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THE PLACE OF 
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 AMONG THE ENGLISH POETS OF 
 HIS TIME. 
 
 s. s. 
 
Camtrilrge : 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CI AY, M.A, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
THE PLACE OF 
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 AMONG THE ENGLISH POETS OF 
 HIS TIME 
 
 R. PICKETT SCOTT, 
 
 king's college. 
 
 BEING THE ESSAY WHICH OBTAINED 
 THE MEMBERS' PRIZE, 1877. 
 
 DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS. 
 
 1878 
 
fAPrfrO 
 
The Representatives in Parliament of the University of Cambridge 
 formerly gave four annual Prizes of fifteen guineas each, for the best 
 Dissertations in Latin Prose. These Prizes were established in 1752 by 
 the Hon. Edward Finch and the Hon. Thomas Townshend, and were con- 
 tinued by the succeeding Members until 1870, when in lieu of four Prizes of 
 ;i^i5. 15^. each, the Representatives of the University in Parliament desired 
 to give annually two Prizes of ;,^3i. loj-. each, one for an English Essay on 
 some subject connected with British History or Literature, the other for a 
 Latin Essay, each Prize to be open for competition to all Members of the 
 University not of sufficient standing to be created Masters of Arts or Law ; 
 and the following Regulations were confirmed by Grace of the Senate, 
 Nov. II, 1869, 
 
 1. That there be two yearly Prizes of £^1. los. each, to be called 
 The Members' Prizes, the one for an English Essay on some subject 
 connected with British History or Literature, the other for a Latin Essay. 
 
 2. That each of these Prizes shall be open for competition to all Stu- 
 dents of the University who are not of sufficient standing to be created 
 Masters of Arts or Law, or who being Students of Medicine are not of 
 more than seven years' standing from Matriculation; provided that no 
 Student, who has gained either Prize, shall be eligible for another Members' 
 Prize given for an Essay m the same language. 
 
 3. That the subject for the English Essay shall be selected and the 
 Prize adjudged by the Vice-Chancellor and two Examiners elected by 
 
 'Grace of the Senate at the last Congregation in February in each year. 
 
 4. That the subject of the Latin Essay shall be selected and the Prize 
 adjudged by the Vice-Chancellor and two Examiners elected by Grace of 
 the Senate at the last Congregation in February in each year. 
 
 5. That the subjects both of the Latin and of the English Essay shall 
 be given out at the end of the Lent Term, and the Essays sent in on or 
 before the tenth day of November in each year. 
 
 6. Any Essay which the Examiners shall unanimously declare to be in 
 their judgment worthy of being published, shall be printed at the expense of 
 the University. 
 
 Subject for 1877: 
 *' The place of Shelley among the English poets of his time." 
 
 752241 
 
This Essay is published in deference to the opinion 
 <jf the University Examiners. 
 
 Yet the author, — admitting that his work is by no 
 means the ripe fruit of reading and thought, but merely 
 the result of a four months' labour of love during an 
 enforced abstinence from sterner studies — feels that 
 many of the opinions stated and forms of expression 
 used herein may justly be considered crude and imma- 
 ture, and deems it at least expedient to commend this 
 explanation to the indulgent remembrance of his readers. 
 
 He also feels bound to acknowledge that he has 
 received help from many sources, particularly from the 
 critical work of Brimley, Swinburne and Stopford 
 ] Brooke. 
 
PLAN OF ESSAY. 
 
 Introduction. To appreciate the work of Shelley, one must lay aside 
 all prejudice. 
 
 The Revolution in English poetry at beginning of 19th century 
 was brought about mainly by Wordsworth and Shelley. 
 
 The poets of Shelley's time reviewed separately. 
 
 Byron's work selfish, though honest — Wordsworth essentially a 
 teacher — Shelley a prophet and bard — Coleridge of an unique 
 imagination — Keats a seeker after beauty. 
 
 Characteristics of Shelley as a man. 
 
 His earnestness— His faith in a happy future — His enthusiasm : 
 its effect on his work — His love of liberty and hatred of intolerance 
 — His honesty and fearlessness — His unfairness in judging others — 
 A summing-up. 
 
 Brief review of Shelley's early poems. 
 
 Representative Poems. 
 
 Prometheus Unbound. — Shelley's favourite idea embodied therein 
 — His object in writing — Shelley a reformer — Inconsistency in the 
 poem — Its supreme lyrical excellence — Its relation to Hellas and 
 Adonais. 
 
 The Cenci. — Preceded by Julian and Maddalo — Its power — 
 Compared with tragedies of Byron and Coleridge — Shelley's treat- 
 ment of the horrible compared with treatment by Keats and 
 Coleridge — Morality of this play — Character of Cenci — Shelley's 
 power for satire compared with Byron's — Character of Beatrice. 
 
 Characteristics of Shelley as a poet. 
 
 His plagiarisms — On the element of human interest in his poems 
 — On his obscurities — His lack of humour — His finish — His music : 
 result obtained in disregard of conventions — Great power of smaller 
 poems — His high place as a poet. 
 
 The poets of Shelley's time compared and contrasted. 
 
 Shelley with Wordsworth — with Byron — with Coleridge — with 
 Keats. 
 
 Conclusion. Why Shelley's poems are not liked in old age— Shelley's 
 religion — Result of his work. 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 On the plagiarisms and repetitions of Shelley. 
 
CHIEF CONTRIBUTIONS TO SHELLEY 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 1 . Accounts of Shelley's life, 
 
 Ly Hogg, Medwin, Trelawney, De Quincey, and G. Barnett Smith. 
 
 2. Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley ; 
 Relics of Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett. 
 
 3. Notes attached to editions of Shelley's works, 
 
 by Mrs Shelley, D. G. Rossetti, H. Buxton Forman. 
 
 4. Notes on the text of Shelley's poems, 
 
 by Swinburne {Essays and Studies) ; 
 Contemporary Revietv (July and August, 1877). 
 
 5. Critical Essays on Shelley's works, 
 
 by Miss Blind [West?fiinster Revietv, July, 1870) ; 
 
 by Professor Baynes {Edinburgh Revieio, April, 187 1). 
 
 6. Criticisms on one or more of Shelley's poems in 
 
 Edinburgh Reviezv (Vols. 40, 69, 90) ; 
 Quarterly Review {y oh. 26, 36, no). 
 
THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TLME. 
 
 The poet hath the child's sight in his brek'if/ 
 And sees all new." — Eliz. Karhett I^jXGV.'ning. 
 
 He who aspires to be a great poet, says Macaulay, must 
 first become a little child. He must take to pieces the 
 whole web of his mind. We would carry this statement 
 further, and affirm that this unweaving process has to be 
 undergone by the mind of him who aspires to appreciate 
 a great poet. This is pre-eminently the case when the 
 work under examination is that of the poet Shelley. No 
 man more than he so constantly refused to accept as 
 truths to live by the conclusions arrived at by other 
 men, and no poet more earnestly than he sought to 
 reach the roots which underlie the relations of man to 
 man, of the human to the divine. 
 
 Easier for himself Shelley doubtless would have 
 found it if he had been more readily content with the 
 experience of other men, for if he had accepted their 
 
2 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG TLIE 
 
 gold for gold, instead of searching for it himself, he would 
 have been spared much labour and much dirt-sifting. 
 Easier we repeat it would have been, pleasanter it 
 might have been for him ; he had thus been spared the 
 necessity of his voluntary exile, he had thus become a lion 
 in society, an oracle courted and flattered : but it would 
 have been disastrous for us ; his crown would have been 
 mixed with alloy which now is absent, although indeed 
 the mark of the fire has passed upon it — that seven- 
 times-heated fire through which he had to pass. 
 
 We have noted in Shelley a stout refusal to obtain 
 Truth at second hand, but though the trait from which 
 this refusal proceeds is good, when duly set off by the 
 company of' certam other characteristics, it becomes 
 harmful when exalted to undue prominence ; for then, 
 refusing to take on trust the old heaven or the old earth, 
 it strikes at the root of all belief, religious and otherwise. 
 Thus it happened with Shelley ; after losing trust in the 
 men with whom he came in contact, he lost trust in the 
 God whom as yet he only knew by their report ; and 
 while thus voluntarily he divested himself, as it were, of 
 the wings of faith, the whole of his after-life was an 
 attempt to soar into those realms from which his own act 
 had exiled him. 
 
 But not only was Shelley deficient in the quality of 
 Faith, he seems utterly to have mistaken what is meant 
 by that word. This we shall proceed to show ; and since 
 it is not so much our desire to enunciate the opinions of 
 the poet as to prove them by his own words, we may 
 perhaps be excused if we use more quotations from his 
 works than is usual ; but in such cases, as in mechanics, 
 what is lost in speed is gained in power. 
 
 Repentance Shelley abominated as ' the dark idolatry 
 of self; but Faith, as he called it, he seemed to hate 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 3 
 
 with a perfect hatred ; let us learn what is the work of 
 this virtue in the eyes of the poet. 
 
 *'Fear, Hatred, Faith and Tyranny . . . spread, 
 Those subtle nets which snare the living and the dead." 
 
 *' Faith ... in the heart of man. 
 Gives shape, voice, name to spectral horrorf." 
 
 In another passage the poet smiles upon ' the grave 
 in which were lain Fear, Faith, and Slavery.' Then she 
 is ranked with Custom and Hell and Melancholy, else- 
 where she and Plague and Slaughter form 'a ghastly 
 brood/ while in another place the poet even goes so far 
 as to declare 'bloody Faith' to be 'the foulest birth of 
 Time.' 
 
 From these quotations it is evident, that beyond 
 being himself void of the quality of Faith, Shelley did not 
 truly distinguish what is represented by the term : as 
 evidently as the word repentance embodied to him the 
 idea of 7^emorse, so the word faith was his synonym of 
 superstition; but the habit of wantonly, as it would 
 almost seem, using holy names was inherent in Shelley, 
 and it brought its punishment. " Why do you call your- 
 self an atheist?" said Trelawney once to him. "I used 
 it" (the word atheist), was the answer, "to express my 
 abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a 
 knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice." 
 This spirit of defiance was at the same time both the 
 cause and the result of many of his peculiarities ; his 
 feelings had been roughly handled by the world, and 
 although he knew there was further rough treatment 
 in store for him if he retaliated, he yet spoke out de- 
 fiantly, " You have ill-treated me, and I in my turn will 
 handle roughly the names you hold so dear." 
 
 t This couplet is found in Mr Buxton Forman's note to Stanza i8 of 
 Canto IX of Laon and Cythna. It is part of one of the alterations which 
 transformed that poem into the milder (!) Revolt of Islam. 
 
4 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 But if he attempted to degrade and debase the two 
 words we have mentioned, he raised and ennobled 
 another word greater than either. We must go back to 
 the time of the Apostles to find the word love used with 
 as noble a meaning as it possessed in the mind of the 
 poet. Paul, indeed, proclaimed that love is the fulfilling 
 of the law, and no less was Shelley's estimate of its 
 value. To him it was the foundation-stone, it was the 
 key-stone, it was the coping-stone of his work. " Love 
 is celebrated everywhere," he says in his preface to Laon 
 and Cythiia, (and nowhere more than in the poet's own 
 heart), " as the sole law which should govern the moral 
 world." In the same poem he sings — 
 
 "And I among thena went in joy — a nation 
 Made free by love; a mighty brotherhood, 
 Linked by a jealous interchange of good." 
 
 And not alone in his poems was this love celebrated by 
 him : his whole life, by its abnegation of self, by its 
 fervent loyalty to good, and by its intense sympathy with 
 sufi"ering, sang the same high truth that love abides al- 
 ways and is greater than all things. 
 
 But his search after Truth did not bring him many 
 friends, and his openly expressed contempt for forms 
 brought him many enemies. His university shut its 
 doors and his father turned his back upon him ; even his 
 wife and he misunderstood one another, and their union 
 was dissolved by her voluntary death. A spirit of un- 
 rest seemed to haunt him as it had haunted his own 
 Wandering Jew. He seemed ever to be seeking a land 
 of rest which ever receded from before him ; and when 
 at last he seemed to be nearing the object of his weary 
 yearnings, he attained only that rest which is the com- 
 mon heritage of mankind : 
 
 "God's finger touched him and he slept." 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 5 
 
 These remarks sufficiently indicate our conviction 
 that we have under examination the work of no ordinary 
 man, but of one who determined to prove the truth of all 
 things around him — even up to his belief in a God and 
 down to the meaning of terms in everyday use. To 
 appreciate his work duly, it is necessary then to strip the 
 mind of all forms and conventions and ceremonies, and 
 to be prepared to accept social rights and privileges and 
 customs and proprieties on the simple basis of their 
 justice ; so it is no vain word that is uttered when we say 
 that to comprehend the work of Shelley, a man has to 
 take to pieces the whole web of his mind. 
 
 The regeneration in poetry which began with the 
 century was caused by the action of many forces none of 
 which was truly understood at the time, but it is now 
 becoming clear by the subsidence of popular prejudice 
 that the two chief instruments in bringing about this 
 new era were Shelley and Wordsworth. From different 
 quarters and with different weapons did these poets 
 attack the school of Dryden and Pope, — the school of 
 men who were satisfied with the existing order of things, — 
 and each was in his own way successful. We propose to 
 say a word about both Shelley and Wordsworth in this 
 representative character, and also a word about Byron, 
 who united in himself some of the qualities of both. 
 
 The poems of Lord Byron are the experience of a 
 man who sought pleasure as the chief good of life. He 
 sought for it as for hid treasure, and in the faithful 
 record that he gives of his search and his failure consists 
 the chief value of his teaching. For it would be difficult 
 to imagine greater advantages than he possessed with 
 which to prosecute his search ; an ample fortune, a great 
 name, and the utmost vigour of mind were his, and he 
 
6 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG -^HE 
 
 used them all to secure his object, but in vain. Society- 
 aided him, a great world applauded, but he had at last 
 wearily to proclaim his want of success ; the subtle 
 essence he was seeking had escaped from his crucible, 
 leaving nothing but ashes behind. There is something 
 very humiliating to see a great intellect, such as Byron's 
 undoubtedly was, flung away in the pursuit of so paltr>^ 
 an object, yet there is something very moving in the 
 fearlessness and the honesty with which he displays the 
 ill success of his endeavours. Over this is thrown the 
 sparkle of a style rich in vigour, wit and enthusiasm, and 
 glad with the consciousness of power, catching ' at every 
 turn the colours of the sun.' Despite his rank, his power, 
 and his wit, the fruit he gathered was at best but Dead 
 Sea fruit : it could never satisfy the hungry soul. 
 
 The poems of Wordsworth proceed from an experience 
 totally opposite to that of Lord Byron. He, too, was 
 conscious of genius, but he regarded it as a precious 
 deposit of great responsibility to be treasured up with 
 peculiar care. " The poet is a teacher," said he ; " I wish 
 to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing." It is 
 therefore to his teaching that we must look for his power. 
 It was reserved for him first " to unfold the glory and 
 the beauty of the material world," and to exalt the 
 imagination to a high place among the faculties. He 
 first showed in what way great Nature teaches those w^ho 
 are willing diligently to learn of her, and how exceeding 
 great is the reward of calm and repose which she bestows 
 upon her true children. He also, more than any poet, 
 has aided to draw together the rich and the poor, not by 
 idly declaiming against the pride of the one and exalt- 
 ing the virtues of the other, but by enlarging upon the 
 sympathies common to both classes and bringing both 
 together on the basis of a common manhood. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 7 
 
 He of whom we have especially to speak was a re- 
 presentative poet in more respects than one. " Let me 
 acknowledge," he wrote in the preface to the greatest 
 of his works, "that I have a passion for reforming the 
 world;" and while we note that this passion was his great 
 political characteristic, we should note also that under 
 pressure of existing evil clear-sighted politicians are apt 
 to separate in two parties : the one sees the ills which 
 must attend the setting straight of wrong, and shrinks 
 from the sight ; the other looks beyond the tempest to the 
 rainbow of promise ahead. To the latter class belonged 
 Percy Shelley. To this was he called by the " divine 
 ordination of facts," for this was he anointed by the holy 
 oil of suffering : " most men," he says himself — * 
 
 *'Are cradled into poetry by wrong, 
 They learn in suffering what they teach in song." 
 
 "Whether this be the best or most useful training for 
 the poet," writes George Brimley, ''may well be doubted, 
 but it is quite indubitable that such discipline will soon- 
 est open a man's eyes to the evils of existing institutions, 
 and the vices of old societies ; and will lend to his invec- 
 tives that passion which raises them above satire, to his 
 schemes that enthusiasm which redeems them from 
 being crotchets ; will turn his abstract abhorrence of 
 oppression into hatred against the oppressors — his loath- 
 ing of corruption into a withering scorn and contempt 
 for tyrants and their tools, the knaves and hypocrites 
 who use holy names and noble offices to promote their 
 selfish ends, and to fetter and enslave their brother 
 men." Thus it was with Shelley: injustice towards him- 
 self only served to awaken in him a bitter hostility to 
 religion and society, and. to encircle with a noble halo 
 the head of him who should inaugurate a new social and 
 
b THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 religious era. Further than this, with a passionate long- 
 ing he yearned after truth in its purity, after a Being 
 who should absorb his nature into its own, after a 
 personal living unity in all things. Thus his name has 
 become the rallying-word of those who would constitute 
 society on a new basis — who exclaim with him 
 
 **The world is weaiy of the past. 
 Oh! might it die or rest at last," 
 
 and look forward to the coming 'world's great age,' to 
 the return of the golden years, and to a reign more 
 bright and good than that of Saturn and of Love. 
 
 ''Thus," continues the critic, ''Shelley united in him- 
 self many of the mightiest tendencies of his age — its 
 democratic, its sceptical, its pantheistic, its socialistic 
 spirit : yet, after the passions and the theories which 
 supplied him with the subject matter of his poems have 
 died away and become mere matters of history, there 
 will still remain a song, such as mortal man never sung 
 before, of inarticulate rapture and of freezing pain — of a 
 blinding light of truth and a dazzling weight of glory, 
 translated into English speech, as coloured as a painted 
 window, as suggestive, as penetrating, as intense as music." 
 
 There remain two poets besides those we have 
 already mentioned, who, although not representative 
 poets in the broadest sense of the term, yet nobly shared 
 in the great revolution of their art, and were each un- 
 rivalled in certain branches of their craft. We refer to, 
 and shall proceed to consider the work of, Coleridge and 
 Keats. 
 
 The poems of Coleridge are the transcript of a 
 singular mind, of a vast original genius. Possibly he 
 helped to teach men to think, but his teaching i§ not the 
 rare thing about him : what he was is the thing to be 
 considered — a poet whose like we shall never see again. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF IIIS TIME. 9 
 
 Few poets have done so little good work as he in so 
 long a life, but none have done better where he has done 
 well. His best poems are simply peerless and unique — 
 perfectly finished and exquisitely beautiful. But they 
 are beautiful rather with a natural than with a sculptured 
 beauty; they bear on them no mark of hammer or 
 chisel, — thus have they grown, not thus have they been 
 carved. Events of the day had once a vast and absorb- 
 ing interest for Coleridge, but the results of the French 
 Revolution gave a death-blow to all his hopes and threw 
 his energies back upon himself. He had been willing to 
 believe that this movement would restore the lost age of 
 gold to the earth, but it served at best to erect a golden 
 image with thighs of brass and feet of- clay, disappoint- 
 ing thereby so bitterly the great soul of the poet, that 
 he turned away from the harsh realities of life and 
 sought refuge in a sweet land of dreams. So passing 
 wonderful and peopled with such brilliant fantasies was 
 this land, that no mortal has set eye on such visions 
 before, nor will any ascend into such rapturous realms of 
 imagination again. Here is this poet's throne, and here 
 he has no rival. 
 
 The poems of John Keats are those of a man con- 
 fessedly alien to all things beyond the range of his art. 
 *'I have not one opinion," he declares, "upon anything 
 except matters of taste." It is, therefore, to his influence 
 on poetry that we should look for the record of his life- 
 work, and here the record is neither obscure nor scanty. 
 To be a poet, as we have intimated, was the object of 
 his life, and he had in him the stuff without which no 
 great poet is made. As Byron sought pleasure, Keats 
 sought beauty, and his was the more successful search; 
 so much so that he is justly regarded as the founder of that 
 which is called the literary school of English poetry. 
 S. S. 2 
 
10 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG TILE 
 
 Unlike Shelley, whose whole being was stirred at the 
 vision of present injustice and future equity, Keats left 
 the things of the present to take care of themselves, that 
 he might cull in the fields of the past such flowers as 
 pleased him. The beauty of such garlands as he wove, 
 and described with the loving enthusiasm of an artist for 
 his art, has served to fill men with that which they did 
 not possess before — a love of beauty for its own sake. 
 This result was skilfully and delicately expressed by 
 Shelley in two lines, where in his mourning for Keats 
 he declares that now — 
 
 *'He is a portion of the loveliness 
 Which once he made more lovely." 
 
 It seems strange when we consider the immense pile 
 of Shelley literature already existing, to have to say that 
 no completely satisfactory life of the poet has yet been 
 written; but it is sof. Those who have attempted a full 
 account of his life have either lacked power for the work 
 or understanding of the task before them: Medwin is 
 shamefully inaccurate; Hogg is doubtful as to which is 
 the more important person — the poet or himself. Then, 
 again, accounts of short periods of a life are nearly 
 always unsatisfying ; otherwise Trelawney's Recollections 
 is worthy of a high place in one's estimation. Nor is 
 this difference surprising ; Hogg and Medwin lived too 
 
 + We feel almost disposed to recall this sentence when we look upon 
 an addition to Shelley literature even later than Mr Buxton Forman's — 
 namely "a critical biography" of Shelley, by George Barnett Smith, a 
 book in which the story of Shelley's life is told with much sympathy, 
 power and acumen. It errs somewhat perhaps, as the Contemporary 
 (Nov. 1877) points out, on the side of anathematizing the poet's enemies, 
 and makes too little of Shelley's want of humour, but otherwise it is an 
 .excellent book, — compact, clear and just. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME, II 
 
 near Shelley, being unobservant men, to appreciate his 
 genius ; by Medwin, Shelley was always remembered as a 
 genial fellow-yachtsman ; by Hogg as joint-editor with 
 him of St Irvyne and author of Zatrozzi ; but Trelawney 
 sought the acquaintance of Shelley because he looked 
 upon him as already a great poet despite the glorious 
 fame of Byron and the laureate wreath of Southey. 
 The Shelley Memorials are disjointed, but they afford 
 ample proof that while Lady Shelley lives there is no 
 need to seek further for a competent biographer. It is 
 no intention of ours to occupy space in putting down the 
 facts of the poet's life ; these are known by every school- 
 boy : the broad lines of the portrait are familiar enough, 
 it is the delicate shading that is yet needed. It is 
 doubly unfortunate that such a life yet remains to be 
 written, because a due understanding of it is more neces- 
 sary with this poet than with almost any other; for from 
 one end to the other of his work, from Queen Mab to 
 The Triumph of Life, there breathes an intense per- 
 sonality. Who can doubt, for instance, that in AJajIar, 
 in Rosalind and, Helen, in The Triumph of Life, the poet 
 is referring to himself and to the circumstances of his 
 lot, unconsciously perhaps, but unmistakably. We are 
 not quite convinced that in the spectacle of Prometheus 
 unjustly bound and ill-treated, Shelley has entirely lost 
 sight of the stupid and harsh persecutions he himself 
 underwent. But this intense personality, far from being 
 a defect, is indeed that which gives its great power to 
 his impassioned language. Had it not been for this 
 intensity of feeling, this white heat of indignation, the 
 whole fabric of his verse would have given way under 
 the weight of ornament which he has been pleased to 
 lay upon it. It would even then have seemed a very 
 Field of the Cloth of Gold, but now it is a field on which 
 
 2 — 2 
 
12 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 the jewelled sword can do good work, and the sparkling 
 helm is seen foremost in the fray. 
 
 The characteristic which runs through the whole of 
 Shelley's work like a thread of gold in a tissue of silver, 
 is his belief in the ultimate perfection of men, joined to an 
 enthusiasm corresponding to this high ideal. He claimed 
 for Laon and Cythna that which he might have claimed 
 for most of his work, namely that it was produced by a 
 series of thoughts which filled his mind with unbounded 
 and sustained enthusiasm, and was written 'with the 
 same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the com- 
 munications of a dying man.' Thus the words hard and 
 inspiration, which sound so coldly applied to other men, 
 when ascribed to Shelley have a peculiar appropriateness 
 and truth. If ever a man gave himself up to his work, 
 heart and soul, seeming to live only in it and for it, 
 Shelley was the m^an ; a more genuine and unforced 
 inspiration it was impossible for any poet to possess ; 
 like the vatcs of old, the divine breath seemed to come 
 upon him, to take him out of himself, and to give his 
 utterance the authority of an oracle. When in this rapt 
 frame of mind, he committed his thoughts to paper with 
 the utmost rapidity. Laon and Cythna — a poem half as 
 long as \h.^^neid — occupied little more than six months 
 in the composition. The Witch of Atlas was completed 
 in three days ; his beautiful translation of the Symposium 
 in ten mornings ; while he declares that he only ex- 
 pended a few days on Peter Bell the Third, and charac- 
 terises Hellas as 'a mere improvise.' Although he wrote 
 thus rapidly, yet he corrected as he went; but if he could 
 not think of a word, he left a blank and went on ; if a 
 verse would not finish smoothly he let it go — nothing 
 stopped him in his onward sweep. Thus when the 
 MSS. had to be deciphered it was frequently found such 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME, 13 
 
 a difficult task that only an intense love for the poet 
 and a deep conviction of the worth of his least word has 
 been sufficiently inspiriting for the work. 
 
 Mr Trelawney thus describes the original MS. draft 
 oi Lines to a Lady with a Guitar, — "It was a frightful 
 scrawl, words smeared out with his finger, and one upon 
 the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together in 
 most admired disorder; it might have been taken for a 
 sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the 
 blots for wild ducks." And that this description is 
 applicable to many other MSS. is evident, when we 
 know that that of Hellas, for example, has on the aver- 
 age ten lines effaced for one retained. Besides these 
 drawbacks to a correct text of the poet there were others 
 hardly less important : some of the poems were printed 
 in alien Italy; many more in England with the task of 
 revision delegated to friends; while others did not see 
 the light till after that 'heart of hearts' had been laid 
 under the violets and daisies he loved so well in the 
 little Protestant cemetery at Rome. "His text," writes 
 Swinburne, ''is already matter for debate and comment, 
 as though he were a classic newly unearthed. Certain 
 passages begin to be famous as crucial subjects for 
 emendation, and the master singer of our modern poets 
 shares with his own masters and models the least enviable 
 proof of fame — that given by corrupt readings and 
 diverse commentaries." Owing to the inspiration with 
 which Shelley wrote, if once he laid aside a poem he 
 was not easily prevailed upon to finish it. His wife, 
 indeed, persuaded him to complete Rosalind aiid Helen, 
 and it is one of the least satisfactory of his poems. Yet 
 it is only fair to notice, on the other hand, how ex- 
 quisitely he has rounded off the Lines ivritten among the 
 Enganean HillSy which had been laid aside unfinished. 
 
14 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 This affords incontestlble proof that it was possible for 
 even the most elevated moods of inspiration to be 
 repeated for him ; and when we consider that the fourth 
 act of Prometheus Unbound, with its exquisite antiphonal 
 music, was an afterthought, we are almost led to acknow- 
 ledge that sometimes the second inspiration of a bard 
 is more exalted than his first. 
 
 We have spoken of one of Shelley's great charac- 
 teristics, and of the way in which it affects his compo- 
 sition, but there are others which affect the web and woof 
 of his poetry. " I knew Shelley more intimately than 
 any man," Avrites Hogg, "but I never could discern in 
 him any more than two fixed principles. The first was 
 a strong, irrepressible love of liberty; the second was an 
 equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but 
 more especially of religious opinions." These are the 
 characteristics to which Shelley owes much of his perse- 
 cution in the past and much of his idolatry in the present 
 time. Undoubtedly Shelley was a democrat at heart — 
 all his works testify thereto — and wheresoever the prin- 
 ciples of democracy flourish, there is the ground cleared 
 for a temple to our poet: because of this trait which 
 Wordsworth and he at first seemed to possess in com- 
 mon, it is interesting to note the effect of the French 
 Revolution upon each of them. Wordsworth looked for 
 a rosewater revolution, and his dream of universal hap- 
 piness vanished at the Reign of Terror. Shelley, gentle 
 and sensitive as he was, did not sicken at the sight of 
 blood as his more robust brother-poet did, but looking 
 forward into the great Hereafter, he welcomed the knife 
 of the pruner for the sake of the good fruit to come. 
 The other characteristic was not perhaps as deeply 
 stamped in his work as the first, but his speech at 
 Dublin, and the pamphlet which he issued to the Irish 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 1 5 
 
 people, owe much of their worth to its prominence therein. 
 Perhaps if we were to substitute hatred of intolerance for 
 Hogg's love of toleration, we should be nearer the truth, 
 for this indeed is the key-note of Qneen Mab, and 
 the principal discord in Laoji and CytJina. 
 
 But beside Shelley's high faith in a golden future and 
 his ardent love of liberty, he had other characteristics 
 as a man and as a poet which should not be overlooked. 
 He was, as his life and his works witness, exceptionally 
 honest and fearless : like his own Alastor, he walked 
 'obedient to the light within his soul,' and, like him, he 
 asked not whither he was going. Of Shelley it was 
 indeed true that "the child is father of the man," for in 
 him the qualities we have mentioned showed forth even 
 while he was a schoolboy at Eton, and being there per- 
 suaded that the fagging system was a wrong one, he 
 nobly stood by his convictions and their consequences. 
 These traits grew with his growth, and their prominence 
 at a later period of his life was the cause of his expul- 
 sion from Oxford and the hatred of that complacent set 
 of men who think that their country has no abuses to 
 remedy so long as they themselves hold some snug 
 sinecure, who love conventionalities more than truth, 
 and hate a contemner of customs more than a breaker 
 of laws. 
 
 But after having noticed the earnestness, the fearless- 
 ness, and the honesty which are so prominent in all his 
 works, it is somewhat startling to have to declare that 
 there is to be found in him an unfairness in judging 
 others, amounting almost to an absolute incapacity to 
 appreciate the quality of honesty in any of his op- 
 ponents. Yet so it was. "He utterly abhorred the 
 Tories and Priests, from whom he differed," writes an 
 Edinburgh reviewer, "and seems to be screaming with 
 
1 6 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG TILE 
 
 rage whenever he talks of them." This trait is even to 
 be discovered in that noble poem oi ProinctJicus Unbound, 
 for Shelley makes Jove guilty of the meanness of whining 
 to Demogorgon: — 
 
 . "Oh, 
 That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge, 
 Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge, 
 On Caucasus! he would not doom me thus." 
 
 If this is the strength of a god in defeat, we may well 
 ask who could for a moment be guilty of belief in such 
 a being. But enough of this; his earnestness and 
 honesty constitute the edifice of his work; the faults we 
 have noted are only to be found in little chinks and 
 corners. 
 
 Thus, then, vre may accept the summing up of our 
 poet by his latest biographer: — "Imperfect as the rest 
 of humanity, and yet waging ceaselessly the conflict 
 wath evil, the Eternal voice which speaks to all — but 
 to many fruitlessly and in vain — thrilled him to the 
 very springs of his being. His soul vv^as one with all 
 things: it embraced the outcast of the vrorld, and the 
 children of light ; the grandeur and minutiae of the 
 material universe; the majestic creations of mythology; 
 and the human Prometheus struggling with woe and 
 wrong. He w^as the sweet singer of his age, destined 
 to live in the reverent affection of all succeeding ages ; 
 for out of the burning depths of his soul sprang immortal 
 music in praise of love, beauty, and virtue." 
 
 Having now touched upon the distinctive character- 
 istics of the several poets of Shelley's time, and having 
 enlarged on those of our poet, we next propose to 
 marshal and briefly review his poems in their due order, 
 with special notice of such as occupy prominent position 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF II IS TIME. I/ 
 
 as the masterpieces by which his place in EngHsh litera- 
 ture must be determined. Then having shown Shelley 
 standing by himself, we will proceed to consider him as 
 one of a group, and to indicate his relations with its 
 other members. 
 
 Before we do this we shall, however, pause to notice 
 one of the latest contributions to Shelley literature. We 
 hail with rejoicing a really critical edition of the works 
 of the poet, for we are speaking far within the mark 
 when we declare that the edition of Mr Buxton Forman 
 marks a new era in the study of Shelley. It is im- 
 measurably the best edition of the poet that has yet 
 appeared. The poet's slightest word has been treated 
 with an almost religious care, and while such obvious 
 mistakes as 'one line' for 'on a line' in the penultimate 
 stanza oi Laon and Cythna are corrected, the text other- 
 wise is as nearly exact to the original as could by any 
 possibility be attained, and it is upon this text that our 
 comments are based. 
 
 We are glad to see that in Mr Forman's edition the 
 poem Laon and Cythna is reinstated in the place of the 
 poem usually known as the Revolt of Islani\. It is true 
 
 + A critic in the Athenccum (29th Sept. 1877), speaking of this feature 
 of Mr Buxton Forman's work, regrets "that so excellent an edition 
 should have been so unnecessarily ruined." Though finding no fault with 
 the Revolt of Islam, he stigmatizes Laon and Cythna as "the favourite 
 quarry of... prurient garbage seekers." We do not hesitate to affirm that 
 this is too sweeping a condemnation, especially when we consider that 
 the changes which transform one poem into the other (each, as we have said, 
 half as long as the ALncid) affect only fifty-five lines, while the incesf por- 
 tion, condemned by the critic, affects only eleven lines. However, we are 
 not disposed to champion this change by reason of the insignificant space it 
 occupies, and we quite agree with the critic, that an abominable principle 
 is advocated ; moreover, his hatred of the crime of incest is not more deep- 
 rooted than ours, but we praise Mr Buxton Forman because he has dared 
 
1 8 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 that the differences are few between the two poems, snicc 
 they include only fifty-five lines beside the title, but a 
 principle of vital importance is involved. Shelley, unlike 
 his custom, was persuaded to make changes in his poem 
 to suit public opinion: he had been too outspoken against 
 Christianity, and his friends — and publishers — persuaded 
 him to soften his strictures and tone down his hard say- 
 ings. The result pleased neither the public nor the poet. 
 The world was as angry with the Revolt of Islam as it 
 could have been with Lao7i and CytJina, and the poet had 
 the mortification of knowing that he had bent in vain to 
 the breath of public opinion, and that every change in 
 the original poem had been for the worse. This mistake 
 he never repeated. 
 
 There are many other alterations in this edition 
 which, unwillingly, we pass without note, but Ave are 
 obliged to declare the feeling little short of wonder, with 
 which we have seen one mystery after another made 
 plain by the touch of this wizard ; and they who, in the 
 case of Shelley's poems, have made confusion w^orse con- 
 founded by intricate commentaries on an exquisitely- 
 woven text, will have to go further afield. Mr Forman 
 has demonstrated method where confusion seemed to 
 reign, and has shown clear light where all seemed mist 
 and obscurity. 
 
 We win now glance at Qtieen Mab, which besides the 
 value it has for us In Its poetry, is additionally interest- 
 ing from a biographical point of view. The mark of 
 genius in this poem Is as undoubted as the sweep of 
 
 to show us Shelley as he was, with all his imperfections as well as all his 
 excellences on his head, and though we lament the manifestation of this 
 morbid element of Shelley's intellect, we cannot conceive that that edition 
 could be a true transcript of the poet's mind which should carefully omit 
 Lao7i and Cythna, 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF II IS TIME. 1 9 
 
 denunciation is powerful, but it was written in an evil 
 hour for the fame of the poet. At that point of his ex- 
 istence, when the world seemed to him full of darkness 
 and cruel habitations, his piercing cry went up into 
 the night, causing those who heard it to shudder at 
 the acute pain it witnessed. " It is true," writes Mr 
 Barnett Smith, " that Shelley was ' cradled into poetry 
 by wrong,' and some notes of his divine music have been 
 marred in consequence ; naturally, his voice should not 
 have been given to wailing ; he was fitted to be one of 
 the most competent utterers and interpreters of the great 
 harmonies of the universe." But his first poem is dis- 
 cordant with pain ; it is the cry of an imprisoned bird, 
 dashing itself against the bars of its cage. 
 
 The poet had been harshly treated by men professing 
 Christianity; his tenderest feelings had been cruelly out- 
 raged ; and, unable to find by the deeds of these pro- 
 fessors the merciful God whom by their words they 
 claimed, he came to the hasty, bitter conclusion that 
 there was no God. It is very touching to think of the 
 reforms which the young poet set out to accomplish, un- 
 aided and undaunted. ■ At seventeen, he contemplated 
 a novel, which was to give the death-blow to intolerance ; 
 at nineteen, '\x\'=> Necessity of Atheism was to convert the 
 world to this dehghtful conviction ; while his Laon and 
 Cythna was written at twenty-two, to undermine the 
 three-headed monster, marriage, religion and monarchy, 
 and topple him to the ground. But though the world 
 went its way unreformed, failure did not long dishearten 
 Shelley. " Amid a cloud of detractions rude " he worked 
 on bravely, his hopefulness never quite deserting him : 
 but there w^ere times of despondency, even for him, and 
 it was in one of these that Alastor was written. The 
 gloom of despair darkens the whole of this sad and 
 
20 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 solemn poem ; a gloom contrasting so strangely with 
 Shelley's usual bright work as to have been prettily com- 
 pared to " the shadow caused by the sun of hope itself." 
 The descriptive passages in this poem show an undoubted 
 increase of power since the writing of Queen Jllab. 
 
 The next great poem to A las tor is Laon and Cythna. 
 Here, indeed, is the hand of a great master of melody ; 
 the music of versification, the felicity of expression, the 
 beauty of images, which Shelley displays probably more 
 than any other poet, are here seen in all their perfection. 
 As yet, however, melodious as is the poet's work, it is 
 devoid of harmony, that quality which regulates the due 
 prominence of all the parts, and the due worth of every 
 detail. As yet it is not the edifice of a master builder 
 that we are examining, but rather a palace of Arabian 
 Nights' architecture abounding in intricate passages and 
 peopled with impossible figures. We object to the theory 
 on which the framework of the poem is hinged, namely, 
 that evil and bloodshed are the necessary results of a 
 religious creed and a monarchical government, but we 
 cannot deny the beauty with which this theory is enun- 
 ciated ; Vv'e deny, too, that men and women are ever 
 waiting to offer themselves as martyrs for abstract 
 liberty, but no one can ignore the beauty of the passage 
 in which the poet controverts our heresy. 
 
 'Tis said that 
 
 One by one, that night, young maidens came, 
 Beauteous and calm, like shapes of living stone 
 Clothed in the light of dreams, and by the flame 
 Which shrank as overgorged they laid them down, 
 And sung a low sweet song, of which alone 
 One word was heard, and that was Liberty; 
 And that some kissed their marble feet, with moan 
 Like love, and died, and then that they did die 
 \Yith happy smiles, which sunk in white tranquillity. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 21 
 
 We now turn to ProvictJicus Unbound, Shelley's lyrical 
 masterpiece, which, as such, we propose to examine some- 
 what minutely. The framework of the poem is mainly 
 the same as that employed by ^schylus in his Pro- 
 metJicns Vijictns. It is in fact a Greek drama in the 
 English language — not that any Greek dramatist could 
 have hoped to escape the punishment due to impiety if 
 he had been the author of the work, but because the 
 descriptions and the feelings, the beauty and the power 
 of this wondrous creation are essentially and altogether 
 Greek. Yet there is another aspect of this poem which 
 should not be overlooked, and that is the strong Hebrew 
 phase of feeling which is seen in the first two acts of the 
 play. Mrs Shelley tells us that the poet meditated a 
 drama, if he had lived, on the Book of Job. The frame 
 of mind in which PronietJieus Unbound was written, was 
 eminently the same which would love to dwell upon the 
 questions of ethics and the metaphysical reasoning of the 
 Book of Job. Job, on his dunghill, buffeted by Satan, is, 
 in all essentials, as Froude points out, the exact counter- 
 part of Prometheus chained to the rock, suffering unre- 
 laxing torture at the hand of an all-powerful, merciless 
 Jove. Each holds fast his integrity as a possession out 
 of reach of the tormentor, and no effort of cruel enemy, 
 or of false friend, is able to snatch it from either. Fur- 
 ther, each believes with all his heart and soul, with all his 
 mind and strength, that the just thing must at last con- 
 quer, that virtue must in the end be triumiphant, though 
 the reckoning be sternly delayed and ages roll between 
 it and the present. But when we probe to arrive at the 
 cause of this belief in each, we perceive an important dif- 
 ference. Prometheus endures in knowing that Fate 
 brings justice, and that Fate cannot be escaped even by 
 Olympian Jove. Job endures knowing that his God, who 
 
22 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 loves righteousness and hates iniquity, is All-Just, All- 
 Patient — Almighty. 
 
 Despite, however, its Greek dress and its seeming un- 
 reality, we regard Promet/ieiis Unbound as second only — 
 if, indeed, second — to Paradise Lost. Milton's grand 
 epic is undoubtedly superior in its subtle delineation of 
 individual character, in its delicate colouring of indi- 
 vidual sketches, and in its carefully wrought contrast of 
 light and shade, but wdiereas Milton clothed in sublime 
 and majestic verse ideas already in vogue, Shelley gives 
 a body to those ' shapes that haunt thought's wilder- 
 nesses,' till W'C are almost disposed to believe that his 
 creations are in truth 
 
 "Forms more real than living man, 
 Nurslings of immortality!" 
 
 In his preface to the poem Shelley has made many 
 references to Paradise Lost : it is our intention, therefore, 
 to note some further points of comparison and contrast 
 between the two poems. 
 
 The object with which Milton wrote his epic was, he 
 tells us, " to justify the w^ays of God to man." Shelley's 
 object — we are not led away by the antithesis — seems 
 rather to have been to justify the w^ays of man in his 
 own eyes. Shelley asks, in his preface, that this oppor- 
 tunity maybe conceded him to acknowledge that he has 
 *a passion for reforming the w^orld ;' we concede it wil- 
 lingly, but at the same time, we feel bound to declare 
 that those reformers are rare who possess both the posi- 
 tive and negative principles of reform. The negative 
 principle, as Froude defines it, is that which sternly re- 
 fuses to believe in lies, or to conceal or disguise disbelief 
 of the same. The positive principle is that which recog- 
 nises the truth underlying all religion — that obedience 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 23 
 
 to law is the supremest freedom. The negative prin- 
 ciple is the first step ; the positive, the second ; the posi- 
 tive when attained brings, indeed, love and praise, but to 
 reach this the negative has to be passed, which can rarely 
 be done without peril and reproach. The first step shows 
 the power of a Gog or a Magog, the second of an Am- 
 phion or an Orpheus. Our poet made one brave step, 
 and, we believe, would have successfully made the second, 
 but the deep claimed him in the midst of his work, and 
 the blue waters of the Mediterranean closed over his 
 head. 
 
 The reform that Shelley would seem to urge in Pro- 
 metheus Unbound is the abolition of the ruler of the 
 universe. 
 
 "The tyranny of heaven none may retain, 
 Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee:" 
 
 is the cheerful assurance with which Demogorgon ad- 
 dresses Jove, and the poet his readers. Is there then, 
 indeed, to be no God 1 we would ask : but the poet 
 leaves us in an uncertainty which we shall do well to 
 examine. 
 
 In Act II. Scene 4, Asia and Panthea are learning of 
 Demogorgon. 
 
 Dem. Ask what thou would'st know. 
 
 Asia. What canst thou tell? 
 
 Dem. All things thou dar'st demand. 
 
 Asia. Who made the living world? 
 
 Dem. God. 
 
 Asia. Who made all that it contains? Thought, passion, reason, will, 
 
 imagination ? 
 Dem. God : Almighty God, .... 
 Asia. And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse? And Hell, 
 
 . • . . or the sharp fear of Hell ? 
 Dem. He reigns. 
 
24. THE PLACE OF, SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 Asia. Utter his name: a world pining in pain asks but his name: 
 
 curses shall drag him down. 
 Dcm. lie reigns. 
 
 From this extract, and the tenor of the scene from 
 which it is taken, it seems evident that the God who 
 made the world and thought and imagination is not the 
 same God as he who made terror, madness. Hell, or the 
 fear of Hell. In the case of such a distinction, the former 
 is expressly declared Almighty by Demogorgon, who 
 knows all things, while the latter, whom Demogorgon 
 identifies with Jove a few lines further on in this same 
 scene, is expressly declared not Almighty by Prometheus, 
 Vv'ho, at the opening of the play, when chained to the 
 rock, thus addresses him : — 
 
 ** Scorn and despair, — these are mine empire, 
 More glorious far than that which thou surveyest 
 From thine unenvied throne, O mighty God,! 
 Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame 
 Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here, 
 Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain. " 
 
 Further, if this distinction be drawn between Jove 
 and Almighty God, it is not doubtful who the latter 
 deity is in the mind of the poet. "What would it avail," 
 says Demogorgon to Asia, 
 
 " To bid speak, 
 Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these 
 All things are subject but eternal Love." 
 
 From this we may fairly conclude that the God who 
 does indeed rule the universe is no despot 'holding the 
 tyranny of heaven,' but a merciful and beneficent ruler, 
 whose name, whose attribute, whose power is Love. If 
 however it be assumed that Jove and Almighty God are 
 one and the same person, the poet is guilty of an incon- 
 sistency amounting to an undoubted contradiction of 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 2$ 
 
 terms, on which contradiction the whole action of the play- 
 rests. If Jove is Almighty, how can another exist mightier 
 than he ? The thing is absurd. If it be answered that ac- 
 cording to the Greek mythology the eternal Molpa was 
 superior to Jove, we would ask if, by the same authority, 
 Love is superior to the eternal Molpa } The origin of 
 this confusion it is not difficult to discover : Shelley 
 wished to patch together his own aspirations after an 
 ideal God with an improved system of Greek mythology, 
 but, like a new piece of cloth sewn on an old garment, 
 the new takes away from the old, and the rent is made 
 worse. 
 
 The excellences of this grand drama are not to be 
 lightly summed up and straightway dismissed. But we 
 are safe in saying that it has surpassing excellences, both 
 literary and from an ethical point of view. In the first 
 aspect we especially note that which distinguishes Shelley 
 above all the poets of his day — transcendent lyrical 
 power. Here we recognise most unmistakably that 
 lyrical exaltation in which self-consciousness is lost in 
 the poet's contemplation of his object. Harmonious in 
 composition and melodious in diction, this drama is like 
 an echo of ' deep music of the rolling world.' Here, at 
 last, we perceive the hand of a master of his art ; here, 
 too, we discover the one note which harmonises every 
 other — the note of Love. 
 
 As Byron's Childe Harold may be said to be the 
 shout of a strong man rejoicing in his strength, so 
 Shelley's poem may be said to be the glad paean oi one 
 who suddenly discovers the true secret of all harmony, 
 and who pours forth his very soul in song. Of the poem — 
 
 "Every pause is filled with under-notes, 
 Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones 
 -Which pierce the sense and live within the soul." 
 
 S. S. -K 
 
26 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 Ethically, too, this poem is worthy of the highest praise: 
 the sublime aspirations, the lofty patience of the cha- 
 racters accord with the majestic verse, to which the 
 poet's own words may well apply: — 
 
 "Those wise and lovely songs 
 Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old, 
 And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom, 
 And how he shall be loosed, and make 
 The earth one brotherhood." 
 
 Mr Rossetti would not "foolishly laud, nor (still less) 
 undervalue" the fact that this poem expresses "the most 
 modern of conceptions — the utmost reach of speculation of 
 a mind which burst up all crusts of custom and prescrip- 
 tion like a volcano," and images forth "a future wherein 
 man should be indeed the autocrat and renovated reno- 
 vator of his planet." For our part, we are not quite con- 
 tent to accept this interpretation of the scope of the 
 poem. It certainly was not created of 'dust from many 
 a creed outworn,' but that it images forth man as the 
 irresponsible ruler of the world w^e deny. The poet does 
 not exchange a bad rule for an anarchy ; he overcomes 
 evil to exalt love, and to this power even man is subject. 
 Love rules all things, and with * perpetual Orphic song' 
 harmonises and orders the whole of the universe. 
 
 We had intended to point out the contrast between 
 the characters of Shelley's Prometheus and Milton's 
 Satan — the undying hope in the one, the sheer force of 
 will in the other ; the long-suffering love of the one, the 
 active malignity of the other; how one opposes the 
 reigning power of Evil, the other the omnipotence of 
 Good. We had intended to point out the qualities they 
 had in common — an iron will, an unflinching purpose, an 
 endless power of suffering; but we have already dwelt 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME, 2 J 
 
 long enough on this poem, and must pass to Shelley's 
 other work. 
 
 The poem of Hellas, which for convenience we ex- 
 amine next in order, is founded on the Pei^sce of 
 ^^schylus. "Common fame is the only authority which 
 I can allege," writes the poet in his preface, "for the 
 details which form the basis of the poem, and I must 
 trespass upon the forgiveness of my readers for the dis- 
 play of newspaper erudition to which I have been re- 
 duced." Despite the frailty of the structure, the poem is 
 a solid and beautiful piece of work, and a poem much 
 weaker would stand well if upheld by such power of 
 enthusiasm and music as that which Shelley throws into 
 this drama. Some of the lyrics of this play are un- 
 rivalled in the English language for life and beauty and 
 supple strength. We may especially note the grand 
 chorus which closes the poem, where the bard assuming 
 the robe and the majesty of a prophet, foretells a new 
 world's great age and the coming of the golden years ; 
 while perhaps the most glorious semichorus of all is that 
 which thus hymns the coming of Christ and the power of 
 His sufferinp-: 
 
 'fc) 
 
 ' A power from the unknown Goi, 
 
 A Promethean conqueror came; 
 Like a triumphal path He trod 
 
 The thorns of death and shame. 
 
 A mortal shape to Him 
 
 Was like the vapour dim 
 Which the orient planet animates with light ; 
 
 Hell, Sin, and Slavery came, 
 
 Like bloodhounds mild and tame, 
 Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight. 
 
 The moon of Mahomet 
 
 Arose, and it shall set: 
 \Vhile blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon 
 
 The cross l.^ads generations on." 
 
28 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 But beautiful as the lyrics of Hellas undoubtedly are, 
 this poem as certainly derives its chief interest from the 
 light it sheds upon the progress of Shelley's conceptions 
 concerning the rule of the universe. This play and 
 Adonais were nearly the last of his great works, and 
 they perfectly agree in this important particular, that 
 the more the mind of Shelley matured, the grander 
 became his ideal conceptions. "The spirit of Queen 
 Mabl' writes Miss Blind, ''is Necessity, and is addressed 
 as such ; the spirit of Adonais is Love, and is addressed 
 as such. By so much higher as the idea of love is than 
 the idea of necessity, by so much better as the poetry of 
 Adonais is than the poetry of Queen Mab, by so much 
 higher and better are Shelley's last thoughts than his 
 first. There is another noteworthy distinction. In 
 Queen Mah the operation of the spirit is limited to the 
 visible universe: it is immanent there: it is expressly 
 said to be 'contained' by Nature. In Adonais, on the 
 other hand, it contains Nature ; it not merely pervades 
 but invests the universe — it is not only immanent but 
 also transcendent — 'sustains it from beneath and kindles 
 it above.' " In PronietJieus Unbound is depicted, as we 
 attempted to show, the struggle which dethroned Neces- 
 sity and enthroned Love : that play, indeed, begins with 
 the reign of Necessity and ends with that of Love. 
 Adonais and Hellas vi\2.x\i no such divided rule: above 
 and below, within and around. Love is all in all. 
 
 "Life may change, but it may fly not; 
 Hope may vanish, but can die not; 
 Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; 
 Love repulsed — but it retumeth." 
 
 If such was the progress of Shelley's mind that in 
 eleven years he passed from Necessity to Love, perhaps 
 it may not be idle to surmise that if he had had other 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 2g 
 
 eleven years allotted him he might have accepted the 
 faith which once he reviled, and have willingly bent the 
 knee to Him who alone could fully satisfy the holy 
 hunger, the eager longing for love which monopolised 
 the poet's soul. 
 
 We have purposely left unnoticed until now the poem 
 of Jtdian and Maddalo, which preceded Provietheiis 
 Unbound, that we might note the trait which it has in 
 common with the Ccnci^ the next work we propose to 
 discuss. All the other productions of the poet come 
 under the head of subjective poems ; in all, the poet's 
 personality can easily be discerned : they proceed in 
 fact from certain perceptions within him entirely his 
 own : the poems we are now examining differ from the 
 foregoing, they are objective poems ; they touch upon 
 matters in which, as it were, the heart of the poet is not 
 necessarily bound up : here he is an indifferent observer 
 — there he was an impassioned actor ; here he is a calm 
 judge — there an earnest pleader. Thus these poems 
 place Shelley before us under a different aspect from that 
 in which his other productions reveal him ; we see what 
 he might have been, had circumstances developed in him 
 the qualities which rather make an impartial judge than 
 a powerful advocate. In both the poems we are con- 
 sidering Shelley has shown a force of genius as great as 
 it is rare. Jidian and Maddalo marks the poet's entry 
 into higher regions of art ; and this masculine, clear and 
 forcible poem bears no uncertain promise of a great 
 future in store for its author when freed from every 
 thorn of pain and from every root of bitterness. 
 Wonderful as it is that the same mind which created 
 PromctJieiLs Unbound should shadow forth the tragedy of 
 the Cenci, it would have been more wonderful still if the 
 tragedy had not been preceded by such a poem as Julian 
 
30 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 and Maddalo, for that is a sturdy messenger of a greater 
 that should come after. 
 
 We now turn to the Ccnci^ justly characterised as 
 "the one great English play of modern times ;" and 
 before we proceed to examine it, we may note that it 
 forms a complete refutation to those who, despite the 
 evidence to the contrary already given by Julian and 
 Maddaio, yet declare Shelley unable to handle flesh and 
 blood. In this play the actors start up before us in the 
 fulness of life and activity, we are in unmistakable con- 
 tact with real men and women whose beings are stirred 
 to their depths by outrage, and whose sympathies 
 awaken mightily at the sight of suffering and wrong. 
 Here the figures are no mere abstractions, no cold, 
 motionless ideals, they are instinct with life and have in 
 them the force and the freedom of nature. The course 
 of this tragedy, more perhaps than any other, recalls the 
 rapid action of Macbeth, we are carried on by it breath- 
 less till we come to the end, and then when we lay it 
 aside the last scene is so vividly impressed on our mind 
 that we seem to have seen with our natural eyes the 
 scaffold and the headsman, the heart-broken Bernardo, 
 and the kind-hearted prelate, and Lucretia and Beatrice 
 helping one another to bind up their hair for the last 
 time. We are sure that no careful critic can affirm that 
 Shelley's figures are not here, at least, those of flesh and 
 blood. 
 
 Thus we are brought face to face with a most interest- 
 ing problem. Can the dramatic art come by intuition } 
 Naturally, the answer would be an unqualified negative ; 
 for this art seems to need for its perfection a close obser- 
 vation of men and of causes : it seems to need a know- 
 ledge of the world, an experience of the feelings and an 
 appreciation of the motives which sway mankind. These 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 3 1 
 
 are undoubtedly present with a master of every branch 
 of the dramatic art, but tragedy is only one branch, and 
 in this statement lies the true solution of our problem. 
 Tragedy more or less represents an idealised existence ; 
 the violence of the passions aroused lifts the actors out 
 of themselves, and the unwontedness of the circum- 
 stances in which they find themselves compels them to 
 act as their nature prompts, because the counsels of con- 
 ventionality cannot here be heard. Thus then the tragic 
 faculty might be intuitive in the case of a man of strong 
 passions, more especially when he happened also to be 
 a lover of the ideal and a despiser of conventionalism. 
 Shelley was all this, and therefore it is not wonderful in 
 our eyes that his 'attempt at a goat-song,' as he lightly 
 calls it, should be the masterpiece it undoubtedly is. 
 Concerning the other essential for a master-dramatist — 
 the faculty of humour — Shelley had it not, and this want 
 would ever have limited the scope of the dramas he 
 might write in after years. Even the sternest of men 
 have their weaknesses, and because comedy can better 
 paint these than tragedy it is necessary for the perfect 
 delineation of real life. Shelley could skilfully touch off 
 the glory or the infamy of a moment, but the power 
 which could depict in a few touches the characteristics of 
 a whole lifetime he had not. 
 
 We shall do well to note how far Shelley outsoared 
 his contemporaries in the art of which we have been 
 speaking. Wordsworth and Keats attempted no flight 
 in this direction -f, but Coleridge did, and so did Byron. 
 And what was the result.'' Failure in both cases: Coleridge 
 
 + Unless inexorable accuracy requires us to class as attempts the two 
 long-forgotten tragedies of which these poets were certainly guilty: viz. The 
 Borderers of Wordsworth, and Otho the Great, which Keats wrote conjointly 
 with his friend, Mr Brown of Highgate. 
 
32 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 mainly because he lacked passion, Byron because he 
 could not appreciate any character but his own. The 
 plots of Coleridge's plays are disjointed and heavy, the 
 characters dull and lifeless. Now and then we come on 
 such an exquisite little poem as the song of Glycine in 
 Zapolya, but these give evidence rather of poetic than of 
 dramatic power, and are almost as rare and quite as 
 easily distinguishable as nuggets of gold on a rocky 
 soil. The dramas of Byron are, in truth, simple mono- 
 logues : they are but as masks which half display and 
 half conceal the personality of the poet. They tire us 
 by their obstinate recurrence, by their stubborn same- 
 ness. The only poem indeed in which Byron is able to 
 bring together two people and furnish them with a natural 
 dialogue is that one in which he, too, got tired of his 
 morbid self and escaped from it into a land of unwonted 
 liberty. It was neither given to the sweet dreamer of 
 dreams, nor to the forceful, sneering seeker after pleasure, 
 to unravel the tangled thread of human passion, or to 
 weigh truly the motives of the sorely-tempted human 
 soul ; but this was reserved for the passionate imagina- 
 tion and the childlike heart of Percy Shelley. 
 
 Some critics have accused him of selecting the story 
 of the Cenci solely on account of its horror. De Quincey 
 on the other hand declares that Shelley found the "whole 
 attraction of this dreadful tale in the angelic nature of 
 Beatrice as revealed in local traditions and in the por- 
 trait of her by Guido." In our idea, neither of these 
 criticisms is entirely true or entirely false, for though it 
 is certain that a nature such as Beatrice's would have 
 special claim for a soul such as Shelley's, yet it is quite 
 certain also — this fact being amply evidenced by some 
 of his favourite words and images — that the horrible 
 possessed for him at times an almost irresistible fascina- 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 33 
 
 tion : both Keats and Coleridge were careful not to 
 linger in this region of Cimmerian darkness, and Shelley's 
 work would have been the better if he had followed their 
 example. 
 
 This tragedy has even been denounced by one critic 
 as "a loathsome subject loathsomely treated;" we shall 
 examine the grounds of this accusation. The second 
 count of it cannot, we believe, by any argument be sub- 
 stantiated ; granted that the subject is a loathsome one, 
 we challenge the critic to point out the work of any 
 dramatist whatsoever wherein the matters which excite 
 our abhorrence are more delicately touched upon. 
 Shelley has so shrunk away from the hateful crime of 
 Cenci, "as actually to leave it doubtful," writes De 
 Quincey, "whether the murder were in punishment of the 
 last outrage committed or in repulsion of a menace con- 
 tinually repeated." The first count of the accusation is, 
 then, the only one which need occupy us. 
 
 We first note that Shelley and his critic choose to 
 look upon the dramatic art from standpoints essentially 
 different, and from thence this tragedy will ever be 
 severally praised and condemned. The ground on 
 which Shelley took his stand was that art is supreme ; 
 his critic's was that art devoid of morality is not supreme. 
 We take our stand here with the critic. 
 
 Shelley entirely separated the ideas of art and 
 morality, this the critic refused to do. Shelley declared 
 that some actions are admirably adapted for poetic and 
 dramatic purposes which are essentially immoral. These 
 are the words in which he justified to Mrs Gisborne the 
 introduction even of the crime of incest into poetry : — 
 " Incest," he writes, "is, like many other incorrect things, 
 a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of 
 love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for 
 
34 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of 
 the highest heroism ; or it may be that cynical rage, 
 which, confounding the good and bad in existing 
 opinions, breaks through them for the purpose of rioting 
 in selfishness and antipathy." These are the arguments 
 by which Shelley seeks to justify his practice, but the 
 critic can imagine the glory of a higher heroism than 
 that of a self-sacrificing lust, and turns away with disgust 
 from a picture which, however truly, presents a human 
 being 'rioting in selfishness and antipathy.' Shelley 
 pleads again that his object, like that of our greatest 
 dramatist, is " to hold the mirror up to nature," to which 
 the critic replies that though his power would be great 
 who could represent things as they are, adding no new 
 beauty, and taking away no old deformity, yet his would 
 be a depraved taste and an impure imagination who 
 should occupy himself in describing, however minutely 
 and to the life, the plague-spots of society, and the 
 desperate ugliness of wicked hearts. " Granted," says the 
 critic, "that the poetry is peerless, that the lyrics are fault- 
 less and that the dramatic art here reaches its perfec- 
 tion, I see in the work a moral ugliness which effectually 
 eclipses all its artistic beauty. To me the darkness is 
 more intense because a very source of light has been 
 clouded over." Shelley, indeed, does not deserve so 
 sweeping a condemnation, because he has attempted to 
 draw a strong contrast of light and darkness in the 
 characters of Beatrice and her father ; but the fact that 
 such darkness is willingly painted by him is enough to 
 prove that he had not yet attained that purity of motive, 
 that singleness of eye which can alone render the whole 
 heart full of light and leave no corner dark. 
 
 It has been said that the figures of Beatrice and of 
 Cenci stand out in too bold relief, compared with the 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 35 
 
 other dramatis persojtcs ; but it should be remembered, 
 that such characters would always stand out boldly in 
 whatsoever age and under whatsoever circumstances they 
 had been placed : nay, more, — as a matter of fact, these 
 are the characters whose true history after more than 
 two centuries still has power to awaken the strongest 
 feelings of pity and of hatred in all ranks of the people, 
 even in the great and busy city of the Seven Hills. 
 "On my arrival at Rome" — writes Shelley — " I found 
 that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be 
 mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep 
 and breathless interest .... All ranks of people 
 knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the 
 overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic 
 of exciting in the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's 
 picture of Beatrice, which is preserved in the Colonna 
 Palace, and my servant instantly recognised it as the 
 portrait of Z^; Cejicir The character of a Beatrice, of a 
 Cenci, would always be prominent, even in an age of 
 strong men, for both had essentially the strong will and 
 the unswerving purpose which mark the leader of men. 
 Surely, his profile should not be lightly sketched, before 
 whom his children cowered as to d^ tyrant, and the 
 princes of the church and the haughtiest nobles as to a 
 demon : surely, too, the lines of her character should be 
 touched in with no uncertain stroke who was a refuge for 
 her stepmother and brothers, and who, beside daring to 
 denounce her father in his own hall, when the sternest 
 man there crept silently away, had yet the courage to 
 compass the tyrant's death, since by no other means 
 could she escape his persecution. 
 
 How pitilessly clear-cut is the figure of old Cenci, 
 boasting of his 'strength and wealth, and pride and lust, 
 and length of days;' vaunting that he has 'no remorse 
 
36 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 and little fear,' while the action of the play declares this 
 to be no false estimate of himself. It is a picture of the 
 natural man possessing all that the natural heart can 
 desire, absolute in his good fortune, and unchecked by 
 any scruple of conscience, believing only in a God as a 
 means by which he shall himself be respited from hell, 
 and by which he shall be revenged upon those he hates. 
 Through observation of this character we notice in 
 Shelley a capacity for satire of which moreover the poet 
 himself was conscious "f*. Still more certain evidence of 
 this exists in Peter Bell the Third, — but though our poet's 
 faculty in this direction was sufficiently marked, yet his 
 efforts were beyond all question immeasurably surpassed 
 by Byron, whose Vision of Judgment is, perhaps, the 
 most pow^erful satire the world has ever seen. The 
 reason that Byron should excel Shelley in this branch of 
 their craft it is not difficult to determine : in satire, 
 Shelley's musical verse did not help him, and his earnest- 
 ness was absolutely against him, w^iereas Byron's sneer 
 and the grand force of his intellect were invaluable for 
 the perfection of this w^eapon. 
 
 But to return to the Cenci. The character of Beatrice 
 forms a noble contrast to that of her father. Her will is 
 every whit as strong as his, yet the sweetness of her dis- 
 position is evident throughout the play, even to the last ; 
 in her prison she forgives and comforts Lucretia, who is 
 stricken by remorse for her weakness which has brought 
 condemnation on both, and even on the scaffold she tries 
 to calm old Camillo by an assumption of nonchalance. 
 Of the golden purity of her nature she is herself the 
 
 + With this statement compare Shelley's own words in a letter dated 
 25th January, 1822: — "I began once a satire upon satire, which I meant 
 to be very severe : it was full of small knives, in the use of which practice 
 would soon have made me perfect." 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 3/ 
 
 unconscious exponent : she discovers at once the alloy in 
 Orsino : 
 
 "You have a sly, equivocating vein 
 That suits me not," 
 
 and it is a very natural touch by which the poet con- 
 trasts her behaviour under torture and condemnation 
 with Lucretia's : the one with her high spirit defying her 
 gaolers, but breaking down completely for a moment 
 when death is made certain, the other timidly fearing 
 torture but not death. 
 
 Though the lines of contrast are not cut deeply enough 
 between the wicked outspoken Cenci and the hypocriti- 
 cal priest, willing to take fees both from God and the 
 devil, yet that is a delicate touch by which the blazoning 
 abroad of sins by the one renders blacker if possible the 
 damnable casuistry of the other seeking to incite and 
 justify the crime of parricide. 
 
 "Mark, how wisest God 
 Draws to one point the threads of a just doom, 
 So sanctifying it: what you devise 
 Is, as it were, accomplished." 
 
 And Shelley gives us the key to the whole character of 
 this master of wordy fence in indicating the mode of 
 reasoning by which he satisfies and deceives his own 
 
 heart : — 
 
 "I'll do 
 As little mischief as I can : that thought 
 Shall fee the accuser conscience." 
 
 It yet remains for us to notice how skilfully like and 
 yet unlike are the lesser spirits to one another. The 
 wavering, chicken-hearted Giacomo — the kind but nerve- 
 less Camillo — the loving but timid Lucretia — all serve 
 to set off one another and to contrast with the greater 
 light and the greater darkness which Beatrice and Cenci 
 represent. 
 
jS Tim PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 Before we leave the Ccnci we feel it necessary to 
 point out to what a vast extent the habit of plagiarism 
 has crept into the text of Shelley's work, and more par- 
 ticularly (as a writer in the CornJiill points out) into this 
 tragedy; but as this matter should properly be discussed 
 in detail, and as such treatment would here be out of 
 place, we must be content to point out a few of the 
 many instances we have noted, and to declare our belief 
 that a careful examination would reveal the existence 
 of the same trait in other poets to a far greater extent 
 than is commonly supposed. But be this as it may, 
 having noted this habit in our poet, meet it is that we 
 should set it down. De Ouincey, remarking on the 
 same trait in Coleridge, says, "To take a phrase or an 
 inspiriting line from the great fathers of poetry, even 
 though no marks of quotation should be added, carries 
 with it no charge of plagiarism. Milton [for example] 
 is justly presumed to be as familiar to the ear as nature 
 to the eye, and to steal from him is as impossible as to 
 appropriate or sequester to a private use ' some bright 
 particular star.'" This is quite enough to justify the use 
 without quotation marks of such a phrase as " open-eyed 
 conspiracy," which occurs in Shelley's fragment, entitled 
 Charles I., evidently borrowed from the Tempest (though 
 curiously enough the phrase "too deep for tears" from 
 Wordsworth's famous Ode is punctiliously acknowledged 
 in Alastor), but it is a deeper question than this that we 
 have to discuss, and moreover a most interesting one 
 from a psychological point of view. De Quincey speaks 
 of conscious plagiarism which calls for blame. We have 
 before us the subject of unconscious plagiarism which 
 cannot be blamed, however much its presence may be 
 deprecated. It is not merely " a phrase or an inspiriting 
 line" that Shelley so often borrows from other poets, it 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 39 
 
 is more frequently the idea or the form, or an intricate 
 combination of both. Thus who will say that the follow- 
 ing passage from Qiiecn Mab is not " rather a barefaced 
 expansion of a famous line in Gray's Elegy''} 
 
 ** How many a rustic Milton has past by 
 Stifling the speechless longing of his heart, 
 In unremitting drudgery and care." 
 
 But Shelley's poem is full of such. Professor Baynes 
 has noted them from Pope, Gray, Akenside, Collins and 
 Thomson, and we also have marked others from Young 
 and Shakspere. 
 
 But this trait was developed in earlier work even 
 than Queen Mab. A song in St Irvyne has the following 
 two lines taken bodily from Byron's Hours of Idleness, 
 
 "Ah! why do darkening shades conceal 
 The hour when man must cease to be ?" 
 
 {Poem, entitled "I would I were a careless child.") 
 
 And it survived to the last, as is evident from his 
 latest works ; for in Hellas besides the passage (765-785) 
 in which Ahasuerus expounds to Mahmud the non- 
 existence of matter, which recalls certain phrases from 
 the Merchant of Venice and the Tempest, we have in the 
 two lines — 
 
 "Kings are like stars — they rise and set, they have 
 The worship of the world but no repose," (195-6) 
 
 an almost exact reproduction of Bacon's words from his 
 essay on Empire: — "Princes are like to heavenly bodies 
 
 which have. much veneration but no rest." 
 
 We have ourselves noted the following plagiarisms 
 from Comics which evidence in Shelley a peculiar love 
 for that delightful poem; a poem which to him never 
 lost its loveliness or its music, as the beautiful echo we 
 find in his work skives witness. 
 
40 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 Thus when in Lao)i and Cythna describing a cove- 
 tous man deprived of that which he holds most precious, 
 Shelley says that — 
 
 •'He walks in lonely gloom beneath the noonday sun," 
 
 who is not reminded of the passage in Comiis which thus 
 expresses the same idea ? 
 
 ' ' He that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts. 
 Benighted walks under the midday sun ; 
 Himself is his own dungeon." 
 
 Again, in the last act of Prometheus Unbound^ we 
 find a chorus of spirits singing — 
 
 "Our spoil is won, 
 
 Our task is done. 
 We are free to dive, or soar, or run; 
 
 Beyond and around 
 
 Or within the bound 
 Which clips the world with darkness round." 
 
 And who will not here discover an echo of the re- 
 joicing epilogue of the spirit at the end of Comus where 
 his song is — 
 
 "But now my task is smoothly done, 
 I can fly, or I can run 
 Quickly to the green earth's end. 
 Where the bow'd welkin slow doth bend; 
 And from thence can soar as soon 
 To the corners of the moon." 
 
 But doubtless a more striking resemblance to a 
 passage in Comus than even the foregoing is to be found 
 in Shelley's Song of a Spirit^ which begins thus : — 
 
 *' Within the silent centre of the earth 
 My mansion is; where I live ensphered 
 From the beginning, and around my sleep 
 Have woven all the wondrous imagery 
 Of this dim spot which mortals call the world." 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 4 1 
 
 At the beginning of Milton's poem ''the attendant spirit 
 descends or enters," and sings thus — 
 
 " Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 
 My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
 Of bright aerial spirits live inspher'd 
 In regions mild of calm and serene air; 
 Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, 
 Which men call Earth." 
 
 That one poet could borrow from another the form 
 of expression of a whole passage, the situation, the pecu- 
 liar agent, two unusual words, an epithet and a whole 
 phrase without acknowledging or even being conscious 
 of his obligation, may seem almost incredible, yet no 
 less than this has Shelley done in the case before us. 
 
 It might be interesting to carry this question further, 
 but it would be here unprofitable, yet we may record 
 our belief that a well-read and gifted critic might be 
 able, by following the traces afforded by Shelley's un- 
 conscious use of borrowed words and phrases and ideas 
 in his longer poems, to infer pretty accurately what had 
 been the poet's study before or during the progress of 
 his work. Thus the words and expressions in Laon and 
 Cythna point more particularly to the study of Spenser 
 and IMilton ; Pronicthctcs to the study of the Bible (es- 
 pecially of the New Testament) ; the Cenci to Shakspere ; 
 while throughout it is evident that MacbetJi and Conius, 
 and the Ancient Mariner, were favourite reading with 
 our poet. 
 
 One often repeated objection to Shelley's poems is 
 that they are devoid of human interest. This notion 
 
 may recommendTfself indeed^tb the "general reader," 
 with his superficial judgment and his skin-deep enthu- 
 siasm, but to the true Shelley-student it is a misconcep- 
 tion the more deserving of censure, because it has in it 
 S. S. 4 
 
42 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 some show of truth. The defect with which we are most 
 likely to credit Shelley at the beginning- of our reading 
 is indeed that of unreality, we cannot grasp his abstrac- 
 tions, the unbodied joy eludes us, — but soon this feeling 
 passes off, we learn to soar away into the blue deep with 
 the poet, and we become aware that although Shelley 
 may not be able to present to our view the elemental 
 body of things, yet he is able to show the subtle essences 
 of them to those who have the grace of heavenly vision. 
 The forms which Byron presents to us are tangible 
 enough, for they are himself — of the earth, earthy ; but 
 Shelley's are intangible to the careless reader because 
 they are ethereal, they are elusive because of their 
 spirituality. If then enthusiasm and purity are devoid 
 of interest to human beings, the charge against the poet 
 may be considered proven, otherwise it is an infamous 
 allegation to be scornfully laid aside. 
 
 But though we may thus dismiss one charge, there 
 are others beside his well-known inordinate repetition 
 which cannot be so satisfactorily disposed of. Of these 
 the greatest, perhaps, is that his meaning is frequently 
 very obscure, and in nowise " to be understanded of the 
 common people." This is sometimes due to the careless 
 and prodigal way with which he throws one image upon 
 another into his composition : the principal thought is 
 thus often entirely hidden from sight, and the meaning 
 is lost by the numerous ramifications of secondary 
 thoughts which the poet pursues time after time. It is 
 no justification of this to say that it was the natural 
 result of the poet's love for metaphysical subtleties and 
 remote analogies. Obscurity is not a mark of power but 
 of weakness : if a man has something clear in his own 
 mind it is quite certain that he can express the same 
 clearly in words. But sometimes the obscurity we com- 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 43 
 
 plain of is of a deeper and more conscious kind. Even the 
 most beautiful — nay we would rather say, particiUarly 
 the most beautiful — of his poems are in parts so obscure 
 as almost to defy the efforts of the most loyal of Shelley- 
 lovers to overmaster them and pluck out the heart of 
 their mystery. To take a simple case, we may declare 
 that the beautiful stanzas, beginning- "Away, the moor 
 is dark beneath the moon," have little meaning to an 
 ordinary reader, and even Swinburne is bound to declare 
 oi Epipsychidion, thdit "the high, sweet, mystic doctrine 
 of this poem is apprehensible enough to all who look 
 into it with purged eyes and listen with purged ears; 
 but the passages in which the special experience of the 
 writer is thrust forward under the mask and muffler of 
 allegoric rhapsody are not in any proper sense myste- 
 rious; they are simply puzzling; and art should not have 
 anything to do with puzzles." Yet this poem, Swinburne 
 goes on to say, despite this fault holds a foremost place 
 in Shelley's work by reason of ''the depth and exaltation 
 of its dominant idea, by the rapture of the music and 
 the glory of the colour which clothe with sound and 
 splendour the subtle and luminous body of its thought, 
 by the harmony of its most passionate notes, and the 
 humanity of its most god-like raptures." 
 
 A defect in Shelley's poetry, to which we have 
 already alluded, is his entire lack of humour ; for that is 
 not humour which is to be found in the single ghastly 
 joke in the Cmci-\', or that play on the words in 
 
 + Judge. You, young lord, 
 
 Linger not here! 
 Beatrice. O tear him not away! 
 Judge. Guards, do your duty. 
 
 Ber. {^Embracing Beatrice). Oh ! would ye divide body from soul ? 
 Officer. That is the headsman's business.— (C-«a V. 3). 
 
 4—2 
 
44 7'/^^ PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 PromctJieus-\ so feeble that we hope it will resolve Itself 
 into an unintentional cacophony left in by oversight ; 
 neither here is it to be found nor in his satires; we 
 do not laugh over Shelley's satires as over Thackeray's 
 and grow better in consequence, it is but a grim smile 
 at best that Is called forth ; we mark the hit of an 
 earnest man turned cynic — the more cynical for having 
 been the more earnest — and we wince at the malice of 
 the blow. Shelley's is not that pleasing satire which 
 touches lightly the follies and the foibles of men, but 
 that biting sarcasm which evidences that (for a time 
 at least) the milk of human kindness in the writer has 
 turned to gall while he looks on at the world with 
 the glance of a Heraclltus. Sometimes the same hand 
 may be able to paint in the styles of a Rembrandt and 
 a Wilkle, but such men are as rare as a Shakspere, and 
 Shelley was not one of them J. 
 
 Not merely such faults as these, but his very excel- 
 lences will prevent Shelley from ever becoming a popular 
 poet, his poems will probably always be "caviare to the 
 general," for It demands something more than a casual 
 
 + .... The unseasonable seasons. 
 
 {Proinetheus Unbo7tnd, II. 4.) 
 
 X ' ' Perhaps, when all is said and done, the position of Shelley in the 
 history of literature will be determined by his utter deficiency on the side of 
 kumotcr. No poet so finely gifted in other respects was ever so forlornly 
 unconscious of the humour, but, above all, of the humorous pathos, of 
 human life. The deficiency makes him a dreary poet to readers of Shak- 
 sperean quiddity. His flights of wild ecstasy, his bursts of delirious music, 
 his triumph of melodious falsetto, will ever make him unique among 
 singers. His noble enthusiasm for humanity, his splendid philosophical 
 insight (when he was calm enough to use it), will ever make him venerable 
 among reformers and social teachers. But there was little variety, and no 
 tender mirth, in the legacy he has left to the world, — and for this, among 
 other reasons, his music has never quickened the public pulse on any great 
 human occasion. " — {Contemporary, Nov. 1877.) 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 4$ 
 
 reading, it requires diligent study to appreciate and a 
 cultivated taste to enjoy the subtleties of his thought 
 and the beauty of his figures, and this can only, be 
 expected from the "fit audience, though few," for which 
 Wordsworth asked. 
 
 Among the many artistic excellences of Shelley's 
 work we may note the exquisite finishing touch he puts 
 to his poems ; the last stone, as it were, seems to com- 
 pact and complete the edifice, the last strain is one of 
 exquisite melody. For a proof of this we may point to 
 the last verses of Prometheus U?iboimd, of Hellas, of the 
 Hymn of Apollo, and of others too numerous to mention. 
 In this respect Shelley's work affords a wonderful con- 
 trast to that of Byron, who so frequently ends discord- 
 antly or ineffectively. That excellence, however, of 
 Shelley's poems which is most easily seen, and which 
 has been most readily acknowledged, is the golden 
 music of his verse, and this crowning beauty glances 
 in the sunlight of his enthusiasm like "the countless 
 dimplings of the waves of the deep." Yet this result, 
 curiously enough, is obtained often in direct opposition to 
 the generally received canons of criticism. Mr Rossetti 
 notes with astonishment Shelley's "seeming indifference 
 to mere correctness of rhyming structure," and even Mr 
 Buxton Forman is not ready to grant to others the 
 license to follow Shelley's example of being so frequently 
 content with an echo rather than a rhyme. The usage 
 however, as Mr Forman remarks, is to be found in Dante 
 and in common continental custom, and Shelley's 
 practice has been successfully followed in the present 
 day by Swinburne. Thus it would seem well if some of 
 the canons of such a payment-by-result people as we are 
 should be altered or at least modified; perhaps however 
 they are better left untouched, since genius will ever 
 
46 rilE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMOA'G TILE 
 
 make its own laws, and formulas will no more fetter a 
 Shelley than a Rossini. 
 
 We have but little space left us to note smaller 
 poems, but that we shall now proceed to do. Despite 
 that Adonais is modelled on the work of Moschus and 
 Bion, and contains many resemblances thereto, it is a 
 singularly powerful and beautiful poem ; what Shelley 
 says of Moore is here true of himself, that 
 
 "Love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue." 
 
 It is one of the most beautiful elegies in the English lan- 
 guage : Lycidas and it sit on the elegiac throne robed in 
 equal majesty. But who shall justly praise the aerial 
 witchery, the glittering tissue of the Witch of Atlas, or of 
 the soul-stirring odes To Liberty and To Naples. There 
 is a subtle imponderability in the first, a weight of ma- 
 jesty in the two latter, which it is impossible to duly cal- 
 culate, but each after its own kind is perfect. Then, too, 
 in what other poet can we find such grand liquid melo- 
 dies as those of th.Q Hymn of Apollo, or such soft metrical 
 sighings as we find in Li7ies written in dejection near 
 Naples, or such delicate music as in that poem of The 
 Sensitive Plant? and in what words shall we speak of 
 that high Hymn to Intellecttial Beanty, in which the poet 
 declares that the spells of this sweet spirit bind him to 
 the grand ideal — 
 
 "To fear himself, and love all human kind"? 
 
 And what shall raise us to the due appreciation of 
 that state of exalted feeling into which the poet was rapt 
 in his odes To a Skylark and To the West Wind? In 
 each of these the personality of the poet seems to fall off 
 from him like a loose robe, and his whole soul has rap- 
 turously entered the object of his contemplation. The 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 47 
 
 poet IS lost from our sight like the lark in the blue deep, 
 and we only hear the bird's trill of happiness and triumph 
 as it pours its full heart 
 
 *'In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 
 
 In the second ode the music is deeper, and seems to 
 hold a deeper meaning ; this is no mere rapture, no sim- 
 ple joyance, it has rather the tone of a mighty organ 
 rolling forth a grand fugue of love and hope. Here is 
 present in all its beauty the deep longing to do good, 
 and the only true might of earnestness. 
 
 But despite his earnestness, Shelley's work cannot 
 become rugged or unmusical. Nay, rather, because of 
 its earnestness, it is neither one nor the other; in this 
 Shelley is to Browning what Ruskin is to Carlyle, both 
 men with a God-given message, the latter rugged by 
 reason of his earnestness, the former musical, because he 
 simply cannot be otherwise, and often most musical when 
 most earnest. The best lyric work is either imaginative 
 or passionate : of the latter quality Coleridge was utterly 
 devoid, yet, as we have seen, the imaginative part of his 
 work was unique and peerless, placing him on a pedestal 
 of his own, high even among the most exalted of our 
 lyric poets ; but in Shelley the two qualities were com- 
 bined, and the resulting work is of transcendent strength 
 and beauty. His work is doubtless richer in passion than 
 in imagination, but the comparison is as profitless as 
 a comparison between the riches of a Croesus and a 
 Solomon. 
 
 Thus, when we consider the beauties of the lyrics 
 mentioned above, and that matchless group printed with 
 Prometheus, which, says Mr Forman, " follow the incom- 
 parable fourth act [of that drama] — still sounding in 
 diverse echoing keys and under infinite variations of 
 melody the same intense intellectual passion, the same 
 
48 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 most holy love of humanity, the same godlike perception 
 of ideal beauty/' we shall not hesitate to assign Shelley 
 the place claimed for him both by Swinburne and by his 
 latest editor, that of England's greatest lyric poet. 
 
 We have not yet sufficiently compared and con- 
 trasted Shelley with the other representative poets of 
 his age ; this task we shall now attempt to complete. 
 
 Each aided, as we have said, in the revolution of 
 poetry which took place at the beginning of the centur)^ 
 Before this, men had looked upon nature as a machine, 
 as a regulated, heartless engine, and man had been re- 
 garded as the only fit subject for poetry : it is true that 
 nature was not entirely absent from the poet's ken, but 
 she was only mentioned when in nature the poet found 
 some reflection of man, and the machine became a 
 mirror. But the revolution inaugurated by Cowper was 
 perfected and set on a firm basis by the poets of the age 
 we are considering. Wordsworth, first of them, declared 
 that there was a living spirit in nature ; a spirit which 
 animates all things from the " meanest flower that 
 blows," to the glorious birth of sunshine : a spirit which 
 circles through matter in whatsoever form, and gives to 
 each its distinct life and being. Thus then he loved 
 nature with a personal love. She taught him as a human 
 teach'fer, truths which human teachers had yet to learn. 
 
 Shelley also found out for himself that a spirit ani- 
 mated nature, but while Wordsworth called this spirit 
 Thought, Shelley called it Love, by which he tells us all 
 strife shall be healed 
 
 "And the earth grow young again." 
 
 This is the point at which the two poets' lines of teaching 
 diverge. Wordsworth despaired of a nation's teaching 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 49 
 
 which should not exalt the faculty of imagination, but 
 Shelley exclaiming, with his own Prometheus, 
 
 **How fair these air-bom shapes! and yet I feel 
 Most vain all hope but love," 
 
 certainly seemed to have the countenance of that Apostle 
 w^ho declared even the understanding of all mysteries 
 and all knowledge, and the possession of such faith as 
 could remove mountains, to be worthless without love. 
 
 But besides this original and special feature of Shel- 
 ley's poetical creed, he was not entirely sundered from 
 the school of poetry he had succeeded. Much of his 
 work is not distinctly the record of Nature as she is, but 
 as she appeared in certain moods of the poet's mind. 
 Thus, for instance, \hQ Lines written among the Enganean 
 Hills are, says Swinburne, " a rhapsody of thought and 
 feeling coloured by contact with Nature, but not born 
 of the contact. . . . His [Shelley's] aim is rather to render 
 the effect of the thing than the thing itself, the soul and 
 spirit of life rather than the living form, the growth rather 
 than the thing grown." The contrast pointed out in 
 these words marks accurately the difference between 
 Shelley and Keats. Shelley's aim was opposite to 
 Keats', and what Keats' was we have therefore just 
 seen. 
 
 Byron, who independently made the same discovery 
 as Wordsworth and Shelley, belonged far more to the 
 past school of poetry which we mentioned above than 
 either of these two great poets. To Byron the sea in its 
 restlessness was an emblem of his own unquiet heart — 
 in its strength it typified the vigour of his intellect. Thus 
 all nature became an enlarged picture of the poet's per- 
 sonality — its varying aspects supplying each component 
 with some significant illustration : unquestionably the 
 
50 THE PLACE OE SHELLEY AMONG TILE 
 
 grandest passage he has written is a description of his 
 co-equal, the sea, laughing to scorn the efforts of man. 
 With Wordsworth one can indeed enjoyably explore the 
 fields and contentedly range the country, but it is only 
 with Byron and Shelley, as Swinburne has remarked, 
 that one can put off from the shore and be borne far 
 from the haunts of men into the "wide, w^aste places of 
 the sea." The sea-wind blows frankly on our cheeks, 
 and our boat scuds freely along, although indeed the 
 sun is sometimes hidden and the deep threatens to 
 engulf us. 
 
 These are the results which we may expect from 
 such principles as these several poets advocated. Words- 
 worth's work has all the excellences and all the defects 
 of a man of method. His facts are carefully observed 
 and honestly studied, his generalizations just and well 
 based, but his work is lacking in fire ; it is strong, but 
 seldom stirs to a fier^^ enthusiasm ; it influences the ima- 
 ginations and the feelings, but not the life-blood. Shel- 
 ley, on the other hand, has all the excellences and defects 
 that are the results of a well-meaning revolutionism. 
 Many shams, it is true, are abolished, yet often these 
 shams have gathered round holy things, and the reformer 
 does not always discern this. But we find in Shelley, 
 above all things, an earnestness which would go far to 
 redeem the faults in far more deadly principles than he 
 professed. Moreover, this earnestness never tires us ; we 
 are tired by Byron's uncontrollable propensity for acting; 
 we cannot help gaping sometimes as Wordsworth's love 
 for teaching pursues the even tenor of its way, but our 
 sympathy is always with Shelley, and his earnestness 
 rivets our attention. 
 
 We have already spoken of the comparative lyrical 
 powers of Shelley and Coleridge. We have noted that 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TLME. 5 I 
 
 the imaginative power of Coleridge was unrivalled in its 
 own realm, but out of this, the imaginative power of 
 Shelley was very great, and the word-painting in which 
 Protean nature is sketched as he lay in the net which 
 Shelley's imagination had thrown over him, is as unri- 
 valled in its domain as even Christahcl or Kicbla Khan 
 in theirs. Perhaps Shelley's greatest lyric triumph is his 
 Ode to the West Wmd, where rapt out of himself he pas- 
 sionately prays — 
 
 "Be thou, spirit fierce, 
 My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, 
 Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; 
 And, by the incantation of this verse, 
 . Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind I" 
 
 One power at least these lyrists possessed in com- 
 mon, that of poetic translation. The following extract is 
 an acknowledgment of this from a writer who evidently 
 did not very highly esteem them as original poets -(-: — 
 " In two fragments of Faust, especially in that of Afay 
 Day Night, Shelley has given a splendid proof that he 
 too, as well as Coleridge, was born to translate from the 
 German. Their own thoughts are often not sufficiently 
 defined. But in command of flowing and gorgeous lan- 
 guage they are unrivalled among our modern poets, and 
 deal with words as Rubens and Paul Veronese with dra- 
 pery and colours. Let others only give them the per- 
 sonages and the order of the procession, there seems no 
 limit to the folds of broidered and stately expression in 
 which they can array them forth." 
 
 We shall rather contrast than compare Keats with 
 
 + History and Principles of Translation. Hayward's translation of 
 Faust. {^Edinburgh Reviav, Jan. 1833.) 
 
52 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 Shelley. They were of two distinct schools of poetrj^, 
 and this explains why each was not able more easily to 
 appreciate the poetry of the other. Shelley, as we have 
 seen, belongs mainly to the subjective school, while Keats 
 undoubtedly belonged to the objective : the personality 
 of Shelley is generally to be discerned in his writings, 
 that of Keats never. Keats and Shelley used often to 
 discuss the problem of the relative worth of Beauty and 
 Truth"}*, and the difference in their conclusions lies at the 
 root of the differences in their poems. Thus, while Shel- 
 ley admired the beautiful, and used it simply as an 
 adornment of his poetry, Keats was entirely absorbed in 
 it, and unconsciously made it the very essence of his. 
 As a natural consequence of this love of the beautiful, 
 the greatest characteristic of the work of Keats is its 
 sensuousness, which, indeed, is only saved from degene- 
 rating into the sensual by the high idealism of the poet, 
 but the ideal was at last so grand that it is almost impos- 
 sible not to believe that if Keats had lived to the ordi- 
 nary age of man he would have been one of the greatest 
 of our poets, for on his work from first to last is the 
 mark of progress, and that, too, in a mind promising 
 great things from the first. " There is evidence," says 
 
 t *"Tis the eternal law 
 
 That first in beauty should be first in might." 
 
 Keats, Hyperion. 
 ** Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
 
 Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn. 
 " See a disenchanted nation 
 Spring like day from desolation; 
 To truth its state is dedicate." 
 
 Shelley, Prometheus Ujibonnd. 
 •' There is one road 
 To peace, and that is truth, which follow ye !" 
 
 Shelley, Julian and Maddalo. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF II IS TIME. 53 
 
 Professor Masson, " of a progress both intellectually and 
 morally ; of a disposition, already consciously known to 
 himself, to move forward out of the sensuous or merely 
 sensuous-ideal mood, into the mood of the truly epic 
 poet, the poet of life, sublimity and action." When we 
 compare the sublime " Titanic-torso " Hyperion with the 
 faulty but promising Endymion^ how great seems the 
 distance measured ! 
 
 It has been said that Shelley's poems are not liked 
 In old age. If this is true, it is as surely partly our 
 fault as it is partly his. "After all," he himself acknow- 
 ledges, ''I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I 
 write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the 
 attribute and accompaniment of power." It may then be 
 true that the repose so characteristic of Keats is absent 
 in Shelley. Thus far the fault may lie with him, but too 
 frequently we ourselves do not long enough retain that 
 childlike behef in possibilities, that childlike all-absorbing 
 hope which is so requisite for entering into the spirit of 
 most of Shelley's work. Shelley's want of tranquillity 
 doubtless proceeded from his want of "negative capa- 
 bility," of which Keats possessed so much, — that quality 
 which he defined to be the capability of a man "of being 
 in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable 
 reaching after fact and reason." Shelley had little or no 
 capability thitherwards, he was seemingly una43le ever 
 to suspend his judgment ; if the thing could not be proved, 
 he held it to be disproved ; he could not rest content with 
 twilight, he was in haste to see the sunrise. He that 
 believeth will not make haste, says the prophet, and 
 Shelley's want of belief is the reason at once of his haste 
 and of the many obstacles he stumbled over in his 
 path. 
 
 And what shall we say of Shelley's religion.^ for this 
 
54 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 is a question not to be shirked. Carlyle has truly said 
 that a man's rchgion is the chief fact about him, and this 
 is supremely true of the poet who is a leader of men. 
 But though the question is thus important, we desire to 
 treat it in the simplest manner possible. Undoubtedly 
 Shelley was not a Christian, for to the last he hated 
 Christianity — looking upon it simply as the parent of 
 such monsters as Smithfield bonfires and St Bar- 
 tholomew massacres — but we must not forget that, 
 although he denied the divinity of our Lord, he did no 
 injustice to His *subHme human character/ but hailed 
 Him as a Promethean conqueror, owning, too, that 'like 
 a triumphal path He trod the thorns of death and shame.' 
 We have said that Shelley was not a Christian — what 
 was he, then t We have heard enough, and too much, 
 of Shelley's atheism. True, he assumed the title himself, 
 but to few men could it be less truly applied. Call him 
 materialist, deist, pantheist, if you will — atheist he was 
 not. Why, even in Quee?i Mab, the poem by which alone 
 the charge of atheism could be sustained, the gray rock 
 itself is alive to Shelley, and every particle has its active 
 living spirit. 
 
 "Every grain 
 Is sentient both in unity and part, 
 And the minutest atom comprehends 
 A world of loves and hatreds." 
 
 How shall we call such a belief atheism t But this 
 charge is effectually disproved by his later works, and, in 
 our opinion, these unmistakably reveal him as a pantheist 
 of the higher order ; one of those who painfully strive to 
 climb 
 
 "The great world's altar stairs, 
 That slope through darkness up to God." 
 
 It is true that he never quite got above the darkness. 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 55 
 
 but at times he caught glimpses of the light above, and, 
 as we have seen, he was nobly progressing ; so nobly, 
 that that higher pantheism was possible for Shelley, 
 which acknowledges Him the fulness of whom filleth all 
 in all. 
 
 Some have said that Shelley never could have 
 attained this. We hold such an assertion to be both 
 cruel and unwarranted, for even his enemies never denied 
 his honesty and his fearlessness, and, therefore, we may 
 justly assert that if Shelley's doubts had been honestly 
 dispersed, he would fearlessly have proclaimed as much. 
 His wrench, at the first, from Christianity seemed to have 
 so warped his judgment that he could never afterwards 
 regard dispassionately the faith he had rejected f. For our 
 part we cannot but believe that if Shelley's honest doubts 
 had been openly and liberally met by those with whom 
 he first came in contact, his after-life might have been 
 very different to that which it actually was. If Shelley, 
 when he was writing his Necessity of Atheism, had then 
 discussed matters with Coleridge, what good for him 
 might not have ensued ! For the spirit in which Shelley's 
 doubts would have been listened to is thus embodied 
 in Coleridge's own words : '' His discussions — tending 
 towards atheism of a certain sort — would not have 
 
 + " I grieve that I cannot call Shelley a Christian .... yet I cannot help 
 feeling that there was a spirit in poor Shelley's mind which might have 
 assimilated with the Spirit of his Redeemer — nay, which I will dare to say 
 was kindred with that Spirit, if only his Redeemer had been differently 
 imaged to him. Let who will denounce Shelley, I will not. I will not 
 brand with atheism the name of one whose life was one dream of enthusiastic, 
 however impracticable, philanthropy. I will not say that a man who, by 
 his opposition to God, means opposition to a demon to whom the name of 
 God in his mind is appended, is an enemy of God. To such a man I only 
 reply. You are blaspheming a devil. That is not the God I adore. You 
 are not my enemy. Change the name^ and I will bid that character defiance 
 with you." (Rev. F. W. Robertson, Lectures ^c. On Sceptical Books) 
 
56 THE PLACE OF SHELLEY AMONG THE 
 
 scared me ; for me it would have been a semi-transparent 
 larva, soon to be glorified, and through which I should 
 have seen the true image — the final metamorphosis. 
 Besides, I have ever thought that sort of atheism 
 the next best religion to Christianity ; nor does the 
 better faith I have learnt from Paul and John inter- 
 fere with the cordial reverence I feel for Benedict 
 Spinoza." 
 
 This is the negative side of the question ; the positive 
 has been thus summed up by the man who had better 
 knowledge than any other of Shelley's life and beliefs ; 
 "The leading fact of Shelley's character," writes Leigh 
 Hunt, "may be said to have been a natural piety. He 
 was pious towards nature, towards his friends, towards 
 the whole human race, towards the meanest insect of the 
 forest. He did himself an injustice with the public in 
 using the name of the Supreme Being inconsiderately. 
 He identified it solely with the most vulgar and tyran- 
 nical notions of a god made after the worst fashion ; and 
 did not sufficiently reflect, that it was often used by a 
 juster devotion to express a sense of the great Mover of 
 the universe." We do not wish to further prolong this 
 discussion, but it would not be fair to'^-^close it without 
 alluding to the noble work that Shelley did among the 
 poor and needy wheresoever he happened to meet them. 
 In a biography numerous examples of this should be 
 quoted, but here they are out of place. Yet we may 
 declare our belief that Leigh Hunt had his friend Shelley 
 in mind when he wrote his poem oi Abou ben Adhcni, for 
 it is sure that he who could love, as Shelley did, the 
 brother whom he had seen, was not very far from loving 
 the God whom he had not seen. 
 
 To sum up, we shall do well to ask of Shelley's work 
 the questions to which every man's work has to submit 
 
ENGLISH POETS OF HIS TIME. 57 
 
 sooner or later. What is its tendency ? Has it helped 
 any human soul ? To the first we may reply with 
 another question — What is the tendency of that which 
 seeks by lofty images and impassioned exhortation to 
 raise mankind above petty interests and debasing 
 pleasures into a realm where love shall be the breath of 
 life, animating 
 
 "All things in that sweet abode 
 With its own mild brotherhood"? 
 
 Nor should our second question meet with any dubious 
 response. Shelley's work must have helped many a 
 human soul if such can be helped by the contemplation 
 of a fervid belief in the omnipotence of right, and an 
 earnest conviction that the ultimate perfection and 
 happiness of the human race are inevitable achieve- 
 ments of the virtue and the heroism of the good and the 
 wise. Surely it is helpful to see a brother striving 
 through mists and shadow with steady purpose to reach 
 the light ; surely it is helpful to hear one sorely tried 
 declare that he does not bate a jot of heart or hope, but 
 that he has power given him to still bear up and steer 
 right onward, nay more — 
 
 "To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; 
 To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; • . . 
 To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates." 
 
 And with the no uncertain answer to our question on 
 our lips, we may add in the poet's own triumphant 
 words — 
 
 "This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be 
 
 Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free ; 
 This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, Victory!"' 
 
 ;. s. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 ON THE PLAGIARISMS AND REPETITIONS OF SHELLEY. 
 
 We propose here to discuss some of the plagiarisms to which 
 we have already alluded. The writer in the Co7'nhill\ speaking 
 of those in the Ce7ici^ points out how closely the passage in 
 Othello (v. 2), where the Moor is summing up a result which 
 must follow the murder of Desdemona, is imitated in the Cenci 
 (ill. 2), where Giacomo sums up a like result which must follow 
 the murder of his father. 
 
 Further, when we compare Cenci's apostrophe to the wine 
 he is drinking — 
 
 " Be thou the resolution of quick youth 
 Within my veins, and manhood's pui-pose stern, 
 And age's firm, cold, subtle villany," {Cenci^ I. 3) 
 
 with the following passage in Richard III., (iv. i) — 
 
 "Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy; 
 Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous ; 
 Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly and bloody," 
 
 we trace a resemblance w^hich is not so much in the words as 
 in the idea, where indeed it is unmistakable : this remark will 
 also apply to the resemblance of the words with which Caesario 
 in Twelfth Night (11. 4) and Beatrice in her prison {Cenci, v. 3) 
 
 t Some Notes on Othello. {Cornhill, Oct. 1868.) 
 
APPENDIX. 59 
 
 introduce their songs: also to the resemblance in the passages 
 King yohn, iv. 2, and Cenci, v. i, which describe the means 
 whereby a murderous intent is frequently struck home in the 
 hearts of men. 
 
 The writer then proceeds as follows : — 
 
 *' Sometimes we have in part, the exact words of the passage 
 in Shakspere which had impressed the modern poet's mind, for 
 instance Beatrice exclaims, 
 
 * Ay, something must be done, 
 What yet I know not — something which shall make 
 The thing that I have suffered but a shadow 
 In the dread lightning which avenges it.' {Cenci, ill. i.) 
 
 Who is not reminded of Lear's burst of passion ? 
 
 * I will do such things — 
 What they are I know not, but they shall be 
 The terrors of the earth.' (Lear, 11. 4.) 
 
 In another part of the play we find Beatrice saying — 
 
 * How fearful ! To be nothing ! Or to be 
 What? O where am I? Let me not go mad! 
 Sweet heaven, forgive weak thoughts.' {Cenct, v. 4.) 
 
 Similarly Lear exclaims: 
 
 *0, let me not go mad, not mad, sweet heaven!' 
 
 The coincidence here is both curious and remarkable, on 
 account of the words 'sweet heaven' being in the modern 
 play joined with the sentence following the prayer against mad- 
 ness, while in Lear they form part of the prayer. Evidently 
 the flow and cadence had unconsciously lingered in Shelley's 
 ear, and so the words were reproduced by him in their 
 sequence, though disunited in their sense. Earlier in the same 
 speech Beatrice expressing her shuddering repugnance at the 
 idea of approaching death, says, — 
 
 ' My God ! can it be possible I have 
 To die so suddenly? So young to go 
 Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground I' 
 
 5—2 
 
6o APPENDIX. 
 
 Compare with this Claudio's words on a similar occasion in 
 Measure for Measure (in. i) — 
 
 ' Ay, but to die and go we know not where, 
 To lie in cold obstruction and to rot!' " 
 
 Flven this formidable list by no means exhausts the plagia- 
 risms observable in the Ce?ici^ for there still remain others from 
 Hamlet., the Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets. 
 
 It is the more curious that we should be able to note so 
 many in this play, for Shelley expressly points out in his pre- 
 face the only plagiarism which he had intentionally committed ; 
 and w^hen we remember the absolute truthfulness of Shelley's 
 nature, we cannot hesitate to believe that the plagiarisms we 
 have noticed were entirely unconscious. But we need not 
 long be at a loss to discover the cause of this trait being so 
 largely developed in Shelley. He was not like Wordsworth, 
 indifferent to every modern growth except his own poetry, 
 but with the greatest zest used to devour — rather than study — 
 the beauties to be found in the w^orks of modern writers and 
 of the great masters of old time. His object in reading 
 was not so much to obtain knowledge as enjoyment, and 
 he entered with so much zeal into the creations of other 
 men, into their graces and their elegances, their actors and 
 their situations, that they seem to have become an insepara- 
 ble part of his very thought and nature. To such a heat of 
 enthusiasm did the high thoughts of great souls raise our poet, 
 that his thoughts became welded, as it were, to theirs, and 
 when he wished to enunciate an opinion akin to one already 
 famous, his own words were so inextricably mixed with the 
 words he already loved that he was quite unconscious of any 
 such union; and doubtless no one would have been more 
 unfeignedly surprised than the poet himself if any of the pas- 
 sages we have noticed had been pointed out to him as other 
 than original. This explanation deserves the greater consider- 
 ation from the fact that Shelley's plagiarisms are mostly not 
 from out-of-the-way passages, but from those most known and 
 most quoted. There remains also one further reason which 
 
APPENDIX. 6 1 
 
 may help to account for this habit ; and that is the love \rhich 
 most men of taste exhibit for beautiful ideas and figures and 
 images neatly expressed. Just as in every-day life a man who 
 has a favourite idea or a pet crotchet, is sure to produce it on. 
 all possible occasions, so writers are apt to repeat again and 
 again any phrase or epithet which has won their admiration. 
 Thus Shelley frequently repeats in his poems his favourite 
 ideas and figures and images ; and that, moreover, is the case 
 sometimes when their expression may occupy three or even 
 four lines. As an example of repetition and plagiarism com- 
 bined, it is sufficient to note that while in his address To Night 
 he bids her — 
 
 "Blind with thine hair the eyes of day," 
 and we find elsewhere the couplet — 
 
 " PalHd evening twines its beaming hair 
 In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day," 
 
 {Lines %vritten in Lechlade Churchyard) 
 
 that both these were evidently suggested by Macbeth's apo- 
 strophe to darkness — 
 
 " Come, seeling night 
 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day." [Macbeth, in. i.) 
 
 The following are, however, better examples of the repeti- 
 tion of favourite ideas to which we have alluded. In Prome- 
 theus Unbound {\u. 3) we find the following: — 
 
 "Death is the veil which those who live call life: 
 They sleep and it is lifted." 
 
 In the next scene it is thus expressed: 
 
 "The painted veil, by those who were, called life, — 
 Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread. 
 All men believed and hoped, — is torn aside." 
 
 While in the lines To a Reviewer we find an almost exact 
 repetition of the foregoing: — 
 
 " Lift not the painted veil which those who live 
 Call life; though unreal shapes be pictured there, 
 And it but miinick all we would believe 
 With colour? idly spread." 
 
62 APPENDIX. 
 
 Again, of the following passages the second is actually 
 enfeebled by being so evident an adaptation of the first. In 
 his ode To Liberty^ Shelley, speaking of the Areopagus, the 
 hill which he regards as 'Liberty's earliest throne and latest 
 oracle,' says : 
 
 "Within the surface of time's fleeting river 
 The wrinkled image lies, as then it lay 
 Immovably unquiet, and for ever 
 It trembles, but it cannot pass away." 
 
 And then concerning the city of Pisa on a calm summer's 
 evening, we read — 
 
 " Within the surface of the fleeting river 
 The wrinkled image of the city lay, 
 Immovably unquiet, and for ever 
 It trembles but it never fades away." 
 
 The excessive repetition of favourite images in the poems 
 of Shelley is an undoubted blemish: we have too much for 
 instance of 'wave-reflected stars,' of 'downward -gazing flowers/ 
 of 'sublunar and interlunar spaces,' of 'stellar and planetary 
 wildernesses.' These particular images are doubtless owing to 
 Shelley's habit of spending hours gazing into the calm waters of 
 a pool, or of dreaming away the night in contemplation of the 
 blue vault of heaven; and perhaps the origin of most of his 
 other favourite images could be traced : but this is certain, that 
 such repetition evidences a certain want of poetic care and 
 constitutes an undoubted lack of elegant finish. "The allu- 
 sions that occur most frequently of all in Shelley's poetry," 
 writes Professor Baynes, "are undoubtedly those to the art 
 and mystery of weaving, including the whole process and its 
 result, warp, woof, and w^eb. The references are indeed so 
 numerous, so habitual, so wrought into the very texture of 
 Shelley's poetical thought and style, as almost to defy analysis 
 
 and calculation Had Shelley indeed been the enchanter 
 
 Merlin himself with the profoundest faith in 'the charm of 
 w^oven paces and waving hands,' he could not have resorted 
 more constantly to this peculiar spell or have given it a more 
 
ArrENDix. 63 
 
 prominent place in his magical verse. His whole poetry is in 
 fact covered with a fine net-work or web of figurative allusions 
 to weaving." 
 
 Besides the repetition of favourite images and phrases, 
 Shelley is very prodigal in his use of favourite and even un- 
 usual words. The number of times that the words 'anarch' 
 and 'daedal' occur is somewhat astonishing, while other 
 favourite words in very frequent use are ' moonstone,' ' wind- 
 less,' ' nursling,' ' hyaline.' In addition to these unusual words 
 Shelley evinces a great liking for peculiar Spenserian, Shak- 
 sperian, and Miltonic words. Thus we find in the one poem, 
 Laon and Cyf/uia, 'strook,' 'prankt,' 'eyen,' 'mowing,' 'gri- 
 macing,' 'weets/ 'glode,' 'clombe,' 'frore,' 'indight.' For 
 our part we are inclined to believe that this points to a recent 
 perusal of Spenser by the poet ; for though several of these 
 words appear elsewhere, scattered through his other works, 
 they are rarely found other than singly or at most in twos or 
 threes, while here the number of them is somewhat striking. 
 
 Professor Baynes and T^Ir Buxton Forman have made com- 
 plete lists of Shelley's unusual words : we ourselves have ob- 
 served 'foison' (plenty), 'thwart' (in sense of sour-tempered), 
 'quips and cranks,' 'archimage,' 'crudded' for 'curded,' 'for- 
 bid' (unprayed for, cf. Macbeth), 'treen' (old plural), 'port' (cf. 
 "Their port was more than human," Comtis), and 'grain' (in 
 old sense of dye); and have noticed a very lax usage occurring 
 in Lines written among Euganean Hills in the case of the last- 
 mentioned word, for within a few lines it is used in its two dis- 
 tinct, old and new, meanings, without any note to mark the 
 difference. 
 
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