Shelley(雪莱)

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Shelley

Sydney Waterlow

Shelley

CHAPTER I

Shelley and His Age

In the case of most great writers our interest in them as persons is

derived from out interest in them as writers; we are not very curious about

them except for reasons that have something to do with their art. With

Shelley it is different. During his life he aroused fears and hatreds, loves

and adorations, that were quite irrelevant to literature; and even now, when

he has become a classic, he still causes excitement as a man. His lovers are

as vehement as ever. For them he is the "banner of freedom," which,

"Torn but flying, Streams like a thunder-cloud against the wind."

He has suffered that worst indignity of canonisation as a being saintly

and superhuman, not subject to the morality of ordinary mortals. He has

been bedaubed with pathos. Nevertheless it is possible still to recognise in

him one of the most engaging personalities that ever lived. What is the

secret of this charm? He had many characteristics that belong to the most

tiresome natures; he even had the qualities of the man as to whom one

wonders whether partial insanity may not be his best excuse--inconstancy

expressing itself in hysterical revulsions of feeling, complete lack of

balance, proneness to act recklessly to the hurt of others. Yet he was loved

and respected by contemporaries of tastes very different from his own,

who were good judges and intolerant of bores--by Byron, who was apt to

care little for any one, least of all for poets, except himself; by Peacock,

who poured laughter on all enthusiasms; and by Hogg, who, though

slightly eccentric, was a Tory eccentric. The fact is that, with all his

defects, he had two qualities which, combined, are so attractive that there

is scarcely anything they will not redeem-- perfect sincerity without a

thought of self, and vivid emotional force. All his faults as well as his

virtues were, moreover, derived from a certain strong feeling, coloured in

a peculiar way which will be explained in what follows--a sort of ardour

of universal benevolence. One of his letters ends with these words:

"Affectionate love to and from all. This ought to be not only the vale of a

letter, but a superscription over the gate of life"--words which, expressing

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not merely Shelley's opinion of what ought to be, but what he actually felt,

reveal the ultimate reason why he is still loved, and the reason, too, why

he has so often been idealised. For this universal benevolence is a thing

which appeals to men almost with the force of divinity, still carrying, even

when mutilated and obscured by frailties, some suggestion of St. Francis

or of Christ.

The object of these pages is not to idealise either his life, his characte,

or his works. The three are inseparably connected, and to understand one

we must understand all. The reason is that Shelley is one of the most

subjective of writers. It would be hard to name a poet who has kept his art

more free from all taint of representation of the real, making it nor an

instrument for creating something life-like, but a more and more intimate

echo or emanation of his own spirit. In studying his writings we shall see

how they flow from his dominating emotion of love for his fellow-men;

and the drama of his life, displayed against the background of the time,

will in turn throw light on that emotion. His benevolence took many

forms--none perfect, some admirable, some ridiculous. It was too

universal. He never had a clear enough perception of the real qualities of

real men and women; hence his loves for individuals, as capricious as they

were violent, always seem to lack something which is perhaps the most

valuable element in human affection. If in this way we can analyse his

temperament successfully, the process should help us to a more critical

understanding, and so to a fuller enjoyment, of the poems.

This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of the Romantic

Movement in English literature, appeared in an age which, following on

the series of successful wars that had established British power all over the

world, was one of the gloomiest in our history. If in some ways the

England of 1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it lagged far

behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us from a nation of

peasants and traders into a nation of manufacturers, had begun; but its

chief fruits as yet were increased materialism and greed, and politically the

period was one of blackest reaction. Alone of European peoples we had

been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's conquests, which, when it

receded from the Continent, at least left behind a framework of

Shelley

enlightened institutions, while our success in the Napoleonic wars only

confirmed the ruling aristocratic families in their grip of the nation which

they had governed since the reign of Anne. This despotism crushed the

humble and stimulated the high-spirited to violence, and is the reason why

three such poets as Byron, Landor, and Shelley, though by birth and

fortune members of the ruling class, were pioneers as much of political as

of spiritual rebellion. Unable to breathe the atmosphere of England, they

were driven to live in exile.

It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. A foreign

critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main Currents of Nineteenth

Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that England was then

pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her native energy was

diverted to oppression, in morals and religion it took the form of hypocrisy

and persecution. Abroad she was supporting the Holy Alliance, throwing

her weight into the scale against all movements for freedom. At home

there was exhaustion after war; workmen were thrown out of employment,

and taxation pressed heavily on high rents and the high price of corn, was

made cruel by fear; for the French Revolution had sent a wave of panic

through the country, not to ebb until about 1830. Suspicion of republican

principles--which, it seemed, led straight to the Terror--frightened many

good men, who would otherwise have been reformers, into supporting the

triumph of coercion and Toryism. The elder generation of poets had been

republicans in their youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it

was "bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even

planned to found a communistic society in the New World. Now all three

were rallied to the defence of order and property, to Church and Throne

and Constitution. From their seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and

Wordsworth praised the royal family and celebrated England as the home

of freedom; while Thomson wrote "Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though

they never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were to a home-grown

tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than that of Napoleon.

England had stamped out the Irish rebellion of 1798 in blood, had forced

Ireland by fraud into the Union of 1800, and was strangling her industry

and commerce. Catholics could neither vote nor hold office. At a time

Shelley

when the population of the United Kingdom was some thirty millions, the

Parliamentary franchise was possessed by no more than a million persons,

and most of the seats in the House of Commons were the private property

of rich men. Representative government did not exist; whoever agitated

for some measure of it was deported to Australia or forced to fly to

America. Glasgow and Manchester weavers starved and rioted. The press

was gagged and the Habeas Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second

rebellion in Ireland, when Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young hands in

Erin's gore," was suppressed with unusual ferocity. In England in 1812

famine drove bands of poor people to wander and pillage. Under the

criminal law, still of medieval cruelty, death was the punishment for the

theft of a loaf or a sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--on

the one hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vast Church-

and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who had "a stake in

the country." The strain was not to be relieved until the Reform Act of

1832 set the wheels in motion again; they then moved painfully indeed,

but still they moved. Meanwhile Parliament was the stronghold of selfish

interests; the Church was the jackal of the gentry; George III, who lost the

American colonies and maintained negro slavery, was on the throne, until

he went mad and was succeeded by his profligate son.

Shelley said of himself that he was

"A nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"

and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his life and in his

verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex family that was loyally Whig and

moved in the orbit of the Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and the talk about

emancipation which he would hear at home may partly explain his

amazing invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen years old,

with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the

Union Act--subjects on which he was quite ignorant. He addressed

meetings, wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets "consisting of the

benevolent and tolerant deductions of philosophy reduced into the

simplest language." Later on, when he had left England for ever, he still

followed eagerly the details of the struggle for freedom at home, and in

1819 composed a group of poems designed to stir the masses from their

Shelley

lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was in office, with Sidmouth as

Home Secretary and Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary, a pair whom he

thus pillories:

"As a shark and dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic Isle, For the negro

ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills

the while--

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet

stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched

on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one."

The most effective of these bitter poems is 'The Masque of Anarchy',

called forth by the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester on August 16, 1819,

when hussars had charged a peaceable meeting held in support of

Parliamentary reform, killing six people and wounding some seventy

others. Shelley's frenzy of indignation poured itself out in the terrific

stanzas, written in simplest language so as to be understood by the people,

which tell how "I met a murder on the way-- He had a mask like

Castlereagh-- Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds

followed him."

The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in 1819'-

- "An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, Princes, the dregs of their

dull race, who flow Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring."

and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay in

sinister humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by the grunting

of pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the quarrel between the Prince

Regent and his wife. When the Princess of Wales (Caroline of Brunswick-

Wolfenbuttel), after having left her husband and perambulated Europe

with a paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession as George IV,

to claim her position as Queen, the royal differences became an affair of

high national importance. The divorce case which followed was like a

gangrenous eruption symptomatic of the distempers of the age. Shelley

felt that sort of disgust which makes a man rave and curse under the

attacks of some loathsome disease; if he laughs, it is the laugh of frenzy. In

the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which was sent home,

published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men of England as

Shelley

starving pigs content to lap up such diluted hog's-wash as their tyrant, the

priests, and the soldiers will allow them. At the end, when the pigs,

rollicking after the triumphant Princess, hunt down their oppressors, we

cannot help feeling a little sorry that he does not glide from the insistent

note of piggishness into some gentler mood: their is a rasping quality in

his humour, even though it is always on the side of right. He wrote one

good satire though. This is 'Peter Bell the Third' (1819), an attack on

Wordsworth, partly literary for the dulness of his writing since he had been

sunk in clerical respectability, partly political for his renegade flunkyism.

In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern Europe began to lift in

the south. After Napoleon's downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-16)

had parcelled Europe out on the principle of disregarding national

aspirations and restoring the legitimate rulers. This system, which could

not last, was first shaken by revolutions that set up constitutional

governments in Spain and Naples. Shelley hailed these streaks of dawn

with joy, and uttered his enthusiasm in two odes--the 'Ode to Liberty' and

the 'Ode to Naples'--the most splendid of those cries of hope and prophecy

with which a long line of English poets has encouraged the insurrection of

the nations. Such cries, however, have no visible effect on the course of

events. Byron's jingles could change the face of the world, while all

Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations left no mark on history. And so it was,

not with his republican ardours alone, but with all he undertook. Nothing

he did influenced his contemporaries outside his immediate circle; the

public only noticed him to execrate the atheist, the fiend, and the monster.

He felt that "his name was writ on water," and languished for want of

recognition. His life, a lightning-flash across the storm-cloud of the age,

was a brief but crowded record of mistakes and disasters, the classical

example of the rule that genius is an infinite capacity for getting into

trouble.

Though poets must "learn in suffering what they teach in song," there

is often a vein of comedy in their lives. If we could transport ourselves to

Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a certain afternoon in the early

spring of 1811, we should behold a scene apparently swayed entirely by

the Comic Muse. The member for Shoreham, Mr. Timothy Shelley, a

Shelley

handsome, consequential gentleman of middle age, who piques himself on

his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to dinner--his eldest son,

and his son's friend, T. J. Hogg, who have just been sent down from

Oxford for a scandalous affair of an aesthetical squib. When the young

men arrive at five o'clock, Mr. Shelley receives Hogg, an observant and

cool-headed person, with graciousness, and an hour is spent in

conversation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, "in an odd, unconnected

manner, scolding, crying, swearing, and then weeping again." After dinner,

his son being out of the room, he expresses his surprise to Hogg at finding

him such a sensible fellow, and asks him what is to be done with the

scapegoat. "Let him be married to a girl who will sober him." The wine

moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley becomes maudlin and tearful again.

He is a model magistrate, the terror and the idol of poachers; he is highly

respected in the House of Commons, and the Speaker could not get

through the session without him. Then he drifts to religion. God exists, no

one can deny it; in fact, he has the proof in his pocket. Out comes a piece

of paper, and arguments are read aloud, which his son recognises as

Palley's. "Yes, they are Palley's arguments, but he had them from me;

almost everything in Palley's book he had taken from me." The boy of

nineteen, who listens fuming to this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness.

In appearance he is no ordinary being. A shock of dark brown hair makes

his small round head look larger than it really is; from beneath a pale,

freckled forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a stag's, beam an

earnestness which easily flashes into enthusiasm; the nose is small and

turn-up, the beardless lips girlish and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops, and

has an air of feminine fragility, though his bones and joints are large.

Hands and feet, exquisitely shaped, are expressive of high breeding. His

expensive, handsome clothes are disordered and dusty, and bulging with

books. When he speaks, it is in a strident peacock voice, and there is an

abrupt clumsiness in his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, where he

is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture. Complete

absence of self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are evident in

every tone; it is clear that he is an aristocrat, but it is also clear that he is a

saint.

Shelley

The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been

impossible in a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe Shelley could

not have fitted easily into any system. Born at Field Place, Horsham,

Sussex, on August 4, 1792, simultaneously with the French Revolution, he

had more than a drop of wildness in his blood. The long pedigree of the

Shelley family is full of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather, Sir

Bysshe, an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been married

twice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at Eton Shelley

was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of authority, he had gone his own

way, spending pocket-money on revolutionary literature, trying to raise

ghosts, and dabbling in chemical experiments. As often happens to queer

boys, his school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him with blows and

cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays were happy. There must have

been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his sisters stories about the

alchemist in the attic or "the Great Tortoise that lived in Warnham Pond,"

frightened them with electric shocks, and taught his baby brother to say

devil. There is something of high-spirited fun even in the raptures and

despairs of his first love for his cousin, Harriet Grove. He tried to convert

her to republican atheism, until the family, becoming alarmed, interfered,

and Harriet was disposed of otherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!"

exclaims Shelley. He spent nights "pacing the churchyard," and slept with

a loaded pistol and poison beside him.

He went in to residence at University College, Oxford, in the

Michaelmas term of 1810. The world must always bless the chance which

sent Thomas Jefferson Hogg a freshman to the same college at the same

time, and made him Shelley's friend. The chapters in which Hogg

describes their live at Oxford are the best part of his biography. In these

lively pages we see, with all the force of reality, Shelley working by fits in

a litter of books and retorts and "galvanic troughs," and discoursing on the

vast possibilities of science for making mankind happy; how chemistry

will turn deserts into cornfields, and even the air and water will year fire

and food; how Africa will be explored by balloons, of which the shadows,

passing over the jungles, will emancipate the slaves. In the midst he would

rush out to a lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that it was all

Shelley

about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held

endless talk of metaphysics, pre-existence, and the sceptical philosophy,

on winter walks across country, and all night beside the fire, until Shelley

would curl up on the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy because he

was left to himself. With all his thoughts and impulses, ill-controlled

indeed, but directed to the acquisition of knowledge for the benefit of the

world, such a student would nowadays be a marked man, applauded and

restrained. But the Oxford of that day was a home of "chartered laziness."

An academic circle absorbed in intrigues for preferment, and enlivened

only by drunkenness and immorality, could offer nothing but what was

repugnant to Shelley. He remained a solitary until the hand of authority

fell and expelled him.

He had always had a habit of writing to strangers on the subjects next

his heart. Once he approached Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwards

Mrs. Hemans), who had not been encouraging. Now half in earnest, and

half with an impish desire for dialectical scores, he printed a pamphlet on

'The Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet concisely proving that

no reason for the existence of God can be valid, and sent it to various

personages, including bishops, asking for a refutation. It fell into the hands

of the college authorities. Summoned before the council to say whether he

was the author, Shelley very properly refused to answer, and was

peremptorily expelled, together with Hogg, who had intervened in his

behalf.

The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a house where a wall-

paper with a vine-trellis pattern caught Shelley's fancy. Mr. Timothy

Shelley appeared on the scene, and, his feelings as a Christian and a father

deeply outraged, did the worst thing he could possibly have done--he

made forgiveness conditional on his son's giving up his friend. The next

step was to cut off supplies and to forbid Field Place to him, lest he should

corrupt his sisters' minds. Soon Hogg had to go to York to work in a

conveyancer's office, and Shelley was left alone in London, depressed, a

martyr, and determined to save others from similar persecution. In this

mood he formed a connection destined to end in tragedy. His sisters were

at a school at Clapham, where among the girls was one Harriet Westbrook,

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Shelley1ShelleySydneyWaterlowShelley2CHAPTERIShelleyandHisAgeInthecaseofmostgreatwritersourinterestinthemaspersonsisderivedfromoutinterestinthemaswriters;wearenotverycuriousaboutthemexceptforreasonsthathavesomethingtodowiththeirart.WithShelleyitisdifferent.Duringhislifehearousedfearsandhatreds,loves...

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