes of Locke and Hume. At this time he avowed 
 himself a materiaUst. Then he succumbed to Bishop 
 Berkeley, who convinced him that the nature of 
 everything that exists is spiritual. We find him 
 saying, with charming pompousness, " I confess that 
 I am one of those who are unable to refuse their 
 assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who 
 assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived." 
 This " intellectual system," he rightly sees, leads to 
 the view that nothing whatever exists except a 
 single mind ; and that is the view which he found, 
 or thought that he found, in the dialogues of Plato, 
 and which gave to his whole being a bent it was never 
 to lose. He Hked to call himself an atheist ; and, 
 if pantheism is atheism, an atheist no doubt he was. 
 But, whatever the correct label, he was eminently 
 rehgious. In the notes to Queen Mah he announces
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 47 
 
 his belief in "a pervading Spirit co-etemal with the 
 universe," and religion meant for him a " perception 
 of the relation in which we stand to the principle 
 of the universe " — a perception which, in his case, 
 was accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus 
 grasped the notion that the whole universe is one 
 spirit, he absorbed from Plato a theory which ac- 
 corded perfectly with his predisposition — the theory 
 that all the good and beautiful things that we love 
 on earth are partial manifestations of an absolute 
 beauty or goodness, which exists eternal and un- 
 changmg, and from which everything that becomes 
 and perishes in time derives such reaUty as it has. 
 Hence our human life is good only in so far as we 
 participate in the eternal reaUty ; and the com- 
 munion is effected whenever we adore beauty, whether 
 ' in nature, or in passionate love, or in the inspiration 
 ' of poetry. We shall have to say something presently 
 about the effects of this Platonic idealism on Shelley's 
 conception of love ; here we need only notice that 
 it inspired him to translate Plato's Symposium, a 
 dialogue occupied almost entirely with theories about 
 love. He was not, however, well equipped for this 
 task. His version, or rather adaptation (for much 
 is omitted and much is paraphrased), is fluent, but 
 he had not enough Greek to reproduce the finer 
 shades of the original, or, indeed, to avoid gross 
 mistakes. 
 
 A poet who is also a Platonist is hkely to exalt 
 his office ; it is his not merely to amuse or to please, 
 but to lead mankind nearer to the eternal ideal —
 
 48 SHELLEY 
 
 Shelley called it Intellectual Beauty — which is the 
 only abiding reahty. This is the real theme of his 
 Defence of Poetry X182J), the best piece of prose he 
 
 "^veFlvrote. Thomas Love Peacock, scholar, novehst, 
 and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one 
 of Shelley's most admired friends, had pubUshed a 
 wittily perverse and paradoxical article, not without 
 
 I much good sense, on The Four Ages of Poetry. Pea- 
 cock maintained that genuine poetry is only possible 
 in half-civilised times, such as the Homeric or 
 Ehzabethan ages, which, after the interval of a 
 learned period, like that of Pope in England, are 
 inevitably succeeded by a sham return to nature. 
 What he had in mind was, of course, the movement 
 represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, 
 the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he 
 describes as a " modern- antique compound of frippery 
 and barbarism." He must have greatly enjoyed 
 writing such a paragraph as this : "A poet in our 
 times is a semi-barbarian in a civihsed community. 
 . . . The march of his intellect is Uke that of a crab, 
 backward. The brighter the light diffused around 
 him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the 
 darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries 
 himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks 
 of his Cimmerian labours." These gay shafts had at 
 any rate the merit of stinging Shelley to action. 
 The Defence of Poetry was his reply. People like 
 Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as an adven- 
 titious seasoning of life — ornamental perhaps, but 
 rather out of place in a progressive and practical age.
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 49 
 
 Shelley undermines the whole position by asserting 
 that poetry — a name which includes for him all 
 serious art — is the very stuff out of which all that is 
 valuable and real in life is made. " A poem is the 
 very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." 
 " The great secret of morals is love, or a going out 
 of our own nature, and an identification of oiurselves 
 with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or 
 person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, [ V 
 must imagine intensely and comprehensively^^ he_ 
 must put himself in the place of another and of / 
 many others ; the pains and pleasures of his species 
 must become his own. The great instrument of 
 moral good is the imagination." And it is on the 
 imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as 
 exercises strengthen a Umb. Historically, he argues, 
 good poetry always coexists with good morals ; 
 for instance, when social life decays, drama decays. 
 Peacock had said that reasoners and mechanical 
 inventors are more useful than poets. The reply is 
 that, left to themselves, they simply make the world 
 worse, while it is poets and " poetical philosophers " 
 who produce " true utility," or pleasure in the 
 highest sense. Without poetry, the progress of 
 science and of the mechanical arts results in mental 
 and moral indigestion, merely exasperating the 
 inequahty of mankind. " Poetry and the principle 
 of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, 
 are the God and mammon of the world." While the 
 emotions penetrated by poetry last, " Self appears 
 as what it is, an atom to a universe." Poetry's 
 
 D
 
 50 • SHELLEY 
 
 " secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous 
 waters which flow from death through life." It 
 makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe 
 anew. " Poets are the hierophants of an unappre- 
 hended inspiration ; the mirrors of the gigantic 
 shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; 
 the words which express what they understand not ; 
 the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what 
 they inspire ; the influence which is moved not, but 
 moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of 
 the world," 
 
 Other poets besides Shelley have seen 
 
 " Through all that earthly dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness," 
 
 and others have felt that the freedom from self, 
 which is attained in the vision, is supremely good. 
 What is pecuHar to him, and distinguishes him from 
 the poets of rehgious mysticism, is that he reflected 
 rationally on his vision, brought it more or less into 
 harmony with a philosophical system, and, in em- 
 bracing it, always had in view the improvement of 
 mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it be 
 imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the 
 theory of the eighteenth century, and for a brief 
 period, when the first impvilse of the Romantic Move- 
 ment was spent, it was again to become the theory 
 of the nineteenth century, that the object of poetry 
 is to inculcate correct principles of morals and 
 rehgion. Poetry, with its power of pleasing, was the 
 jam which should make us swallow the powder im-
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 51 
 
 awares. This conception was abhorrent to Shelley, 
 both because poetry ought not to do what can be 
 done better by prose, and also because, for him, the 
 pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably one. 
 The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a 
 moral, but by communicating to others something 
 of that ecstasy with which he himself bums in con- 
 templating eternal truth and beauty and goodness. 
 
 Hitherto aU the writings mentioned have been, 
 except The Defence of Poetry, those of a yoimg and 
 enthusiastic revolutionary, which might have some 
 interest in their proper historical and biographical 
 setting, but otherwise would only be read as curio- 
 sities. We have seen that beneath Shelley's twofold 
 drift towards practical pohtics and speculative 
 philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it is 
 characteristic of liim that he always tended to regard 
 the writing of verse as a 'pis aller. In 1819, when he 
 was actually working on Prometheus, he wrote to 
 Peacock, " I consider poetry very subordinate to 
 moral and pohtical science," adding that he only 
 wrote it because his feeble health made it hopeless 
 to attempt anythuig more useful. We need not 
 take this too seriously ; he was often wrong about 
 the reasons for his own actions. From whatever 
 motive, write poetry he did. We will now consider 
 some of the more voluminous, if not the most valu- 
 able, results. 
 
 Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,^ is a long poem, 
 
 ^ " Alastor " is a Greek word meaning " the victim of an 
 Avenging Spirit,"
 
 52 SHELLEY 
 
 written in 1815, which seems to shadow forth the 
 emotional history of a young and beautiful poet. 
 As a child he drank deep of the beauties of nature 
 and the subhmest creations of the intellect, until, 
 
 " When early youth had past, he left 
 His cold fireside and alienated home. 
 To seek strange truths in undiscovered lauds." 
 
 He wandered tlurough many wildernesses, and visited 
 the ruins of ^gypt and the East, where an Arab 
 maiden fell in love with him and tended him. But 
 he passes on, " through Arabic, and Persia, and the 
 wild Carmanian waste," and, arrived at the vale of 
 Cashmire, Hes down to sleep in a dell. Here he has 
 a vision. A " veiled maid " sits by him, and, after 
 singing first of knowledge and truth and virtue, then 
 of love, embraces him. When he awakes, all the 
 beauty of the world that enchanted and satisfied him 
 before has faded : 
 
 " The Spirit of sweet Human Love has sent 
 A vision to the sleep of him who spurned 
 Her choicest gifts," 
 
 and he rushes on, wildly pursuing the beautiful 
 shape, like an eagle enfolded by a serpent and feeling 
 the poison in his breast. His limbs grow lean, his 
 hair thin and pale. Does death contain the secret 
 of his happiness ? At last he pauses " on the lone 
 Chorasmian shore," and sees a frail shallop in which 
 he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night the 
 boat flies before the storm to the base of the cHffs of 
 Caucasus, where it is enguKed in a cavern. Fol-
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 53 
 
 lowing the twists of the cavern, after a narrow 
 escape from a maelstrom, he floats into a calm pool, 
 and lands. Elaborate descriptions of forest and 
 mountain scenery bring us, as the moon sets, to 
 the death of the worn-out poet — 
 
 " The brave, the gentle, and tlie beautiful, 
 The child of grace and genius ! Heartless things 
 Are done and said i' the world, and many worms 
 And beasts and men live on . . . but thou art fled." 
 
 In Alastor he melted with pity over what he felt to be 
 his own destiny ; in The Revolt of Islam (1817) he was 
 " a trumpet that sings to battle." / This, the longest of 
 Shelley's poems (there are 4176 lines of it, exclusive 
 of certain lyrical passages), is a versified novel with a 
 more or le^s coherent plot, ^though the mechanism is 
 cumbrous, and any one who expects from the title a 
 story of some actual rebellion against the Turks 
 will be disappointed. /Its theme, typified by an in- 
 troductory vision of an eagle and serpent batthng 
 jin mid-sky, is the cosmic struggle between evil and 
 'good, or, what for Shelley is the same thing, between 
 . the forces of established authority and of man's 
 1 aspiration for Hberty, the eagle standing for the 
 powerful oppressor, and the snake for the oppressed. 
 
 " When round piire hearts a host of hopes assemble 
 The Snake and Eagle meet — the world's foundations 
 tremble." 
 
 This piece of symbolism became a sort of fixed 
 language with him ;| " the Snake " was a name by 
 which it amused him to be known among his friends.
 
 54 SHELLEY 
 
 The clash of the two oppo sites is crudely and nar- 
 rowly conceived, with no suggestion yet of some 
 more tremendous force behind both, such as later 
 on was to give depth to his view of the world conflict. 
 The loves and the virtues of Laon and Cythna, the 
 gifted beings who overthrow the tyrant and perish 
 tragically in a counter-revolution, are too bright 
 against a background that is too black ; but even 
 so they were a good opportunity for displaying the 
 various phases through which humanitarian passion 
 may run — the first whispers of hope, the devotion 
 of the pioneer, the joy of freedom and love, in triumph 
 exultation tempered by clemency, in defeat despair 
 ennobled by firmness. And although in this extra- 
 ordinary production Shelley has still not quite found 
 himself, the technical power displayed is great The 
 poem is in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the 
 long breaking wave of that measure with sureness 
 and ease, imparting to it a rapidity of onset that is 
 all his own. But there are small blemishes such as, 
 even when allowance is made for haste of composi- 
 tion (it was written in a single summer), a naturally 
 deHcate ear would never have passed ; he apologises 
 in the preface for one alexandrine (the long last line 
 which should exceed the rest by a foot) left in the 
 middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there are some 
 eight places where obviously redimdant syllables 
 have crept in. A more serious defect is the per- 
 sistence, still unassimilated, of the element of the 
 romantic-horrible. When Laon, chained to the top 
 of a column, gnaws corpses, we feel that the author
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 55 
 
 of Zastrozzi is still slightly ridiculous, magnificent 
 though his writing has become. It is hard, again, 
 not to smile at this world in which the melodious 
 voices of young eleutherarchs have only to sound for 
 the crouching slave to recover his manhood and for 
 tyrants to tremble and turn pale. The poet knows, 
 as he wrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission 
 is "to apprehend minute and remote distinctions 
 of feeling," and " to communicate the conceptions 
 which result from considering either the moral or 
 the material universe as a whole." He does not see 
 that he has failed of both aims, partly because The 
 R4^volt is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. 
 It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings 
 apprehended are, indeed, remote enough ; in many 
 descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer 
 through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, 
 the " material imiverse " may perhaps be admitted 
 to be grasped as a whole ; and he has embodied his 
 conception of the " moral universe " in a picture of 
 all the good impulses of the human heart, that 
 I should be so fruitful, poisoned by the pressvure of 
 ' reHgious and pohtical authority. It was natural 
 that the method which he chose should be that of 
 the romantic narrative — we have noticed how he 
 began by trying to write novels — nor is that method 
 essentially unfitted to represent the conflict between 
 good and evil, with the whole universe for a stages- 
 instances of great novels that are epics in this sense 
 will occur to every one. But realism is required, 
 and Shelley was constitutionally incapable of realism.
 
 56 SHELLEY 
 
 The personages of the story, Laon and the Hermit, 
 the Tyrant and Cythna, are pale projections of 
 Shelley himself ; of Dr. Lind, an enlightened old 
 gentleman with whom he made friends at Eton ; of 
 His Majesty's Government ; and of Mary Wollstone- 
 craft, his wife's illustrious mother. They are neither 
 of the world nor out of it, and consequently, in so far 
 as they are locahsed and incarnate and their actions 
 woven into a tale, The Revolt of Islam is a failure. 
 In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely 
 the same aims, but with more success, because he 
 had now hit upon a figure of more appropriate 
 vagueness and subUmity. The scheme of Prometheus 
 Unbound (1819) is drawn from the immortal creations 
 of Greek tragedy. 
 
 He had experimented with Tasso and had thought 
 of Job ; but the rebeUious Titan, Prometheus, the 
 benefactor of mankind whom .^schylus had repre- 
 sented as chained by Zeus to Caucasus, with a 
 vulture gnawing his Uver, offered a perfect embodi- 
 ment of Shelley's favourite subject, " the image," 
 I to borrow the words of his wife, " of one warring 
 I \ with the Evil Principle, oppressed not only by it, 
 but by all — even the good, who are deluded into 
 considering evil a necessary portion of humanity ; 
 a victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of 
 triumph, emanating from a reliance in the ultimate 
 ^omnipotence of Good." In the Greek play, Zeus is 
 an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older 
 and milder dynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited 
 in his piinishment by the nymphs of ocean, knows 
 
 i
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 57 
 
 a secret on which the rule of Zeus depends. Shelley 
 took over these features, and grafted on them his 
 own pecuhar confidence in the ultimate perfection 
 of mankind. His Prometheus knows that Jupiter 
 (the Evil Principle) will some day be overthrown, 
 though he does not know when, and that he himself 
 will then be released ; and this event is shown as 
 actually taking place. It may be doubted whether 
 this treatment, while it allows the poet to describe 
 what the world will be hke when freed from evil, 
 does not diminish the impressiveness of the suffering 
 Titan ; for if Prometheus knows that a term is set 
 to his punishment, his defiance of the oppressor is 
 easier, and, so far, less subUme. However that may 
 be, his opening cries of pain have much romantic 
 beauty : 
 
 " The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
 Of their moon -freezing crystals, the bright chains 
 Eat with their burning cold into my bones." 
 
 Mercury, Jupiter's messenger, is sent to offer him 
 freedom if he will repent and submit to the t3a^'ant. 
 On his refusal, the Furies are let loose to torture 
 him, and his agony takes the form of a vision of all 
 the suffering of the world. The agony passes, and 
 Mother Earth calls up spirits to soothe him with 
 images of delight ; but he declares " most vain all 
 hope but love," and thinks of Asia, his wife in happier 
 days. The second act is full of the dreams of Asia. 
 With Panthea, one of the ocean nymphs that watch 
 over Prometheus, she makes her way to the cave 
 of Demogorgon, " that terrific gloom," who seems
 
 58 SHELLEY 
 
 meant to typify the Primal Power of the World. 
 Hence they are snatched away by the Spirit of the 
 Hour at which Jove will fall, and the coming of change 
 pulsates through the excitement of those matchless 
 songs that begin : 
 
 " Life of life ! thy lips enkindle 
 With their love the breath between them." 
 
 In the third act the tyrant is triumphing in heaven, 
 when the car of the Hoiu" arrives ; Demogorgon 
 descends from it, and hurls him to the abyss. Pro- 
 metheus, set free by Hercules, is imited again to 
 Asia. And now, with the tyranny of wrongful 
 power, 
 
 " The loathsome mark has fallen, the man remains 
 Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man 
 Equal, unclasaed, tribeless, and nationless, 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
 Over himself ; just, gentle, wise." 
 
 The fourth act is an epilogue in which, to quote 
 Mrs. Shelley again, " the poet gives further scope 
 to his imagination. . . . Maternal Earth, the mighty 
 parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth, the 
 guide of our planet through the realms of sky ; while 
 his fair and weaker companion and attendant, the 
 Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss from the annihila- 
 tion of Evil in the superior sphere." We are in a 
 strange metaphysical region, an interstellar space of 
 incredibly rarefied fire and light, the true home of 
 Shelley's spirit, where the circling spheres sing to 
 one another in wave upon wave of lyrical rapture.
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 59 
 
 as inexpressible in prose as music, and culminating 
 
 in the cry : 
 
 " To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite ; 
 To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; 
 
 To defy Power which seems omnipotent ; 
 To love, and bear ; to hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; 
 
 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent ; 
 This, like thy glory. Titan, is to be 
 Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free ; 
 This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory." 
 
 On the whole, Promethetis has been over-praised, 
 perhaps because the beauty of the interspersed songs 
 has dazzled the critics. Not only are the personages 
 too transparently allegorical, but the allegory is 
 insipid ; especially tactless is the treatment of the 
 marriage between Prometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, 
 and Asia, the Spirit of Nature, as a romantic love 
 affair. When, in the last of his more important 
 poems, Shelley rettuned to the struggle between the 
 good and evil principles, it was in a different spirit. 
 The short drama of Hellas (1821) was " a mere 
 improvise," the boihng over of his sjntnpathy -with 
 the Greeks, who were in revolt against the Turks. 
 He wove into it, with all possible heightening of 
 poetic imagery, the chief events of the period of 
 revolution through which southern Europe was then 
 passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus in 
 having historical facts as ostensible subject. Through 
 it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats 
 of arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, 
 and these cataclysms, though suggestive of some-
 
 60 SHELLEY 
 
 thing that transcends any human warfare, are yet 
 not completely pinnacled m " the intense inane." 
 But this is not the only merit of Hellas ; its poetry 
 is purer than that of the ear her work, because Shelley 
 no longer takes sides so violently. He has lost the 
 cruder optimism of the Tromeiheus, and is thrown 
 back for consolation upon something that moves us 
 more than any prospect of a heaven reahsed on 
 earth by abolishing kings and priests. When the 
 chorus of captive Greek women, who provide the 
 lyrical setting, sing round the couch of the sleeping 
 sultan, we are aware of an ineffable hope at the heart 
 of their strain of melancholy pity ; and so again 
 when their burthen becomes the transience of all 
 things human. The sultan, too, feels that Islam is 
 doomed, and, as messenger after messenger an- 
 nounces the success of the rebels, his fataHsm ex- 
 presses itself as the growing perception that all this 
 blood and all these tears are but phantoms that come 
 and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity. This again 
 is the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering 
 Jew, who evokes for him a vision of Mahmud II 
 capturing Constantinople. The sultan is puzzled : 
 
 " What meanest thou ? Thy words stream like a tempest 
 Of dazzling mist within my brain " ; 
 
 but we know that the substance behind the mist is 
 Shelley's " immaterial philosophy," the doctrine that 
 nothing is real except the one eternal Mind. Ever 
 louder and more confident sounds this note, until it 
 drowns even the cries of victory when the tide of
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 61 
 
 battle turns in favour of the Turks. The chorus, 
 lamenting antiphonally the destruction of hberty, 
 are interrupted by repeated howls of savage triumph : 
 " Kill ! crush ! despoil ! Let not a Greek escape ! " 
 But these discords are gradually resolved, through 
 exquisitely comphcated cadences, into the golden and 
 equable flow of the concluding song : 
 
 " The world's great age begins anew, 
 
 The golden years return. 
 The earth doth like a snake renew 
 
 Her winter weeds outworn : 
 Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, 
 Like wrecks of a dissolving dream." 
 
 Breezy confidence has given place to a poignant 
 mood of disillusionment. 
 
 " Oh, cease ! must hate and death return ? 
 
 Cease ! must men kill and die ? 
 Cease ! drain not to its dregs the urn 
 
 Of bitter prophecy. 
 The world is weary of the past, 
 Oh, might it die or rest at last ! " 
 
 Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civihsation 
 shall never be restored ; but the wisdom of its 
 thinkers and the creations of its artists are immortal, 
 while the fabric of the world 
 
 *'Xs but a vision ; — all that it inherits 
 Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams." 
 
 It is curious that for three of his more considerable 
 works Shelley should have chosen the form of drama, 
 since the last thing one would say of him is that 
 he had the dramatic talent. Prometheus and HellaSy
 
 62 SHELLEY 
 
 however, are dramas only in name ; there is no 
 thought in them of scenic representation. The 
 Cenci (1819), on the other hand, is a real play ; in 
 ^ writing it he had the stage in view, and even a 
 particular actress, Miss O'Neil. It thus stands alone 
 among his works, unless we put beside it the frag- 
 ment of a projected play about Charles I (1822), 
 a theme which, with its crowd of historical figures, 
 was ill-suited to his powers. And not only is TJie 
 Cenci a play ; it is the most successful attempt 
 since the seventeenth century at a kind of writing, 
 tragedy in the grand style, over which all our poets, 
 from Addison to Swdnbume, have more or less come 
 to grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice Cenci, 
 the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 
 was executed with her stepmother and brother for 
 the murder of her father. The wicked father, more 
 intensely wicked for his grey hairs and his immense 
 abihty, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope 
 impunity for a long succession of crimes, hated his 
 children, and drove them to frenzy by his relentless 
 cruelty. When to insults and oppression he added 
 the horrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, 
 the cup overflowed, and Beatrice, faced with shame 
 more intolerable than death, preferred parricide. 
 Here was a subject made to Shelley's hand — a 
 naturally pure and gentle soul soiled, driven to 
 violence, and finally extinguished, by unnameable 
 wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, 
 is on the side of the persecutor. Haunted by the 
 grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni's picture of Beatrice,
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 63 
 
 so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo her 
 name — though it was only old women calling out 
 " rags " (cenci) — he was tempted from his airy 
 flights to throw himself for once into the portrayal 
 of reahty. There was no need now to dip " his pen 
 in earthquake and echpse " ; clothed in plain and 
 natural language, the action unfolded itself in a 
 crescendo of horror ; but from the ease with which 
 he wrote — it cost him relatively the least time and 
 pains of all his works — it would be rash to infer that 
 he could have constructed an equally good tragedy 
 on any other subject than the injured Beatrice and 
 the combination, which Count Francesco Cenci is, 
 of paternal power with the extreme limit of human 
 iniquity. 
 
 With the exception of The Cenci, everything Shelley 
 published was almost entirely unnoticed at the time. 
 This play, being more intelhgible than the rest, 
 attracted both notice and praise, though it was also 
 much blamed for what would now be called its 
 unpleasantness. Many people, among them his wife, 
 regretted that, having proved his abihty to handle 
 the concrete, he still should devote himself to ideal and 
 unpopular abstractions, such as The Witch of Atlas 
 (1821), a fantastical piece in rime royal, which seems 
 particularly to have provoked Mrs. Shelley. A 
 " lady Witch " lived in a cave on Mount Atlas, and 
 her games in a magic boat, her dances in the upper 
 regions of space, and the pranks which she played 
 among men, are described in verse of a richness that 
 bewilders because it leads to nothing. The poet 
 
 J
 
 64 SHELLEY 
 
 juggles with flowers and gems, stars and spirits, 
 lovers and meteors ; we are constantly expecting 
 liim to break into some design, and are as constantly 
 disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar 
 kind ; it is not the same, for instance, as that pro- 
 duced by Blake's prophetic books, where we are 
 conscious of a great spirit fumbhng after the inex- 
 pressible. Shelley is not a true mystic. He is seldom 
 puzzled, and he never seems to have any difficulty in 
 expressing exactly what he feels ; his images are 
 perfectly definite. Our uneasiness arises from the 
 fact that, with so much clear definition, such great 
 activity in reproducing the subtlest impressions which 
 Nature makes upon him, his work should have so little 
 artistic purpose or form. Stroke is accumiilated on 
 stroke, each a triumph of imaginative beauty ; but as 
 they do not cohere to any discoverable end, the total 
 impression is apt to be one of effort running to waste. 
 This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is 
 felt even in Adonais (1821), his elegy on the death 
 of Keats. John Keats was a very different person 
 from Shelley. The son of a Hvery-stable keeper, he 
 had been an apothecary's apprentice, and for a short 
 time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into 
 Uterature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all 
 from any craving to amehorate the world. His odes 
 are among the chief glories of the EngHsh k nguage. 
 His life, unhke Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, 
 and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappy 
 love-affair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed 
 passion and the Quarterly Eeview's contemptuous
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 65 
 
 attack on his work, of the consumption which killed 
 him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy 
 as a last chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, 
 proposed to nurse him back to health, and offered 
 him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, and died 
 at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not 
 intimate with Keats, and had been slow to recognise 
 his genius ; but it was enough that he was a poet, 
 in S37Tapathy with the Radicals, an exile, and the 
 victim of the Tory reviewers. There is not in 
 Adonais that note of personal bereavement which 
 wails through Tennyson's In Memoriam or Cowley's 
 Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey. Much, especially 
 in the earher stanzas, is common form. The Muse 
 Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of per- 
 sonified abstractions flit before us, " hke pageantry 
 of mist on an autumnal stream " — 
 
 " Desires and Adorations, 
 Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies, 
 Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations 
 Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies.' 
 
 At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that 
 he wants to say, but as he proceeds he warms to his 
 work. The poets gather round Adonais' bier, and 
 in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself 
 as " a phantom among men," who -,-.,<—*-».>.. 
 
 " Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 
 Actseon-Iike ; and now he fled astray 
 
 With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 
 And his own thoughts along that rugged way 
 Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey." 
 
 E
 
 66 SHELLEY 
 
 The Quarterly Reviewer is next chastised, and at 
 last Shelley has found his cue. The strain rises from 
 thoughts of mortality to the consolations of the 
 eternal : 
 
 " Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep ! 
 He hath awakened from the dream of life. 
 'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep 
 With phantoms an unprofitable strife." 
 
 Keats is made " one with Nature " ; he is a pares 
 of that power 
 
 "Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
 Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above." 
 
 It is once more the same conviction, the offspring 
 of his philosophy and of his suffermg, that we noticed 
 in Hellas, only here the pathos is more acute. So 
 strong is the sense of his own misery, the premoni- 
 tion of liis own death, that we scarcely know, nor 
 does it matter, whether it is in the person of Keats 
 or of liimseK that he is lamenting the impermanence 
 of earthly good. His spirit was hastening to escape 
 from " the last clouds of cold mortahty " ; his bark 
 is driven 
 
 " Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng 
 Whose sails were never to the tempest given." 
 
 A year later he was drowned. 
 
 While the beauty of Adonais is easily appreciated, 
 Epipsychidion, written in the same year, must strike 
 many readers as mere moonshine and madness. In 
 Alastor, the poet, at the opening of his career, had 
 pursued in vain through the wilderness of the world
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 67 
 
 a vision of ideal loveliness ; it would now seem that 
 this vision is at last embodied in " the noble and 
 unfortunate Lady EmiUa Viviani," to whom Epipsy- 
 chidion is addressed. Shelley begins by exhausting, 
 in the effort to express her perfection, aU the meta- 
 phors that rapture can suggest. He calls her his 
 adored nightingale, a spirit- winged heart, a seraph of 
 heaven, sweet benediction in the eternal curse, moon 
 beyond the clouds, star above the storm, " thou 
 Wonder and thou Beauty and thou Terror ! Thou 
 Harmony of Nature's art ! " She is a sweet lamp, a 
 " weU of sealed and secret happiness," a star, a tone, 
 a Ught, a solitude, a refuge, a dehght, a lute, a buried 
 treasure, a cradle, a violet-shaded grave, an antelope, 
 a moon shuiing through a mist of dew. But all his 
 " world of fancies " is unequal to express her ; he 
 breaks off in despair. A calmer passage of great 
 interest then explains his philosophy of love : 
 
 " That best philosophy, whose taste 
 Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom 
 As glorious as a fiery martyrdom," 
 
 and tells how he " never was attached to that great 
 sect," which requires that everyone should bind 
 himself for life to one mistress or friend ; for the 
 secret of true love is that it is increased, not dimi- | 
 nished, by division ; hke imagination, it fills the 
 universe ; the parts exceed the whole, and this is 
 the great characteristic distinguishing all things good 
 from all things evil. We then have a shadowy record 
 of love's dealings with him. In childhood he clasped 
 the vision in every natural sight and sound, in verse.
 
 68 SHELLEY 
 
 and in philosophy. Then it fled, this " soul out of 
 my soul." He goes into the wintry forest of life, 
 where " one whose voice was venomed melody " 
 entraps and poisons his youth. The ideal is sought 
 in vain in many mortal shapes, until the moon rises 
 on him, " the cold chaste Moon," smOing on his 
 soul, which hes in a death-hke trance, a frozen ocean. 
 At last the long-sought vision comes into the wintry 
 forest ; it is Emily, Uke the sun, bringing hght and 
 odour and new life. Henceforth he is a world ruled 
 by and rejoicing in these twin spheres. " As to real 
 flesh and blood," he said in a letter to Leigh Hunt, 
 " you know that I do not deal 'rz those articles ; you 
 might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton 
 as expect anything human or earthly from me." 
 Yet it is certain that the figures behind the shifting 
 web of metaphors are partly real — that the poisonous 
 enchantress is his first wife, and the moon that saved 
 him from despair his second wife. The last part of 
 the poem hymns the bliss of union with the ideal, 
 Emily must fly with him ; "a ship is floating in the 
 harbour now," and there is " an isle under Ionian 
 skies," the fairest of all SheUey's imaginary land- 
 scapes, where their two souls may become one. 
 Then, at the supreme moment, the song trembles 
 and stops : 
 
 " Woe is me ! 
 The winged words on which my soul would pierce 
 Into the heights of love's rare universe, 
 Are chains of lead around its flight of fire — 
 I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire."
 
 PRINCIPAL WRITINGS 69 
 
 We have now taken some view of the chief of 
 Shelley's longer poems. Most of these were pub- 
 hshed during his hfe. They brought him httle 
 applause and much execration, but if he had written 
 nothing else his fame would still be secure. They 
 are, however, less than half of the verse that he 
 actually wrote. Besides many completed poems, it 
 remained for his wife to decipher, from scraps of 
 paper, scribbled over, interHned, and erased, a host 
 of fragments, aU valuable, and many of them gems 
 of purest ray. We must now attempt a general 
 estimate of this whole output.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE POET OF BEBELLION, OF NATURE, AND OF LOVE 
 
 It may seem strange that so much space has been 
 occupied in the last two chapters by philosopliical 
 and pohtical topics, and this although SheUey is 
 the most purely lyrical of EngHsh poets. The fact 
 is that in nearly all Enghsh poets there is a strong 
 moral and philosophical strain, particularly in those 
 of the period 1770-1830. They are deeply interested 
 in pohtical, scientific, and rehgious speculations ; 
 in aesthetic questions only superficially, if at all. 
 Shelley, with the tap-roots of his emotions striking 
 deep into poUtics and philosophy, is only an extreme 
 instance of a national trait, which was unusually 
 prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century 
 owing to the state of our insular politics at the time, 
 though it must be admitted that Enghsh artists of 
 all periods have an inherent tendency to morahse, 
 which has sometimes been a weakness, and some- 
 times has given them surprising strength. 
 
 Like the other poets of the Romantic Movement, 
 Shelley expended his emotion on three main objects — 
 pohtics, nature, and love. In each of these subjects 
 he struck a note peculiar to himself, but his singu- 
 
 70
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 71 
 
 larity is perhaps greatest in the sphere of politics. 
 It may be summed up in the observation that no 
 Enghsh imaginative writer of the first rank has been 
 equally inspired by those doctrines that helped to 
 produce the French Kevolution. That all men are 
 bom free and equal ; that by a contract entered into 
 in primitive times they surrendered as much of their 
 rights as was necessary to the well-being of the com- 
 munity ; that despotic governments and established 
 reHgions, being violations of the original contract, are 
 encroachments on those rights and the causes of all 
 evil ; that inequahties of rank and power can be 
 abolished by reasoning, and that then, since men are 
 naturally good, the golden age will return — these are 
 positions which the Enghsh mind, with its dishke 
 of the a priori, will not readily accept. The Enghsh 
 UtiUtarians, who exerted a great influence on the 
 course of affairs, and the classical school of econo- 
 mists that derived from them, did indeed hold that 
 men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory 
 was that, if people were left to themselves, and if 
 the restraints imposed by authority on thought and 
 commerce were removed, the operation of ordinary 
 human motives would produce the most beneficent 
 results. But their theory was quite empirical ; 
 worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, 
 and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence 
 of the Enghsh character, and was justified by the 
 fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, 
 governments were so bad that an immense increase 
 of wealth, inteUigence, and happiness was bound to
 
 72 SHELLEY 
 
 come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete 
 institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this 
 drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying 
 the connections between causes and effects — an in- 
 capacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for 
 history — and his conception of the ideal at which the 
 reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In 
 both these respects his shortcomings were due to 
 ignorance of human nature proceeding from ignorance 
 of himself. 
 
 And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all 
 good men must sympathise with the sincerity of his 
 passion to remould this sorry scheme of things 
 " nearer to the heart's desire," few will find the 
 model, as it appears in his poems, very exhilarating. 
 It is chiefly expressed in negatives : there will be no 
 priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty ; 
 man will be " tribeless and nationless." Though the 
 earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest 
 imagination, the general effect is insipid ; or, if there 
 are colours in the scene, they are hectic, imnatural 
 colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers 
 of bhss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are 
 poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emo- 
 tions which the real world, with all its admixture of 
 evU, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates 
 when he shrilly summons us to adore his New Jeru- 
 salem. Reflecting on the narrowness of his ideals, 
 we are apt to see him as an ignorant and fanatical 
 sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his 
 verse. And we perceive that, as with all honest
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 73 
 
 fanatics, his narrowness comes from ignorance of 
 himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. 
 When he visited Southey there were hot buttered 
 buns for tea, and he so much offended Mrs. Southey 
 by caUing them coarse, disgusting food that she 
 determined to make him try them. He ate first one, 
 then another, and ended by clearing off two plates 
 of the unclean thing. Actively conscious of nothing 
 in himself but aspirations towards perfection, he 
 never saw that, Uke everyone else, he was a cockpit 
 of ordinary conflicting instincts ; or, if this tumult 
 of lower movements did emerge into consciousness, 
 he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it had no 
 connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities 
 as a reformer. Similarly the world at large, full as 
 it was of nightmare oppressions of wrong, fell for him 
 into two sharply opposed spheres of hght and dark- 
 ness — on one side the radiant armies of right, on the 
 other the perverse opposition of devils. 
 
 With this hysterically over-simpHfied view of Hfe, 
 fostered by lack of self-knowledge, was connected a 
 corresponding mistake as to the means by which his 
 ends could be reached. One of the first observations 
 which generous spirits often make is that the un- 
 satisfactory state of society is due to some very small 
 kink or flaw in the dispositions of the majority of 
 people. This perception, which it does not need 
 much experience to reach, is the source of the common 
 error of youth that everything can be put right by 
 some simple remedy. If only some tiny change 
 could be made in men's attitude towards one another
 
 i 
 
 74 SHELLEY 
 
 and towards the universe, what a flood of evil could 
 be dammed ; the slightness of the cause is as striking 
 as the immensity of the effect. Those who ridicule 
 the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is 
 perfectly true, though of course they are right in 
 denouncing the inference so often drawn — and here 
 lay Shelley's fundamental fallacy — that the required 
 tiny change depends on an effort of the will, and that 
 the wiU only does not make the effort because feeling 
 is perverted and intelligence dimmed by convention, 
 traditions, prejudices, and superstitions. It is cer- 
 tain, for one thing, that will only plays a small part 
 in our nature, and that by themselves acts of -will 
 cannot make the world perfect. Most men are helped 
 to this lesson by observation of themselves ; they 
 see that their high resolves are ineffective because 
 their characters are mixed. Shelley never leamt 
 this. He saw, indeed, that his efforts were futile, 
 even mischievous ; but, being certain, and rightly, of 
 the nobiUty of his aims, he could never see that he 
 had acted wrongly, that he ought to have calculat^ed 
 the results of his actions more reasonably. Ever 
 thwarted, and never nearer the happiness he desired 
 for himself and others, he did not, Hke ordinary men, 
 attain a juster notion of the relation between good 
 and ill in himself and in the world ; he lapsed into 
 a plaintive bewildered melancholy, translating the 
 inexplicable conflict of right and wrong into the 
 transcendental view that 
 
 " Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass. 
 Stains the white radiance of Eternitv."
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 75 
 
 But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is 
 best in his poetry is this expression of frustrated 
 .hope. He has indeed, when he is moved simply 
 "by pubUc passion, some wonderful trumpet-notes; 
 what hate and mdignation can do, he sometimes 
 does. And his rapturous dreams of freedom can 
 stir the intellect, if not the blood. But it must be 
 remarked that poetry inspired solely by revolutionary 
 enthusiasm is liable to one fatal weakness : it de- 
 generates too easily into rhetoric. To avoid being a 
 didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown ab- 
 stractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyramiy, and 
 the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the 
 classical manner. They appear now as brothers, 
 now as parents, now as sisters of one another ; the 
 task of unravelHng their genealogy would be as 
 difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been 
 merely the singer of revolution, the mtensity and 
 sincerity of his feeling would still have made him a 
 better poet than Bjrron ; but he would not have been 
 a great poet, partly because of the inherent draw- 
 backs of the subject, partly because of his strained 
 and false view of " the moral miiverse " and of 
 himself. His song, in treating of men as citizens, 
 as governors and governed, could never have touched 
 such a height as Burns' " A man's a man for a' that." 
 Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more 
 than arraign tyrants, The Romantic Movement was 
 not merely a new way of considering human beings 
 in their pubUc capacity ; it meant also a new kind 
 of sensitiveness to their environment. If we turn,
 
 76 SHELLEY 
 
 say, from Pope's The Rape of the Lock to Words- 
 worth's The Prelude, it is as if we have passed 
 from a saloon crowded with a bewigged and painted 
 company, wittily conversing in an atmosphere that 
 has become rather stuffy, into the freshness of a 
 starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the open 
 air, the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may 
 enlarge our feelings with wonder and deUght, so a 
 corresponding change may occur in our emotions 
 towards one another ; in this setting of a universe 
 with which we feel ourselves now rapturously, now 
 calmly, united, we love with less artifice, with greater 
 impetuosity and self-abandonment. " Thomson and 
 Cowper," says Peacock, " looked at the trees and 
 hills which so many ingenious gentlemen had rhymed 
 about so long without looking at them, and the 
 effect of the operation on poetry was hke the dis- 
 covery of a new world." The Romantic poets tended 
 to be absorbed in their trees and hills, but when they 
 also looked in the same spirit on their own hearts, 
 ^that operation added yet another world to poetry. 
 C_In Shelley the absorption of the self in nature is 
 carried to its furthest point. If the passion to which 
 nature moved him is less deeply meditated than in 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge,..its exuberance is wilder ; 
 and in his best lyrics it is inseparably mingled with 
 the passion which puts him among the world's two 
 or three greatest writers of love-poems. 
 
 Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and 
 love that every one knows and likes best. And, in 
 fact, many of them seem to satisfy what is perhaps
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 77 
 
 the ultimate test of true poetry : they sometimes 
 have the power, which makes poetry akin to music, 
 of suggesting by means of words something which 
 cannot possibly be expressed in words. Obviously 
 the test is impossible to use with any objective 
 certamty, but, for a reason which will appear, it 
 seems capable of a fairly straightforward appUcation 
 to Shelley's work. •- 
 
 First we may observe that, just as the sight of some 
 real scene — not necessarily a sunset or a glacier, but 
 a ploughed field or a street-comer — may call up 
 emotions which " he too deep for tears " and cannot 
 be put into words, this same effect can be produced 
 by unstudied descriptions. Wordsworth often pro- 
 duces it : 
 
 " I wandered lonely as a cloud 
 
 That floats qn high o'er vales and hills, 
 When all at once I saw a crowd, 
 A host of golden daffodils." 
 
 Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind 
 of effect is beyond Shelley's reach, though he has 
 many pictures which are both detailed and emotional. 
 Consider, for instance, these lines from The Invita- 
 tion (1822). He calls to Jane WiUiams to come 
 away " to the wild woods and the plains," 
 
 " Where the lawns and pastures be, 
 And the sandhills of the sea ; — 
 Where the melting hoar-frost wets 
 The daisy-star that never sets, 
 And wind-flowers, and violets. 
 Which yet join not scent to hue, 
 Crown the pale year weak and new ;
 
 78 SHELLEY 
 
 When the night is left behind 
 In the deep east, dun and blind, 
 And the blue moon is over us, 
 And the multitudinous 
 Billows murmur at our feet, 
 Where the earth and ocean meet, 
 And all things seem only one 
 In the universal sun." 
 
 This has a wonderful Ughtness and radiance. And 
 here is a passage of careful description from Evening : 
 Ponte a Mare, Pisa : 
 
 *• The sun is set ; the swallows are asleep ; 
 
 The bats are flitting fast in the gray air ; 
 The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep, 
 
 And evening's breath, wandering here and there 
 Over the quivering surface of the stream. 
 Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream. 
 
 There is no dew on the dry grass to-night, 
 Nor damp within the shadow of the trees; 
 
 Tlie wind is intermitting, dry and light ; 
 And in the inconstant motion of the breeze 
 
 The dust and straws are driven up and down. 
 
 And whirled about the pavement of the town." 
 
 Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense 
 that he saw details clearly — unlike Byron, who had 
 for nature but a vague and a preoccupied eye — and 
 evidently, too, his observation is steeped in strong 
 feeling, and is expressed in most melodious language. 
 Yet we get the impression that he neither saw nor 
 felt anjrtliing beyond exactly what he has expressed ; 
 there is no suggestion, as there should be in great 
 poetry, of sometliing beyond all expression. And,
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 79 
 
 curiously enough, this seems to be true even of those 
 fanciful poems so especially characteristic of him, 
 such as The Cloud and Artihusa, where he has dashed 
 together on his palette the most starthng colours in 
 nature, and composed out of them an extravagantly 
 imaginative whole : 
 
 " The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, 
 
 And his burning plumes outspread, 
 Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, 
 
 When the morning star shines dead, 
 As on the j ng of a mountain crag 
 
 Which an earthquake rocks and swings, 
 An eagle alit one moment may sit 
 
 In the light of its golden wings. 
 And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, 
 
 Its ardours of rest and of love. 
 And the crimson pall of eve may fall 
 
 From the depths of heaven above, 
 With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest, 
 
 As still as a brooding dove." 
 
 Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of 
 eagles and rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of 
 spray and thunder and Ughtning ? We hold our 
 breath ; it is superhuman, miraculous ; but he 
 never falters, so vehement is the impulse of his 
 delight. It is only afterwards that we ask ourselves 
 whether there is anytliing beyond the mere dehght ; 
 and reahsing that, though we have been rapt far 
 above the earth, we have had no disturbing glimpses 
 of infinity, we are left with a sUght flatness of dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the 
 poems in which ecstasy is shot through with that
 
 80 SHELLEY 
 
 strain of melancholy which we have aheady noticed. 
 He invokes the wild West Wmd, not so much to exult 
 impersonally m the force that chariots the decaying 
 leaves, spreads the seeds abroad, wakes the Mediter- 
 ranean from its slumber, and cleaves the Atlantic, 
 as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and 
 failure : 
 
 " Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
 
 I fall upon the thorns of life I I bleed ! 
 A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
 One too like thee : tameless, and swift, and proud." 
 
 Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing 
 from misty morning through blue noon to twilight, 
 brings, as he looks over " the w^aveless plain of 
 Lombardy," a short respite : 
 
 " Many a green isle needs must be 
 In the deep wide sea of misery ; 
 Or the Mariner, worn and wan, 
 Never thus could voyage on." 
 
 The contrast between the peaceful loveHness of 
 nature and his own misery is a piteous puzzle. On 
 the beach near Naples 
 
 " The sun is warm, the sky is clear, 
 
 The waves are dancing fast and bright. 
 Blue isles and snowy mountains wear 
 The purple noon's transparent might." 
 
 But 
 
 " Alas ! I have nor hope nor health, 
 Nor peace within nor calm around. 
 Nor that content surpassing wealth 
 The sage in meditation found,
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 81 
 
 And walked with inward glory crowned — 
 Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 
 
 Others I see whom these surround — 
 Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; — 
 To me that cup has been dealt in another measure " ; 
 
 SO that 
 
 " I could lie down like a tired child, 
 And weep away the life of care." 
 
 The aching weariness that throbs in the music of 
 these verses is not mere sentimental self-pity ; it is 
 the cry of a soul that has known moments of bhss 
 when it has been absorbed in the sea of beauty that 
 surrounds it, only the moments pass, and the re- 
 union, ever sought, seems ever more hopeless. Over 
 and over again Shelley's song gives us both the 
 fugitive glimpses and the mystery of frustration. 
 
 " I sang of the dancing stars, 
 I sang of the daedal Earth, 
 And of Heaven — and the giant wars, 
 And Love, and Death, and Birth, — 
 And then I changed my pipings, — 
 Singing how down the vale of Menalus 
 
 I pursued a maiden and clasp'd a reed : 
 Gods and men, we are all deluded thus ! 
 
 It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed : 
 All wept, as I think both ye now would, 
 If envy or age had not frozen your blood. 
 At the sorrow of my sweet pipings," 
 
 Why ib it that he is equal to the highest office of 
 poetry in these sad cris de coeur rather than anjrwhere 
 else ? There is one poem — perhaps his greatest poem 
 — which may suggest the answer. In the Sensitive 
 Plant (1820) a garden is first described on which are
 
 82 SHELLEY 
 
 lavished all his powers of weaving an imaginary 
 landscape out of flowers and Hght and odour. All 
 the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty 
 except the Sensitive Plant, 
 
 " For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower ; 
 Radiance and odour are not its dower ; 
 It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is fuU, 
 It desires what it has not, the beautiful." 
 
 Now there was " a power in this sweet place, an 
 Eve in this Eden." " A Lady, the wonder of her 
 kind," tended the flowers from earhest spring, 
 through the summer, " and, ere the first leaf looked 
 brown, she died ! " The last part of the poem, a 
 pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corrup- 
 tion and decay when the power of good has vanished 
 and the power of evil is triumphant. Cruel frost 
 comes, and snow, 
 
 " And a northern whirlwind, wandering about 
 Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, 
 Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, 
 And snapped them off with his rigid griff. 
 
 WTien Avinter had gone and spring came back 
 
 The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck ; 
 
 But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, 
 
 Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels." 
 
 Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that 
 perhaps we may console ourselves by beheving that 
 
 " In this life 
 Of error, ignorance, and strife, 
 "Where nothing is, but all things seem, 
 And we the shadows of the dream,
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 83 
 
 It is a modest creed, and yet 
 Pleasant if one considers it, 
 To own that death itself must be, 
 Like all the rest, a mockery. 
 
 That garden sweet, that lady fair, 
 And all sweet shapes and odours there, 
 In truth have never passed away : 
 'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed ; not they. 
 
 For love, and beauty, and delight, 
 There is no death nor change : their might 
 Exceeds our organs, which endure 
 No light, being themselves obscure." 
 
 ' The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately 
 connected with his philosophical ideas. It is the 
 creed of the student of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza. 
 What is real and unchanging is the one spirit which 
 interpenetrates and upholds the world with " love 
 and beauty and dehght," and this spirit — the vision 
 which Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" 
 of the Ode to Intellectual Beauty — is what is always 
 suggested by his poetry at its highest moments. 
 The suggestion, in its fulness, is of course ineffable ; 
 only in the case of Shelley some approach can be 
 made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped 
 in philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in 
 which he gave it expression are predominantly melan- 
 choly, because this kind of idealism, with its insist- 
 ence on the unreaHty of evil, is the recoil from life 
 of an unsatisfied and disappointed soul. 
 
 His philosophy of love is but a special case of this 
 all-embracing doctrine. We saw how in Epipsy-
 
 84 SHELLEY 
 
 chidion he rejected monogamic principles on the 
 ground that true love is increased, not diminished, 
 by division, and we can now understand why he 
 calls this theory an " eternal law." For, in this life 
 of illusion, it is in passionate love that we most 
 nearly attain to communion with the eternal reahty. 
 Hence the more of it the better. The more we divide 
 and spread our love, the more nearly will the frag- 
 ments of goodness and beauty that are in each of 
 us find their true fruition. This doctrine may be 
 inconvenient in practice, but it is far removed from 
 vulgar sensuaHsm, of which Shelley had not a trace. 
 Hogg says that he was " pre-eminently a ladies' 
 man," meaning that he had that childUke helpless- 
 ness and sincerity which go straight to the hearts 
 of women. To this youth, preaching subhme mys- 
 teries, and needing to be mothered into the bargain, 
 they were as iron to the magnet. There was always 
 an Eve in his Eden, and each was the " wonder of 
 her kind " ; but whoever she was — Harriet Grove, 
 Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Kitchener, ComeUa 
 Tinner, Mary Godwin, EmiHa Viviani, or Jane 
 Williams — she was never a Don Juan's mistress ; 
 she was an incarnation of the soul of the world, a 
 momentary mirror of the eternal. Such an attitude 
 towards the least controllable of passions has several 
 drawbacks : it involves a certain inhumanity, and 
 it is only possible for long to one who remains ignorant 
 of himself and cannot see that part of the force im- 
 pelling him is blind attraction towards a pretty face. 
 It also has the result that, if the lover is a poet,
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 85 
 
 his love-soiigs will be sad. Obsessed by the idea of 
 communion with some divine perfection, he must 
 needs be often cast down, not only by finding that, 
 Ixion-like, he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said 
 of himself and EmiHa), but because, even when the 
 object of his affection is worthy, complete com- 
 munion is easier to desire than to attain. Thus 
 Shelley's love- songs are just what might be expected. 
 If he does strain to the moment of ingress into the 
 divine being, it is to swoon with excess of bUss, as 
 at the end of Epipsychidion, or as in the Indian 
 Serenade : 
 
 " Oh lift me from the grass ! 
 I die ! I faint ! I fail ! " 
 
 More often he exhales pure melancholy : 
 
 " See the mountains kiss high heaven 
 
 And the waves clasp one another ; 
 No sister-flower would he forgiven 
 
 If it disdained its brother. 
 And the sunlight clasps the earth, 
 
 And the moonbeams kiss the sea : 
 What is all this sweet work worth 
 
 If thou kiss not me ?" 
 
 Here the failure is foreseen ; he knows she will not 
 kiss him. Sometimes his sadness is faint and re- 
 strained : 
 
 " I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden, 
 Thou needest not fear mine ; 
 My spirit is too deeply laden 
 Ever to burthen thine."
 
 86 SHELLEY 
 
 At other times it flows with the fuhiess of despair, 
 as in 
 
 " I can give not what men call love, 
 But wilt thou accept not 
 The worship the heart lifts above 
 
 And the Heavens reject not, 
 The desire of the moth for the star, 
 
 Of the night for the morrow, 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow ? " 
 or in 
 
 J' When the lamp is shattered 
 The light in the dust lies dead- 
 
 When the cloud is scattered 
 The rainbow's glory is shed. 
 
 When the lute is broken, 
 Sweet tones are remembered not ; 
 
 When the lips have spoken, 
 Loved accents are soon forgot." 
 
 The very rapture of the skylark opens, as he listens, 
 the wound at his heart : 
 
 "We look before and after, 
 And pine for what is not : 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 
 With some pain is fraught ; 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 
 
 • Is the assertion contained in this last line universally 
 
 ^] true ? Perhaps. At any rate it is true of Shelley. 
 
 His saddest songs are the sweetest, and the reason 
 
 is that in them, rather than in those verses where 
 
 he merely utters ecstatic delight, or calm pleasure, 
 
 . or bitter indignation, he conveys ineffable sugges- 
 
 1 tions beyond what the bare words express.
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 87 
 
 It remains to point out that there is one means of 
 convejTng such suggestions which was outside the 
 scope of his genius. One of the methods which 
 poetry most often uses to suggest the ineffable is 
 by the artful choice and arrangement of words. 
 A word^ simply b y bftin p ; cunni np;1y placed and given 
 a certain colour, can, in the hands of a good crafts-, 
 ma n, open _u£_indescribable vistas. But Keats, 
 when, in reply to a letter of^critTcism, he wrote to 
 him, " You might curb your magnanimity, and be 
 more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject 
 with ore," was giving him advice which, though 
 admirable, it was impossible that he should follow. 
 Shelley was not merely not a craftsman by nature, 
 he was not the least interested in those matters which 
 are covered by the clumsy name of " technique." 
 It is characteristic of him that, while most great 
 poets have been fertile coiners of new words,, his 
 only addition to the language is the ugly " ideahsm " 
 in the sense of " ideal object." He seems to have 
 strayed from the current vocabulary only in two 
 other cases, both infelicitous — " glode " for " glided," 
 and " blosmy " for " blossomy." He did not, hke 
 Keats, look on fine phrases with the eye of a lover. 
 His taste was the conventional taste of the time. 
 Thus he said of Byron's Cain, " It is apocalyptic, it 
 is a revelation not before communicated to man " ; 
 and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better poets 
 than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael 
 Angelo, and the only things about which he was 
 enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of anti-
 
 88 SHELLEY 
 
 quity which he loved for their associations, were the 
 paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we 
 find in him any of those new metrical effects, those 
 subhme inventions in prosody, with which the great 
 masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets 
 in this respect, and Shelley's blank verse is hmp 
 and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which 
 consist in the beauty of compUcated wholes, were 
 never his. He is supreme, indeed, in simple out- 
 bursts where there is no question of form, but in 
 efforts of longer breath, where architecture is re- 
 quired, he too often sprawls and fumbles before the 
 inspiration comes. 
 
 Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such 
 criticisms vain. We may trace in it all kinds of 
 arrieres pensees, philosophical and sociological, that 
 an artist ought not to have, a nd we may even disUk e 
 its dominating conception of a vague spirit that 
 pervades the universe ; but we must admit that when 
 h^ wrote it was as if seized and swept away by some ^ 
 "^unseen power "that fell ux3on him unpremeditated. - 
 His emotions were of that fatal violence which dis- 
 tinguishes so many illustrious but unhappy souls 
 from the mass of peaceable mankind. In the early 
 part of last century a set of illustrations to Faust 
 by Retzch used to be greatly admired ; about one of 
 them, a picture of Faust and Margaret in the arbour, 
 Shelley says in a letter to a friend : " The artist 
 makes one envy his happiness that - he can sketch 
 such things with calmness, which I only dared look 
 upon once, and which made my brain swim round
 
 THE POET OF REBELLION 89 
 
 oiily to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which 
 I knew that it was figured." So shght were the 
 occasions that could affect him even to vertigo. 
 When, from whatever cause, the frenzy took him, 
 he would write hastily, leaving gaps, not caring about 
 the sense. Afterwards he would work conscientiously 
 over what he had written, but there was nothing left 
 for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make 
 plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as 
 he could. One result of this method was that his 
 verse preserved an unparaUelled rush and spontaneity, 
 which is perhaps as great a quaUty as anjrthing 
 attained by the more bee-hke toil of better artists.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is 
 
 immense, and no attempt will be made even to summarise it 
 
 here. A convenient one-volume edition of the poems is that 
 
 edited by Professor Edward Dowden for Messrs. Macmillan 
 
 (1896) ; it includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There 
 
 is a good selection of the poems in the " Golden Treasury 
 
 Series," compiled by A. Stopfoid Brooke. The Prose Works 
 
 have been collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman 
 
 in four volumes (1876-1880). Of the letters there is an 
 
 edition by Mr. Roger Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A number 
 
 of letters to Elizabeth Hitchener were published by Mr. 
 
 Bertram Dobell in 1909. 
 
 For a first-hand knowledge of a poet's life and character 
 
 the student must always go to the accounts of contemporaries. 
 
 In Shelley's case these are copious. There are T. L. Peacock's 
 
 Memoirs (edited by H. F. B. Brett-Smith, 1909) ; Peacock's 
 
 Nightmare Abbey contains an amusing caricature of Shelley 
 
 in the person of Scythrops ; and in at least two of her novels 
 
 Mary Shelley has left descriptions of her husband : Adrian, 
 
 Earl of Windsor, in The Last Man, is a portrait of Shelley, 
 
 and Lodore contains an account of his estrangement from 
 
 Harriet. His cousin Tom Medwin's Life (1847) is a bad 
 
 book, full of inaccuracies. But Shelley had one unique piece 
 
 of good fortune : two friends wrote books about him that 
 
 are masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's Life is especially valuable 
 
 for the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, 
 
 Byron, and the Author, describes him in the last year before 
 
 his death. Hogg's Life has been republished in a cheap 
 
 edition by Messrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of 
 
 90
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 91 
 
 Trelawny's Records in Messrs. Routledge's " New Universal 
 Library." But both these books, while they give incom- 
 parably vivid pictures of the poet, are rambling and un- 
 conventional, and should be supplemented by Professor 
 Dowdeii's Life of Shelley (2 vols., 1886), which will always 
 remain the standard biography. Of other recent lives, Mr. 
 A. Glutton-Brock's Shelley : the Man and the Poet (1910) may 
 be recommended. 
 
 Of the innumerable critical estimates of Shelley and hie 
 place in literature, the most noteworthy are perhaps 
 Matthew Arnold's Essay in his Essays in Criticism, and 
 Francis Thompson's Shelley (1909). Vol. iv. "Naturalism 
 in England," of Dr. George Brandes' Main Curreyits in 
 Nineteenth Century Literature (1905), may be read with 
 interest, though it is not very reliable ; and Prof. Oliver 
 Elton's A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (1912), 
 should be consulted. 
 
 Whoever wishes to follow the fortunes, after the fire of 
 their lives was extinguished by Shelley's death, of Mary 
 Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and the rest, should read, besides 
 Trelawny's Records already mentioned, The Life and Letters 
 of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, by Mrs. Julian Marshall 
 (2 vols., 1889), and The Letters of E. J. Trelawny, edited by 
 Mr. H. Buxton Forman (1910).
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adonais, 64 
 Alastor, 51 
 
 Allegra, child of Claire Clair- 
 mont and Byron, 30, 31, SI 
 Austen, Miss, 39 
 
 BoiNViLLB, Mrs., 23 
 Brandes, Dr. George, 10 
 Browne, Miss Felicia Dorothea, 
 
 20 
 Burns, Robert, 75 
 Byron, Lord, 10, 28, 31, 32, 34, 
 
 75, 78, 87 
 
 Castleeeagh, Lord, 12-14 
 Cenci, The, 62 
 Clairmont, Charles, 24 
 — Clara (Claire), 24, 25, 26, 
 28, 30, 31 
 aoud, The, 79 
 Coleridge, S. T., 11, 44, 76 
 Congress of Vienna, the, 15 
 
 ^ Defence of Poetry, The, 48 
 -^ Dowden, Prof. E., 34 
 
 Epipsychidion, 66, 84 
 Euganean Hills, Lines written in 
 
 the, 80 
 Evening, Ponte a Marc, 78 
 
 French Revolution, effect of, 
 in England, 11 
 
 George III, 12, 14 
 
 — IV, 14 
 
 Gisborne, Mrs., 32 
 Godwin, Fanny, 24, 29 
 
 — Mary Wollstonecraft {see 
 Shelley, Mary) 
 
 — Mrs., 24, 26 
 
 — William, 22, 24, 27 
 Grove, Harriet, 19, 84 
 
 Hellas, 59 
 
 Hemans, Mrs. (see Browne, 
 
 Miss Felicia Dorothea) 
 Kitchener, Elizabeth, 21, 23, 
 
 84 
 Hogg, T. J., 16, 19-21, 30, 45, 
 
 84' 
 Hunt, Leigh, 35 
 Hymn to Pan, 81 
 
 " I fear thy kistes," 85 
 Indian Serenade, The, 85 
 Invitation, The, 77 
 Ireland, England's treatment 
 of, 11, 12 
 
 — Shelley's expedition to, 
 13, 40 
 
 Julian and Maddalo, 31 
 
 Keats, John, 35, 64, 87 
 
 92
 
 INDEX 
 
 93 
 
 Landor, W. S., 10 
 
 Lind, Dr., 56 
 
 Liverpool, Lord, 13 
 
 Love, Shelley's philosophy of, 
 
 68, 83 
 Love's Philosophy, 85 
 
 ■^Masque of Anarchy, The, 14 
 Moore, Thomas, 87 
 
 Necessity of Atheism, The, 20, 
 42 
 
 Peacock, T. L., 48, 51, 76 
 Peter Bell the Third, 15 
 Peterloo Massacre, the, 14 
 Pope, Alexander, 76 
 Princess Caroline, the, 14 
 Prometheus Unbound, 56 
 Proposal, a, for Putting Reform 
 to the Vote, 41 
 
 Queen Mob, 42 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 39 
 Reform Act of 1832, the, 12 
 Revolt of Islam, The, 30, 53 
 Roberts, Captain, 34 
 
 St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, 
 
 39 
 Sensitive Plant, The, 81 
 Shelley, Clara, 28, 31 
 
 — Mary, 24, 26, 33, 56, 58, 
 63, 68, 64 
 
 — Mr. (afterwards Sir) 
 Timothy, 16, 20 
 
 — Percy Bysshe. His family, 
 13, 18 ; expedition to Ireland, 
 13 ; writes political poems. 
 
 13; encourages revolutionary 
 movements, 15 ; personal 
 appearance, 17 ; at Eton, 18 ; 
 at Oxford, 19 ; interest in 
 science, 19 ; expelled from 
 Oxford, 20 ; entanglement 
 with Harriet Westbrook, 21 ; 
 first marriage, 22 ; elopes 
 with Mary Godwin, 25 ; first 
 Swiss journey, 26 ; second 
 Swiss journey, 28 ; deprived 
 of children by Chancery 
 decree, 29 ; hallucinations, 
 29 ; settles at Marlow, 30 ; 
 leaves England for Italy, 
 31 ; Italian period, 31-34 ; 
 his love of the sea, 34 ; 
 drowned, 35 ; his body 
 burned by Trelawny, 36 ; 
 early work, 38-44; logical 
 character of his mind, 43 ; 
 his philosophy, 44-47, 81 
 sqq. ; describes himself in 
 Adonais, 65; influenced by 
 principles of the French Re- 
 volution, 71 ; revolutionary 
 poems, 75 ; connection of 
 his melancholy and his philo- 
 sophy, _80r8J._ 
 Shelley, Sir Bysshe, 18, 27 
 
 — Sir Percy, 31 
 
 — William, 28, 31 
 Sidmouth, Lord, 13 
 Skylark, To a, 86 
 Southey, Mrs., 73 
 
 — Robert, 11 
 
 Stanzas written in dejection near 
 
 Naples, 80 
 Swellfoot the Tyrant, 14
 
 94 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Thomson, James, 11 
 Trelawny, E. J., 32, 36 
 Turner, Cornelia, 23, 8i 
 
 ViviANi, Emilia, 32, 67, 84 
 
 Westbrook, Eliza, 21, 23 
 — Harriet, 21, 23, 68, 84 
 ^West Wind, Ode to the, 80 
 , " When the lam-p is shattered," 86 
 
 Williams, Jane, 32, 35, 77, 
 
 84 
 — Ned, 32, 35 
 Witch of Atlas, The, 63 
 WoUstonecraft, Mary, 24 
 Wordsworth, William, 11. 15, 
 
 76,77 
 
 Zastrozzi, 39 
 
 Printed by Ballantynk, HANSON 6^ Ca 
 Edinburgh <>• London 
 
 3/13 
 
 IS
 
 THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS 
 
 THE FIRST HUNDRED VOLUMES 
 
 The volumes issued (Spring 1913) are marked with an asterisk 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 ♦i. The Foundations of Science . . By W. C. D. Whetham, F.R.S. 
 
 *2. Embryology— The Beginnings of Life By Prof. Gerald Leighton, M.D. 
 3. Biology— The Science of Life . . By Prof. W. D. Henderson, M.A. 
 
 *4. Zoology: The Study of Animal Life By Prof. E. W. MacBride, F.R.S. 
 
 •5. Botany ; The Modern Study of Plants By M. C. Slopes, D.Sc, Ph.D. 
 6. Bacteriology By W. E. Carnegie Dickson, M.D. 
 
 •7. The Structure of the Earth . . By the Rev. T. G. Bonney, F.R.S. 
 
 •8. Evolution By E. S. Goodrich, M.A. , F.R.S. 
 
 Q.Darwin By Prof. W. Garstang, M.A., D.Sc. 
 
 ^10. Heredity By J. A. S. Watson, B.Sc. 
 
 •11. Inorganic Chemistry .... By Prof. E. C. C. Baly, F.R.S. 
 •12. Organic Chemistry .... By Prof. J. B. Cohen, B.Sc, F.R.S. 
 •13. The Principles of Electricity . . By Norman R. Campbell, M.A. 
 
 *i4. Radiation By P. Phillips, D.Sc. 
 
 *i5. The Science of the Stars . . . By E. W. Maunder, F.R.A.S. 
 •16. The Science of Light . . . . By P. Phillips, D.Sc. 
 
 •17. Weather-Science By R. G. K. Lempfert, M.A. 
 
 *i3. Hypnotism By Alice Hutchison, M.D. 
 
 "ig. The Baby: A Mother's Book . . By a University Woman. 
 *2o. Youth and Sex— Dangers and Safe- f ByMarySch.irlieb, M.D., M.S., and 
 guards for Boys and Girls . .1 G. E. C. Pritchard, M.A., M.D. 
 •21. Motherhood-A Wife's Handbook . By H. S. Davidson, F.R.C.S.E. 
 
 *22. Lord Kelvin By A. Russell, M. A., D.Sc. 
 
 *23. Huxley By Professor G. Leighton, M.D. 
 
 24. Sir W. Huggins and Spectroscopic/ By E.W. Maunder, F.R.A.S. , of the 
 
 Astronomy \ Royal Observatory, Greenwich. 
 
 *62. Practical Astronomy . . . . By H. Macpherson, Jr., F.R.A.S. 
 ,,..,.„ /By Sydney F. Walker, R.N., 
 
 •63. Aviation I ^ M.I.E.E. 
 
 •64. Navigation By W. Hall, R N., B.A. 
 
 *65. Pond Life By E. C. Ash, M.R A.C. 
 
 •66. Dietetics By Alex. Bryce, M.D., D.P.H. 
 
 *94. The Nature of Mathematics . . By P. G. B. Jourdain, M.A. 
 
 95. Applications of Electricity . . . By Alex. Ogilvie, B.Sc. 
 
 •96. Gardening By A. Cecil Bartlett. 
 
 97. The Care of the Teeth . . . By J. A. Young, L.D.S. 
 
 ■"98. Atlas of the World .... By J. Bartholomew, F.R.G.S. 
 
 *iio. British Birds By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 
 
 23. The Meaning of Philosophy . . By T. Loveday, M.A. 
 
 •26. Henri Bergson By H. Wildon Carr. 
 
 •27. Psychology By H. J. Watt, M.A., Ph.D. 
 
 •28. Ethics HyCanonRashdall, D.Litt.,F.B.A. 
 
 29. Kant's Philosophy By A. D. Lindsay, M.A. 
 
 30. The Teaching of Plato . . . By A. D. Lindsay, M.A. 
 
 ■•67. Aristotle By Prof. A. E.Taylor, M. A., F.B.A. 
 
 •68. Nietzsche By M. A. Miigge, Ph.D. 
 
 •69. Eucken By A. J. Jones, M.A. , B.Sc, Ph.D. 
 
 70. The Experimental Psychology of | ^ p. W. Valentine, B.A. 
 
 Beauty I ' 
 
 •71. The Problem of Truth . . . By H. Wildon Carr. 
 99. George Berkeley : the Philosophy | g ^ jj^^^^ Hicks, Litt.D. 
 of Idealism j ■' 
 
 31. Buddhism By Prof. T.W. Rhys Davids, F.B.A. 
 
 •32. Roman Catholicism . . . . By H. B. Co.xon. 
 
 •33. The Oxford Movement . . . By Wilfrid P. Ward. 
 
 •34. The Bible in the Light of the Higher/ By Rev. W. F. Adeney, M.A., and 
 
 Criticism \ Rev. Prof. W. H. Bennett, Litt.D. 
 
 3;. Cardinal Newman By Wilfrid Meynell. 
 
 •72. The Church of England • . . By Rev. Canon Masterman.
 
 74- 
 
 •75- 
 •76. 
 
 *36. 
 37- 
 •38. 
 •39- 
 •40. 
 *4i. 
 
 42. 
 
 *43. 
 44. 
 
 45- 
 46. 
 
 *6i. 
 77- 
 
 •78. 
 
 100. 
 
 loi. 
 
 102. 
 •103. 
 
 104. 
 
 •47- 
 48. 
 
 49. 
 
 79- 
 •80. 
 
 81. 
 •82. 
 
 > 
 92. 
 
 •105. 
 
 •106. 
 
 •si- 
 
 •52- 
 *S3- 
 
 *54. 
 *55- 
 •56. 
 *57. 
 
 58- 
 
 59- 
 *6o. 
 
 84. 
 •85. 
 
 86. 
 *87. 
 
 88. 
 
 89. 
 90. 
 91. 
 
 •93. 
 
 107. 
 
 *io8. 
 
 109. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND REl,IC101H— (con fmue J) 
 Ang-lo-Catholicism . . . . By A. E. Manning Foster. 
 
 The Free Churches .... By Rev. Edward Shillito, M.A. 
 
 Judaism By Ephraim Levine, B.A. 
 
 Theosophy By Annie Besant. 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 By H. W. Nevinson. 
 
 By Prof. F. M. Powicke, M.A. 
 
 By Hilda Johnstone, M.A. 
 
 By E. O'Neill, M.A. 
 
 By Ian Colvin. 
 
 The Growth of Freedom 
 Bismarck .... 
 Oliver Cromwell 
 Mary Queen of Scots . 
 
 Cecil Rhodes ..... _^ 
 
 Julius Cjesar By Hilary Hardinge, 
 
 History of England- 
 England in the Making 
 England in the Middle Ages 
 The Monarchy and the People 
 The Industrial Revolution 
 Empire and Democracy 
 
 Home Rule 
 
 Nelson .... 
 Wellington and Waterloo 
 A History of Greece . 
 Luther and the Reformation 
 The Discovery of the New World 
 Turkey and the Eastern Question 
 A History of Architecture . 
 
 SOCIAL AND 
 
 Women's Suffrage 
 
 . By Prof. F. J. C. Hearnshaw, LL.D. 
 
 . By E. O'Neill, M.A. 
 
 . By W. T. Waugh, M.A. 
 
 . By A. Jones, M.A. 
 
 . ByG. S. Veitch, M.A. 
 
 . By L. G. Redmond Howard. 
 
 . By H. W. Wilson. 
 
 . By Major G. W. Red way. 
 
 . By E. Fearenside, B.A. 
 
 . By L. D. .Agate, M.A. 
 
 . By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 By John Macdonald. 
 
 . By Mrs. Arthur Bell. 
 
 ECONOMIC 
 
 By M. G. Fawcett, LL.D. 
 
 The Working of the British System"! n' -d r v> at • nr a 
 
 of Government to-day . . | ^'^ ^'°^- Ra^^s^V ^I""". ^'-A 
 
 An Introduction to Economic Science 
 
 Socialism . 
 
 Mediaeval Socialism 
 
 Syndicalism 
 
 Labour and Wages 
 
 Co-operation . 
 
 Insurance as Investment 
 
 The Training of the Child 
 
 Trade Unions . 
 
 Everyday Law 
 
 By Prof. H. O. Meredith, M.A. 
 
 By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 By Rev. B. Jarrett, O.P., M.A. 
 
 By J. H. Harley, M.A. 
 
 By H. M. Hallsworth, M.A., B.Sc. 
 
 By Joseph Clayton. 
 
 By W. A. Robertson, F.F.A. 
 
 By G. Spiller. 
 
 By Joseph Clayton. 
 
 By J. J. Adams. 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 Shakespeare By 
 
 Wordsworth By 
 
 Pure Gold— A Choice of Lyrics and\r)„ 
 Sonnets . . . . . . / ^^ 
 
 Francis Bacon By 
 
 The Brontes By 
 
 Carlyle By 
 
 Dante By 
 
 Ruskin By 
 
 Common Faults in Writing English By 
 
 A Dictionary of Synonyms . . . By 
 
 Classical Dictionary .... By 
 
 History of English Literature . . By 
 
 Browning By 
 
 Charles Lamb By 
 
 Goethe By 
 
 Balzac By 
 
 Rousseau By 
 
 Ibsen By 
 
 Tennyson By 
 
 R. L. Stevenson By 
 
 Shelley By 
 
 William Morris By 
 
 Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D. 
 Rosaline Masson. 
 
 H. C. O'Neill. 
 
 Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 
 Flora Masson. 
 
 the Rev. L. MacLean Watt. 
 
 A. G. Ferrers Howell. 
 
 A. Blyth Webster, M.A. 
 
 Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 
 Austin K. Gray, B.A. 
 
 A. E. Stirling. _ 
 
 A. Compton-Rickett. 
 
 Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 
 Flora INIasson. 
 
 Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D. 
 
 Frank Harris. 
 
 H. S.icher. 
 
 Hilary Hardinge. 
 
 Aaron Watson. 
 
 Rosaline Masson. 
 
 Sydney Waterlow, M.A. 
 
 A. Blyth Webster, M.A. 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH: T. C. & E. C. JACK ^ 
 NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 iC'DLD-URL APR ll 1^89 
 
 ■«- jT^C^ a IMnTiTT tl^UJ
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 375 956 o 
 
 ^^'^' 
 
 ■7 ^ 
 
 ^•11 
 
 .■111- 
 |i«t < 
 
 lit Bia 
 OK''