Shelley..................................................................................................................................................................1

Sydney Waterlow .....................................................................................................................................1

Chapter I Shelley and His Age .................................................................................................................1

Chapter II Principal Writings .................................................................................................................11

Chapter III The Poet of Rebellion, of Nature, and of Love...................................................................23

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

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 excuseinconstancy 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 boresby 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 followsa sort of ardour of universal

benevolence. One of his letters ends with these words: "Affectionate love to and from all. This ought to be

not only the vale of a letter, but a superscription over the gate of life"words which, expressing not merely

Shelley's opinion of what ought to be, but what he actually felt, reveal the ultimate reason why he is 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,

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 lifelike, 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 fellowmen; 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 formsnone 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

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 180020 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 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 highspirited 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

It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere today. 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

preeminently 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 principleswhich, it seemed, led straight to the

Terrorfrightened 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

homegrown 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 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 deadlockon the one hand a

starved and angry populace, on the other a vast ChurchandKing 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

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

181112, when he was nineteen years old, with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the repeal

of the Union Actsubjects 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 lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was in office, with Sidmouth as Home Secretary and

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,

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 BrunswickWolfenbuttel), 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 starving pigs content to lap up

such diluted hog'swash 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 (181416) 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 odesthe '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 lightningflash across the stormcloud 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

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

his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to dinnerhis 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 coolheaded 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 turnup, 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 drawingrooms, where he is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture. Complete

absence of selfconsciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that he is an

The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been impossible in a wellregulated 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 pocketmoney on revolutionary literature, trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical

experiments. As often happens to queer boys, his schoolfellows 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 highspirited 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

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 about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held endless talk of metaphysics,

preexistence, 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, illcontrolled 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 wallpaper with a vinetrellis 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 donehe 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, the sixteenyearold daughter of a coffeehouse keeper. Shelley

became intimate with the Westbrooks, and set about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a

neat figure, and a glib schoolgirl mind quick to catch up and reproduce his doctrines. The child seems to

have been innocent enough, but her elder sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to entangle

the future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by encouraging Harriet to believe herself the victim of

tyranny at school. Still, it was six months before he took the final step. How he could save Harriet from

scholastic and domestic bigotry was a grave question. In the first place, hatred of "matrimonialism" was one

of his principles, yet it seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of illicit union; in the second

place, he was at this time passionately interested in another woman, a certain Miss Hitchener, a Sussex school

mistress of republican and deistic principles, whom he idealised as an angel, only to discover soon, with

equal falsity, that she was a demon. At last Harriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection. They

fled by the northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg to join them, and contracted a Scottish

The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelley lived with Harriet must seem insane to a

rational mind. Life was one comfortless picnic. When Shelley wanted food, he would dart into a shop and

buy a loaf or a handful of raisins. Always accompanied by Eliza, they changed their dwellingplace more

than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt,

Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and Windsor, successively

received this fantastic household. Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and each

formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensive beneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the

Welsh coast, Shelley embarked on the construction of an embankment to reclaim a drowned tract of land;

'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he had gone to

regenerate the country, he opened correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of

'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw

into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting

means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable qualities,

quickly became "a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, who had been

induced to give up her school and come to live with them "for ever," was discovered to be a "brown demon,"

and had to be pensioned off. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted apart, and he found consolation in a

sentimental attachment to a Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who read Italian poetry

with him and sang to guitars. Harriet had borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but she herself was a child, who soon

wearied of philosophy and of being taught Latin; naturally she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a settlement.

Egged on by her sister, she spent on plate and a carriage the money that Shelley would have squandered on

humanity at large. Money difficulties and negotiations with his father were the background of all this period.

On March 24, 1814, he married Harriet in church, to settle any possible question as to the legitimacy of his

children; but they parted soon after. Attempts were made at reconciliation, which might have. succeeded had

not Shelley during this summer drifted into a serious and relatively permanent passion. He made financial

provision for his wife, who gave birth to a second child, a boy, on November 30, 1814; but, as the months

passed, and Shelley was irrevocably bound to another, she lost heart for life in the dreariness of her father's

house. An Irish officer took her for his mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was found drowned in the

This marriage was the result of his correspondence with William Godwin, which had ripened into intimacy,

based on community of principles, with the Godwin household. The philosopher, a short, stout old man,

presided, with his big bald head, his leaden complexion, and his air of a dissenting minister, over a

heterogeneous family at 41 Skinner Street, Holborn, supported in scrambling poverty by the energy of the

second Mrs. Godwin, who carried on a business of publishing children's books. In letters of the time we see

Mrs. Godwin as a fat little woman in a black velvet dress, badtempered and untruthful. "She is a very

disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles," said Charles Lamb. Besides a small son of the Godwins, the

family contained four other membersClara Mary Jane Clairmont and Charles Clairmont (Mrs. Godwin's

children by a previous marriage), Fanny Godwin (as she was called), and Mary Godwin. These last two were

the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of 'The Rights of Women', the great feminist, who had been

Godwin's first wife. Fanny's father was a scamp called Imlay, and Mary was Godwin's child.

Mary disliked her stepmother, and would wander on fine days to read beside her mother's grave in Old St.

Pancras Churchyard. This girl of seventeen had a strong if rather narrow mind; she was imperious, ardent,

and firmwilled. She is said to have been very pale, with golden hair and a large forehead, redeemed from

commonplace by hazel eyes which had a piercing look. When sitting, she appeared to be of more than

average height; when she stood, you saw that she had her father's stumpy legs. Intellectually, and by the

solidity of her character, she was better fitted to be Shelley's mate than any other woman he ever came across.

It was natural that she should be interested in this bright creature, fallen as from another world into their

dingy, squabbling family. If it was inevitable that her interest, touched with pity (for he was in despair over

the collapse of his life with Harriet), should quickly warm to love, we must insist that the rapture with which

he leaped to meet her had some foundation in reality. That she was gifted is manifest in her writings

chiefly, no doubt, in 'Frankenstein', composed when she had Shelley to fire her imagination; but her other

novels are competent, and her letters are the work of a vigorous intellect. She had her limitations. She was not

quite so free from conventionality as either he or she believed; but on the whole they were neither deceiving

themselves nor one another when they plighted faith by Mary Wollstonecraft's grave. With their principles, it

was nothing that marriage was impossible. Without the knowledge of the elder Godwins, they made

arrangements to elope, and on July 28, 1814, crossed from Dover to Calais in an open boat, taking Jane

Clairmont with them on the spur of the moment. Jane also had been unhappy in Skinner Street. She was

about Mary's age, a pert, olivecomplexioned girl, with a strong taste for life. She changed her name to Claire

Mrs. Godwin pursued the fugitives to Calais, but in vain. Shelley was now launched on a new life with a new

bride, anda freakish touchaccompanied as before by his bride's sister. The more his life changed, the

more it was the same thingthe same plunging without forethought, the same disregard for all that is

conventionally deemed necessary. His courage is often praised, and rightly, though we ought not to forget

that ignorance, and even obtuseness, were large ingredients in it. As far as they had any plan, it was to reach

Switzerland and settle on the banks of some lake, amid sublime mountain scenery, "for ever." In fact, the tour

lasted but six weeks. Their difficulties began in Paris, where only an accident enabled Shelley to raise funds.

Then they moved slowly across warwasted France, Mary and Claire, in black silk dresses, riding by turns on

a mule, and Shelley walking. Childish happiness glows in their journals. From Troyes Shelley wrote to the

abandoned Harriet, in perfect good faith, pressing her to join them in Switzerland. There were sprained

ankles, dirty inns, perfidious and disobliging driversthe ordinary misadventures of the road, magnified a

thousand times by their helplessness, and all transfigured in the purple light of youth and the intoxication of

literature. At last they reached the Lake of Lucerne, settled at Brunnen, and began feverishly to read and

write. Shelley worked at a novel called 'The Assassins', and we hear of him "sitting on a rude pier by the

lake" and reading aloud the siege of Jerusalem from Tacitus. Soon they discovered that they had only just

enough money left to take them home. Camp was struck in haste, and they travelled down the Rhine. When

their boat was detained at Marsluys, all three sat writing in the cabinShelley his novel, Mary a story called

'Hate', and Claire a story called 'The Idiot'until they were tossed across to England, and reached London

The winter was spent in poverty, dodging creditors through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic

embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness to

believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. Knowing that he was

heir to a large fortune, he would subsidise any project or any grievance, only provided it were wild enough.

Godwin especially was a running sore both now and later on; the philosopher was at the beginning of that

shabby 'degringolade' which was to end in the ruin of his selfrespect. In spite of his antimatrimonial

principles, he was indignant at his disciple's elopement with his daughter, and, in spite of his philosophy, he

was not above abusing and sponging in the same breath. The worst of these difficulties, however, came to an

end when Shelley's grandfather died on January 6, 1815, and he was able, after long negotiations, to make an

arrangement with his father, by which his debts were paid and he received an income of 1000 pounds a year

And now, the financial muddle partly smoothed out, his genius began to bloom in the congenial air of Mary's

companionship. The summer of 1815 spent in rambles in various parts of the country, saw the creation of

Alastor. Early in 1816 Mary gave birth to her first child, a boy, William, and in the spring, accompanied by

the baby and Claire, they made a second expedition to Switzerland. A little in advance another poet left

England for ever. George Gordon, Lord Byron, loaded with fame and lacerated by chagrin, was beginning to

bear through Europe that 'pageant of his bleeding heart" of which the first steps are celebrated in 'Childe

Harold'. Unknown to Shelley and Mary, there was already a link between them and the luxurious "pilgrim of

eternity' rolling towards Geneva in his travellingcarriage, with physician and suite: Claire had visited Byron

in the hope that he might help her to employment at Drury Lane Theatre, and, instead of going on the stage,

had become his mistress. Thus united, but strangely dissimilar, the two parties converged on the Lake of

Geneva, where the poets met for the first time. Shelley, though jarred by Byron's worldliness and pride, was

impressed by his creative power, and the days they spent sailing on the lake, and wandering in a region

haunted by the spirit of Rousseau, were fruitful. The 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and the 'Lines on Mont

Blanc' were conceived this summer. In September the Shelleys were back in England.

But England, though he had good friends like Peacock and the Leigh Hunts, was full of private and public

troubles, and was not to hold him long. The country was agitated by riots due to unemployment. The

Government, frightened and vindictive, was multiplying trials for treason and blasphemous libel, and Shelley

feared he might be put in the pillory himself. Mary's sister Fanny, to whom he was attached, killed herself in

October; Harriet's suicide followed in December; and in the same winter the Westbrooks began to prepare

their case for the Chancery suit, which ended in the permanent removal of Harriet's children from his

custody, on the grounds that his immoral conduct and opinions unfitted him to be their guardian. His health,

too, seems to have been bad, though it is hard to know precisely how bad. He was liable to hallucinations of

all kinds; the line between imagination and reality, which ordinary people draw quite definitely, seems

scarcely to have existed for him. There are many stories as to which it is disputed how far, if at all, reality is

mixed with dream, as in the case of the murderous assault he believed to have been made on him one night of

wind and rain in Wales; of the veiled lady who offered to join her life to his; of the Englishman who, hearing

him ask for letters in the postoffice at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned atheist

Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half frantic with delusionsas that his father and

uncle were plotting to shut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatched from him by

the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh and blood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal

disease, he would often make his certainty of early death the pretext for abandoning some illconsidered

scheme; but there is probably much exaggeration in the spasms and the consumptive symptoms which figure

so excitedly in his letters. Hogg relates how he once plagued himself and his friends by believing that he had

elephantiasis, and says that he was really very healthy The truth seems to be that his constitution was

naturally strong, though weakened from time to time by neurotic conditions, in which mental pain brought on

In February 1817 he settled at Marlow with Mary and Claire. Claire, as a result of her intrigue with

Byronof which the fruit was a daughter, Allegra, born in Januarywas now a permanent charge on his

affectionate generosity. It seemed that their wanderings were at last over. At Marlow he busied himself with

politics and philanthropy, and wrote 'The Revolt of Islam'. But, partly because the climate was unsuitable,

partly from overwork in visiting and helping the poor, his health was thought to be seriously endangered. In

March 1818, together with the five souls dependent on him Claire and her baby, Mary and her two babies

(a second, Clara, had been born about six months before)he left England, never to return.

Mary disliked hot weather, but it always put Shelley in spirits, and his best work was done beneath the sultry

blue of Italian skies, floating in a boat on the Serchio or the Arno, baking in a glazed cage on the roof of a

Tuscan villa, or lying among the ruins of the Coliseum or in the pinewoods near Pisa. Their Italian

wanderings are too intricate to be traced in detail here. It was a chequered time, darkened by disaster and

cheered by friendships. Both their children died, Clara at Venice in 1818, and William at home in 1819. It is

impossible not to be amazed at the heedlessnessthe long journeys in a rough foreign land, the absence of

ordinary provision against ailmentswhich seems to have caused the death of these beloved little beings.

The birth in 1819 of another son, Percy (who survived to become Sir Percy Shelley), brought some comfort.

Claire's troubles, again, were a constant anxiety. Shelley worked hard to persuade Byron either to let her have

Allegra or to look after his daughter properly himself; but he was obdurate, and the child died in a convent

near Venice in 1822. Shelley's association with Byron, of whom, in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has

drawn a picture with the darker features left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned. No doubt

Byron's splenetic cynicism, even his parade of debauchery, was largely an assumption for the benefit of the

world; but beneath the frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of his intimate conversation, beneath his careful

cultivation of the graces of a Regency buck, he was fundamentally selfish and treacherous. Provided no

serious demands were made upon him, he enjoyed the society of Shelley and his circle, and the two were

much together, both at Venice and in the Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa, where, with a menagerie of animals and

retainers, Byron had installed himself in those surroundings of Oriental ostentation which it amused him to

A more unalloyed friendship was that with the amiable Gisborne family, settled at Leghorn; its serene

cheerfulness is reflected in Shelley's charming rhymed 'Letter to Maria Gisborne'. And early in 1821 they

were joined by a young couple who proved very congenial. Ned Williams was a halfpay lieutenant of

dragoons, with literary and artistic tastes, and his wife, Jane, had a sweet, engaging manner, and a good

singing voice. Then there was the e'citing discovery of the Countess Emilia Viviani, imprisoned in a convent

by a jealous stepmother. All three of themMary, Claire, and Shelleyat once fell in love with the dusky

beauty. Impassioned letters passed between her and Shelley, in which he was her "dear brother" and she his

"dearest sister"; but she was soon found to be a very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as the

instrument chosen by chance to inspire 'Epipsychidion'. Finally there appeared, in January 1822, the

truesthearted and the most lovable of all Shelley's friends. Edward John Trelawny, a cadet of a Cornish

family, "with his knighterrant aspect, dark, handsome, and moustachioed," was the true buccaneer of

romance, but of honest English grain, and without a trace of pose. The devotion with which, though he only

knew Shelley for a few months, he fed in memory on their friendship to the last day of his life, brings home

to us, as nothing else can, the force of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man lived until 1881, an almost

solitary survivor from the Byronic age, and his life contained matter enough to swamp recollection of

halfadozen poets. It seems that, after serving in the navy and deserting from an East Indiaman at Bombay,

he passed, in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredible experiences narrated in his 'Adventures of a

Younger Son'; and all this before he was twentyone, for in 1813 he was in England and married. Then he

disappeared, bored by civilisation; nothing is known of him until 1820, when he turns up in Switzerland in

pursuit of sport and adventure. After Shelley's death he went to Greece with Byron, joined the rebel chief

Odysseus, married his sister Tersitza, and was nearly killed in defending a cave on Mount Parnassus.

Through the subsequent years, which included wanderings in America, and a narrow escape from drowning

in trying to swim Niagara, he kept pressing Shelley's widow to marry him. Perhaps because he was piqued by

Mary's refusal, he has left a rather unflattering portrait of her. He was indignant at her desire to suppress parts

of 'Queen Mab'; but he might have admired the honesty with which she retained 'Epipsychidion', although

that poem describes her as a "cold chaste moon." The old seacaptain in Sir John Millais' picture, "The

NorthWest Passage," now in the Tate Gallery in London, is a portrait of Trelawny in old age.

To return to the Shelleys. It was decided that the summer of 1822 should be spent with the Williamses, and

after some search a house just capable of holding both families was found near Lerici, on the east side of the

Bay of Spezzia. It was a lonely, windswept place, with its feet in the waves. The natives were halfsavage;

there was no furniture, and no facility for getting provisions. The omens opened badly. At the moment of

moving in, news of Allegra's death came; Shelley was shaken and saw visions, and Mary disliked the place at

first sight. Still, there was the sea washing their terrace, and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of his

poems in which a boat does not figure, though it is usually made of moonstone); and, while Williams fancied

himself as a navigator, Trelawny was really at home on the water. A certain Captain Roberts was

commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, where Byron also was fitting out a yacht, the 'Bolivar'. When the

'Ariel'for so they called herarrived, the friends were delighted with her speed and handiness. She was a

thirtyfooter, without a deck, ketchrigged.[1] Shelley's health was good, and this June, passed in bathing,

sailing, reading, and hearing Jane sing simple melodies to her guitar in the moonlight, was a gleam of

happiness before the end. It was not so happy for Mary, who was ill and oppressed with housekeeping for two

families, and over whose relations with Shelley a film of querulous jealousy had crept.

[1 Professor Dowden, 'Life of Shelley', vol. ii., p. 501, says "schoonerrigged." This is a landsman's mistake.]

Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters, was coming out from England with his wife; on

July 1st Shelley and Williams sailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them into the

groundfloor of Byron's palace at Pisa. His business despatched, Shelley returned from Pisa to Leghorn, with

Hunt's copy of Keats's 'Hyperion' in his pocket to read on the voyage home. Though the weather looked

threatening, he put to sea again on July 8th, with Williams and an English sailorboy. Trelawny wanted to

convoy them in Byron's yacht, but was turned back by the authorities because he had no portclearance. The

air was sultry and still, with a storm brewing, and he went down to his cabin and slept. When he awoke, it

was to see fishingboats running into harbour under bare poles amid the hubbub of a thundersquall. In that

squall the 'Ariel' disappeared. It is doubtful whether the unseaworthy craft was merely swamped, or whether,

as there is some reason to suppose, an Italian felucca ran her down with intent to rob the Englishmen. In any

case, the calamity is the crowning example of that combination of bad management and bad luck which

dogged Shelley all his life. It was madness to trust an open boat, manned only by the inexperienced Williams

and a boy (for Shelley was worse than useless), to the chances of a Mediterranean storm. And destiny turns

on trifles; if the 'Bolivar' had been allowed to sail, Trelawny might have saved them.

He sent out searchparties, and on July 19th sealed the despairing women's certainty of disaster by the news

that the bodies had been washed ashore. Shelley's was identified by a copy of Sophocles in one coatpocket

and the Keats in another. What Trelawny then did was an action of that perfect fitness to which only the

rarest natures are prompted: he charged himself with the business of burning the bodies. This required some

organisation. There were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials had to be assembledthe fuel, the

improvised furnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre. In his artless 'Records' he

describes the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body was given to the flames on a day of intense heat,

when the islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the background the marbleflecked Apennines gleamed.

Byron looked on until he could stand it no longer, and swam off to his yacht. The heart was the last part to be

consumed. By Trelawny's care the ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.

It is often sought to deepen our sense of this tragedy by speculating on what Shelley would have done if he

had lived. But, if such a question must be asked, there are reasons for thinking that he might not have added

much to his reputation. It may indeed be an accident that his last two years were less fertile in firstrate work

than the years 1819 and 1820, and that his last unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life', is even more

incoherent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider the nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant.

His song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles in middle life,

leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource. Some men suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in

which they lose their old selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may be fairly sure that

this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would always have returned to much the

same impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar rigidity which can

sometimes be observed in violently unstable characters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuatedit

took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on which it

The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a very peculiar combination of the two. He was a

dreamer, but he never dreamed merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate his dreams into

acts. The practical side of him was so strong that he might have been a great statesman or reformer, had not

his imagination, stimulated by a torrential fluency of language, overborne his will. He was like a boat (the

comparison would have pleased him) built for strength and speed, but immensely oversparred. His life was a

scene of incessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters, diaries, and pamphlets, his translations from

Greek, Spanish, German, and Italian, and remembering that he died at thirty, and was, besides, feverishly

active in a multitude of affairs, we fancy that his pen can scarcely ever have been out of his hand. And not

only was he perpetually writing; he read gluttonously. He would thread the London traffic, nourishing his

unworldly mind from an open book held in one hand, and his ascetic body from a hunch of bread held in the

other. This fury for literature seized him early. But the quality of his early work was astonishingly bad. An

author while still a schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, written for the most part when he was seventeen

years old, called 'Zastrozzi', the mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants, is eloquent of its

nature. This was soon followed by another like it, 'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are

adaptations from the German [2] or not, these books are merely bad imitations of the bad school then in

vogue, the fleshcreeping school of skeletons and clanking chains, of convulsions and ecstasies, which Miss

Austen, though no one knew it, had killed with laughter years before.[3] "Verezzi scarcely now shuddered

when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined

themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of horror"that is the kind of stuff

in which the imagination of the young Shelley rioted. And evidently it is not consciously imagined; life really

presented itself to him as a romance of this kind, with himself as heroa hero who is a hopeless lover,

blighted by premature decay, or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to all eternity.

This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental verse and prose, much of it more or less surreptitiously

published, which the researches of specialists have brought to light, and which need not be dwelt upon here.

[2 So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says

[3 'Northanger Abbey', satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, was written before 1798, but was not published

But very soon another influence began to mingle with this feebly extravagant vein, an influence which

purified and strengthened, though it never quite obliterated it. At school he absorbed, along with the official

tincture of classical education, a violent private dose of the philosophy of the French Revolution; he

discovered that all that was needed to abolish all the evil done under the sun was to destroy bigotry,

intolerance, and persecution as represented by religious and monarchical institutions. At first this influence

combined with his misguided literary passions only to heighten the whole absurdity, as when he exclaims, in

a letter about his first disappointed love, "I swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast

menever will I forgive Intolerance!" The character of the romance is changed indeed; it has become an

epic of human regeneration, and its emotions are dedicated to the service of mankind; but still it is a romance.

The results, however, are momentous; for the hero, being a man of action, is no longer content to write and

pay for the printing: in his capacity of liberator he has to step into the arena, and, above all, he has to think

An early manifestation of this impulse was the Irish enterprise already mentioned. Public affairs always

stirred him, but, as time went on, it was more and more to verse and less to practical intervention, and after

1817 he abandoned argument altogether for song. But one pamphlet, 'A Proposal for putting Reform to the

Vote' (1817), is characteristic of the way in which he was always labouring to do something, not merely to

ventilate existing evils, but to promote some practical scheme for abolishing them. Let a national referendum,

he says, be held on the question of reform, and let it be agreed that the result shall be binding on Parliament;

he himself will contribute 100 pounds a year (onetenth of his income) to the expenses of organisation. He is

in favour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by degrees; it

would not do to abolish aristocracy and monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the hands of men

rendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery; and he proposes that the payment of a small sum in direct taxes

should be the qualification for the parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, was not in the sphere of

practical politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how far Shelley was from being a vulgar theoryridden

Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that "intolerance" was the cause of all evil, and, in the same flash, that

it could be destroyed by clear and simple reasoning. Apply the acid of enlightened argument, and religious

beliefs will melt away, and with them the whole rotten fabric which they supportcrowns and churches, lust

and cruelty, war and crime, the inequality of women to men, and the inequality of one man to another. With

Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it at once. The first thing, since religion is at the

bottom of all force and fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason for believing in Christianity. This was

easy enough, and a number of impatient argumentative pamphlets were dashed off. One of these, 'The

Necessity of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the heart

of the enemy's position, there were outworks which might also be usefully attacked:there were alcohol

and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on

commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces

unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious

poem, 'Queen Mab' (181213), an overlong rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The

spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the confines of the universe, where the past,

present, and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones;

Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is described.

In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find

Though many poets have begun their careers with something better than this, 'Queen Mab' will always be

read, because it gives us, in embryo, the whole of Shelley at a stroke. The melody of the verse is thin and

loose, but it soars from the ground and spins itself into a series of etherial visions. And these visions, though

they look utterly disconnected from reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate interest in science. In

this respect the sole difference between 'Queen Mab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is

that, in the prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their disquisitions on physiology and

astronomy, determinism and utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is explicit. These notes are a queer medley.

We may laugh at their cruditytheir certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument, the

millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to recognise that here is something more than the

ordinary dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous language, vividness of imagination,

and, above all, much conscientious reasoning and a passion for hard facts. His wife was not far wrong when

she praised him for a 'logical exactness of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all secondhand, and

mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively something which is for ever hidden from the mass of

mankindthe difference between an argument and a confused stirring of prejudices. Then, again, he was not

content with abstract generalities: he was always trying to enforce his views by facts industriously collected

from such books of medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and history as he could get hold of.

For instance, he does not preach abstinence from flesh on pure a priori grounds, but because "the

orangoutang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth." We catch here what is

perhaps the fundamental paradox of his characterthe combination of a curious rational hardness with the

wildest and most romantic idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a mind no stranger to

We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic achievement, and it will be well before going further to

underline the connection, which persists all through his work and is already so striking in 'Queen Mab',

Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet. But his philosophy was much more definite than Coleridge's; it

gave substance to his character and edge to his intellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be distinguished from

the emotion generating his verse. There is, however, no trace of originality in his speculative writing, and we

need not regret that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet, he decided against philosophy.

Before finally settling to poetry, he at one time projected a complete and systematic account of the operations

of the human mind. It was to be divided into sectionschildhood, youth, and so on. One of the first things to

be done was to ascertain the real nature of dreams, and accordingly, with characteristic passion for a

foundation of fact, he turned to the only facts accessible to him, and tried to describe exactly his own

experiences in dreaming. The result showed that, along with the scientific impulse, there was working in him

a more powerful antagonistic force. He got no further than telling how once, when walking with Hogg near

Oxford, he suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and a scene presented itself which, though commonplace,

was yet mysteriously connected with the obscurer parts of his nature. A windmill stood in a plashy meadow;

behind it was a long low hill, and "a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was the

season of the year when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash." The manuscript

concludes: "I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of longHere I was

obliged to leave off, overcome with thrilling horror." And, apart from such overwhelming surges of emotion

from the depths of subconsciousness, he does not seem ever to have taken that sort of interest in the

problems of the universe which is distinctive of the philosopher; in so far as he speculated on the nature and

destiny of the world or the soul, it was not from curiosity about the truth, but rather because correct views on

these matters seemed to him especially in early years, an infallible method of regenerating society. As his

expectation of heaven on earth became less confident, so the speculative impulse waned. Not long before his

death he told Trelawny that he was not inquisitive about the system of the universe, that his mind was

tranquil on these high questions. He seems, for instance, to have oscillated vaguely between belief and

disbelief in personal life after death, and on the whole to have concluded that there was no evidence for it.

At the same time, it is essential to a just appreciation of him, either as man or poet, to see how all his opinions

and feelings were shaped by philosophy, and by the influence of one particular doctrine. This doctrine was

Platonism. He first went through a stage of devotion to what he calls "the sceptical philosophy," when his

writings were full of schoolboy echoes of Locke and Hume. At this time he avowed himself a materialist.

Then he succumbed to Bishop Berkeley, who convinced him that the nature of everything that exists is

spiritual. We find him saying, with charming pompousness, "I confess that I am one of those who are unable

to refuse their assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is

perceived." This "intellectual system," he rightly sees, leads to the view that nothing whatever exists except a

single mind; and that is the view which he found, or thought that he found, in the dialogues of Plato, and

which gave to his whole being a bent it was never to lose. He liked to call himself an atheist; and, if

pantheism is atheism, an atheist no doubt he was. But, whatever the correct label, he was eminently religious.

In the notes to 'Queen Mab' he announces his belief in "a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe," and

religion meant for him a "perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe"a

perception which, in his case, was accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus grasped the notion that the

whole universe is one spirit, he absorbed from Plato a theory which accorded perfectly with his

predispositionthe theory that all the good and beautiful things that we love on earth are partial

manifestations of an absolute beauty or goodness, which exists eternal and unchanging, and from which

everything that becomes and perishes in time derives such reality as it has. Hence our human life is good only

in so far as we participate in the eternal reality; and the communion is effected whenever we adore beauty,

whether in nature, or in passionate love, or in the inspiration of poetry. We shall have to say something

presently about the effects of this Platonic idealism on Shelley's conception of love; here we need only notice

that it inspired him to translate Plato's 'Symposium', a dialogue occupied almost entirely with theories about

love. He was not, however, well equipped for this task. His version, or rather adaptation (for much is omitted

and much is paraphrased), is fluent, but he had not enough Greek to reproduce the finer shades of the

A poet who is also a Platonist is likely to exalt his office; it is his not merely to amuse or to please, but to lead

mankind nearer to the eternal idealShelley called it Intellectual Beautywhich is the only abiding reality.

This is the real theme of his 'Defence of Poetry' (1821), the best piece of prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love

Peacock, scholar, novelist, and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one of Shelley's most admired

friends, had published a wittily perverse and paradoxical article, not without much good sense, on 'The Four

Ages of Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine poetry is only possible in halfcivilised times, such as the

Homeric or Elizabethan ages, which, after the interval of a learned period, like that of Pope in England, are

inevitably succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mind was, of course, the movement

represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he

describes as a "modernantique compound of frippery and barbarism." He must have greatly enjoyed writing

such a paragraph as this: "A poet in our times is a semibarbarian in a civilised community. . . . The march of

his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of

reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up

the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours." These gay shafts had at any rate the merit of stinging Shelley

to action. 'The Defence of Poetry' was his reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as an

adventitious seasoning of lifeornamental perhaps, but rather out of place in a progressive and practical age.

Shelley undermines the whole position by asserting that poetrya name which includes for him all serious

artis the very stuff out of which all that is valuable and real in life is made. "A poem is the very image of

life expressed in its eternal truth." "The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and

an identification of ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,

to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another

and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of

moral good is the imagination." And it is on the imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as exercises

strengthen a limb. Historically, he argues, good poetry always coexists with good morals; for instance, when

social life decays, drama decays. Peacock had said that reasoners and mechanical inventors are more useful

than poets. The reply is that, left to themselves, they simply make the world worse, while it is poets and

"poetical philosophers" who produce "true utility," or pleasure in the highest sense. Without poetry, the

progress of science and of the mechanical arts results in mental and moral indigestion, merely exasperating

the inequality of mankind. "Poetry and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the

God and mammon of the world." While the emotions penetrated by poetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an

atom to a universe." Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from

death through life." It makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew. "Poets are the hierophants of

an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the

words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they

inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

and others have felt that the freedom from self, which is attained in the vision, is supremely good. What is

peculiar to him, and distinguishes him from the poets of religious mysticism, is that he reflected rationally on

his vision, brought it more or less into harmony with a philosophical system, and, in embracing it, always had

in view the improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it be imagined that he was a didactic

poet. It was the theory of the eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first impulse of the

Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to become the theory of the nineteenth century, that the obJect

of poetry is to inculcate correct principles of morals and religion. Poetry, with its power of pleasing, was the

jam which should make us swallow the powder unawares. This conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both

because poetry ought not to do what can be done better by prose, and also because, for him, the pleasure and

the lesson were indistinguishably one. The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a moral, but by

communicating to others something of that ecstasy with which he himself burns in contemplating eternal

Hitherto all the writings mentioned have been, except 'The Defence of Poetry', those of a young and

enthusiastic revolutionary, which might have some interest in their proper historical and biographical setting,

but otherwise would only be read as curiosities. We have seen that beneath Shelley's twofold drift towards

practical politics and speculative philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it is characteristic of him that

he always tended to regard the writing of verse as a 'pis aller'. In 1819, when he was actually working on

'Prometheus', he wrote to Peacock, "I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science," adding

that he only wrote it because his feeble health made it hopeless to attempt anything more useful. We need not

take this too seriously; he was often wrong about the reasons for his own actions. From whatever motive,

write poetry he did. We will now consider some of the more voluminous, if not the most valuable, results.

'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,' [4] is a long poem, written in 1815, which seems to shadow forth the

emotional history of a young and beautiful poet. As a child he drank deep of the beauties of nature and the

He wandered through many wildernesses, and visited the ruins of Egypt and the East, where an Arab maiden

fell in love with him and tended him. But he passes on, "through Arabie, and Persia, and the wild Carmanian

waste," and, arrived at the vale of Cashmire, lies down to sleep in a dell. Here he has a vision. A "veiled

maid" sits by him, and, after singing first of knowledge and truth and virtue, then of love, embraces him.

When he awakes, all the beauty of the world that enchanted and satisfied him before has faded:

and he rushes on, wildly pursuing the beautiful shape, like an eagle enfolded by a serpent and feeling the

poison in his breast. His limbs grow lean, his hair thin and pale. Does death contain the secret of his

happiness? At last he pauses "on the lone Chorasmian shore," and sees a frail shallop in which he trusts

himself to the waves. Day and night the boat fiies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus,

where it is engulfed in a cavern. Following the twists of the cavern, after a narrow escape from a maelstrom,

he floats into a calm pool, and lands. Elaborate descriptions of forest and mountain scenery bring us, as the

In 'Alastor' he melted with pity over what he felt to be his own destiny; in 'The Revolt of Islam' (1817) he was

"a trumpet that sings to battle." This, the longest of Shelley's poems (there are 4176 lines of it, exclusive of

certain lyrical passages), is a versified novel with a more or less coherent plot, though the mechanism is

cumbrous, and any one who expects from the title a story of some actual rebellion against the Turks will be

disappointed. Its theme, typified by an introductory vision of an eagle and serpent battling in midsky, is the

cosmic struggle between evil and good, or, what for Shelley is the same thing, between the forces of

established authority and of man's aspiration for liberty, the eagle standing for the powerful oppressor, and

This piece of symbolism became a sort of fixed language with him; "the Snake" was a name by which it

amused him to be known among his friends. The clash of the two opposites is crudely and narrowly

conceived, with no suggestion yet of some more tremendous force behind both, such as later on was to give

depth to his view of the world conflict. The loves and the virtues of Laon and Cythna, the gifted beings who

overthrow the tyrant and perish tragically in a counterrevolution, are too bright against a background that is

too black; but even so they were a good opportunity for displaying the various phases through which

humanitarian passion may runthe first whispers of hope, the devotion of the pioneer, the joy of freedom

and love, in triumph exultation tempered by clemency, in defeat despair ennobled by firmness. And although

in this extraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found himself, the technical power displayed is

great. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the long breaking wave of that measure with

sureness and ease, imparting to it a rapidity of onset that is all his own. But there are small blemishes such as,

even when allowance is made for haste of composition (it was written in a single summer), a naturally

delicate ear would never have passed; he apologises in the preface for one alexandrine (the long last line

which should exceed the rest by a foot) left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there are some eight

places where obviously redundant syllables have crept in. A more serious defect is the persistence, still

unassimilated, of the element of the romantichorrible. When Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnaws

corpses, we feel that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightly ridiculous, magnificent though his writing has

become. It is hard, again, not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of young eleutherarchs

have only to sound for the crouching slave to recover his manhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn pale.

The poet knows, as he wrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission is "to apprehend minute and remote

distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral

or the material universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of both aims, partly because 'The

Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings

apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer

through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be

grasped as a whole; and he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in a picture of all the good

impulses of the human heart, that should be so fruitful, poisoned by the pressure of religious and political

authority. It was natural that the method which he chose should be that of the romantic narrativewe have

noticed how he began by trying to write novelsnor is that method essentially unfitted to represent the

conflict between good and evil, with the whole universe for a stage; instances of great novels that are epics in

this sense will occur to every one. But realism is required, and Shelley was constitutionally incapable of

realism The personages of the story, Laon and the Hermit, the Tyrant and Cythna, are pale projections of

Shelley himself; of Dr. Lind, an enlightened old gentleman with whom he made friends at Eton; of His

Majesty's Government; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife's illustrious mother. They are neither of the

world nor out of it, and consequently, in so far as they are localised and incarnate and their actions woven

into a tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a failure. In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely the same aims,

but with more success, because he had now hit upon a figure of more appropriate vagueness and sublimity.

The scheme of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) is drawn from the immortal creations of Greek tragedy.

He had experimented with Tasso and had thought of Job; but the rebellious Titan, Prometheus, the benefactor

of mankind whom Aeschylus had represented as chained by Zeus to Caucasus, with a vulture gnawing his

liver, offered a perfect embodiment of Shelley's favourite subject, "the image," to borrow the words of his

wife, "of one warring with the Evil Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by alleven the good, who are

deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a victim full of fortitude and hope and the

Spirit of triumph, emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good." In the Greek play, Zeus is

an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older and milder dynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited in his

punishment by the nymphs of ocean, knows a secret on which the rule of Zeus depends. Shelley took over

these features, and grafted on them his own peculiar confidence in the ultimate perfection of mankind. His

Prometheus knows that Jupiter (the Evil Principle) will some day be overthrown, though he does not know

when, and that he himself will then be released; and this event is shown as actually taking place. It may be

doubted whether this treatment, while it allows the poet to describe what the world will be like when freed

from evil, does not diminish the impressiveness of the suffering Titan; for if Prometheus knows that a term is

set to his punishment, his defiance of the oppressor is easier, and, so far, less sublime. However that may be,

Mercury, Jupiter's messenger, is sent to offer him freedom if he will repent and submit to the tyrant. On his

refusal, the Furies are let loose to torture him, and his agony takes the form of a vision of all the suffering of

the world. The agony passes, and Mother Earth calls up spirits to soothe him with images of delight; but he

declares "most vain all hope but love," and thinks of Asia, his wife in happier days. The second act is full of

the dreams of Asia. With Panthea, one of the ocean nymphs that watch over Prometheus, she makes her way

to the cave of Demogorgon, "that terrific gloom," who seems meant to typify the Primal Power of the World.

Hence they are snatched away by the Spirit of the Hour at which Jove will fall, and the coming of change

In the third act the tyrant is triumphing in heaven, when the car of the Hour arrives; Demogorgon descends

from it, and hurls him to the abyss. Prometheus, set free by Hercules, is united again to Asia. And now, with

The fourth act is an epilogue in which, to quote Mrs. Shelley again, "the poet gives further scope to his

imagination . . . . Maternal Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth, the guide of our

planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon,

receives bliss from the annihilation of evil in the superior sphere." We are in a strange metaphysical region,

an interstellar space of incredibly rarefied fire and light, the true home of Shelley's spirit, where the circling

spheres sing to one another in wave upon wave of lyrical rapture, as inexpressible in prose as music, and

On the whole, Prometheus has been overpraised, perhaps because the beauty of the interspersed songs has

dazzled the critics. Not only are the personages too transparently allegorical, but the allegory is insipid;

especially tactless is the treatment of the marriage between Prometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, and Asia, the

Spirit of Nature, as a romantic love affair. When, in the last of his more important poems, Shelley returned to

the struggle between the good and evil principles, it was in a different Spirit. The short drama of 'Hellas'

(1821) was "a mere improvise," the boiling over of his sympathy with the Greeks, who were in revolt against

the Turks. He wove into it, with all possible heightening of poetic imagery, the chief events of the period of

revolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus in having

historical facts as ostensible subject. Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats of arms by

land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms, though suggestive of something that transcends

any human warfare, are yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane." But this is not the only merit of

"Hellas;' its poetry is purer than that of the earlier work, because Shelley no longer takes sides so violently.

He has lost the cruder optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back for consolation upon something that

moves us more than any prospect of a heaven realised on earth by abolishing kings and priests. When the

chorus of captive Greek women, who provide the lyrical setting, sing round the couch of the sleeping sultan,

we are aware of an ineffable hope at the heart of their strain of melancholy pity; and so again when their

burthen becomes the transience of all things human. The sultan, too, feels that Islam is doomed, and, as

messenger after messenger announces the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself as the growing

perception that all this blood and all these tears are but phantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of

eternity. This again is the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who evokes for him a vision

but 'we' know that the substance behind the mist is Shelley's "immaterial philosophy," the doctrine that

nothing is real except the one eternal Mind. Ever louder and more confident sounds this note, until it drowns

even the cries of victory when the tide of battle turns in favour of the Turks. The chorus, lamenting

antiphonally the destruction of liberty, are interrupted by repeated howls of savage triumph: "Kill! crush!

despoil! Let not a Greek escape'" But these discords are gradually resolved, through exquisitely complicated

Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civilisation shall never be restored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the

It is curious that for three of his more considerable works Shelley should have chosen the form of drama,

since the last thing one would say of him is that he had the dramatic talent. 'Prometheus' and 'Hellas',

however, are dramas only in name; there is no thought in them of scenic representation. 'The Cenci' (1819),

on the other hand, is a real play; in writing it he had the stage in view, and even a particular actress, Miss

O'Neil. It thus stands alone among his works, unless we put beside it the fragment of a projected play about

Charles I (1822), a theme which, with its crowd of historical figures, was illsuited to his powers. And not

only is 'The Cenci' a play; it is the most successful attempt since the seventeenth century at a kind of writing,

tragedy in the grand style, over which all our poets, from Addison to Swinburne, have more or less come to

grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was

executed with her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father. The wicked father, more intensely

wicked for his grey hairs and his immense ability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope impunity for a

long succession of crimes, hated his children, and drove them to frenzy by his relentless cruelty. When to

insults and oppression he added the horrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed,

and Beatrice, faced with shame more intolerable than death, preferred parricide. Here was a subject made to

Shelley's handa naturally pure and gentle soul soiled, driven to violence, and finally extinguished, by

unnameable wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, is on the side of the persecutor. Haunted by

the grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni's picture of Beatrice, so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo her

namethough it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')he was tempted from his airy flights to

throw himself for once into the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in earthquake and

eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from

the ease with which he wroteit cost him relatively the least time and pains of all his worksit would be

rash to infer that he could have constructed an equally good tragedy on any other subject than the injured

Beatrice and the combination, which Count Francesco Cenci is, of paternal power with the extreme limit of

With the exception of 'The Cenci', everything Shelley published was almost entirely unnoticed at the time.

This play, being more intelligible than the rest, attracted both notice and praise, though it was also much

blamed for what would now be called its unpleasantness. Many people, among them his wife, regretted that,

having proved his ability to handle the concrete, he still should devote himself to ideal and unpopular

abstractions, such as 'The Witch of Atlas' (1821), a fantastical piece in rime royal, which seems particularly to

have provoked Mrs. Shelley. A "lady Witch" lived in a cave on Mount Atlas, and her games in a magic boat,

her dances in the upper regions of space, and the pranks which she played among men, are described in verse

of a richness that bewilders because it leads to nothing. The poet juggles with flowers and gems, stars and

spirits, lovers and meteors; we are constantly expecting him to break into some design, and are as constantly

disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar kind; it is not the same, for instance, as that produced by

Blake's prophetic books, where we are conscious of a great spirit fumbling after the inexpressible. Shelley is

not a true mystic. He is seldom puzzled, and he never seems to have any difficulty in expressing exactly what

he feels; his images are perfectly definite. Our uneasiness arises from the fact that, with so much clear

definition, such great activity in reproducing the subtlest impressions which Nature makes upon him, his

work should have so little artistic purpose or form. Stroke is accumulated on stroke, each a triumph of

imaginative beauty; but as they do not cohere to any discoverable end, the total impression is apt to be one of

This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is felt even in 'Adonais' (1821), his elegy on the death of

Keats. John Keats was a very different person from Shelley. The son of a liverystable keeper, he had been

an apothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into literature by

sheer artistic passion, and not at all from any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chief

glories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, and was uneventful, its

only incidents an unhappy loveaffair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed passion and the 'Quarterly

Review's' contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumption which killed him at the age of twentysix.

He was sent to Italy as a last chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse him back to health, and

offered him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, and died at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not

intimate with Keats, and had been slow to recognise his genius; but it was enough that he was a poet, in

sympathy with the Radicals, an exile, and the victim of the Tory reviewers. There is not ill Adonais that note

of personal bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of

Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to

lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream"

At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that he wants to say, but as he proceeds he warms to his work.

The poets gather round Adonais' bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself as "a phantom

The Quarterly Reviewer is next chastised, and at last Shelley has found his cue. The strain rises from

It is once more the same conviction, the offspring of his philosophy and of his suffering, that we noticed in

Hellas, only here the pathos is more acute. So strong is the sense of his own misery, the premonition of his

own death, that we scarcely know, nor does it matter, whether it is in the person of Keats or of himself that he

is lamenting the impermanence of earthly good. His spirit was hastening to escape from "the last clouds of

While the beauty of Adonais is easily appreciated, 'Epipsychidion', written in the same year, must strike many

readers as mere moonshine and madness. In 'Alastor', the poet, at the opening of his career, had pursued in

vain through the wilderness of the world a vision of ideal loveliness; it would now seem that this vision is at

last embodied in "the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia Viviani," to whom 'Epipsychidion' is addressed.

Shelley begins by exhausting, in the effort to express her perfection, all the metaphors that rapture can

suggest. He calls her his adored nightingale, a spiritwinged heart, a seraph of heaven, sweet benediction in

the eternal curse, moon beyond the clouds, star above the storm, "thou Wonder and thou Beauty and thou

Terror! Thou Harmony of Nature's art!" She is a sweet lamp, a "well of sealed and secret happiness," a star, a

tone, a light, a solitude, a refuge, a delight, a lute, a buried treasure, a cradle, a violetshaded grave, an

antelope, a moon shining through a mist of dew. But all his "world of fancies" is unequal to express her; he

breaks off in despair. A calmer passage of great interest then explains his philosophy of love:

and tells how he "never was attached to that great sect," which requires that everyone should bind himself for

life to one mistress or friend; for the secret of true love is that it is increased, not diminished, by division; like

imagination, it fills the universe; the parts exceed the whole, and this is the great characteristic distinguishing

all things good from all things evil. We then have a shadowy record of love's dealings with him. In childhood

he clasped the vision in every natural sight and sound, in verse, and in philosophy. Then it fled, this "soul out

of my soul." He goes into the wintry forest of life, where "one whose voice was venomed melody" entraps

and poisons his youth. The ideal is sought in vain in many mortal shapes, until the moon rises on him, "the

cold chaste Moon," smiling on his soul, which lies in a deathlike trance, a frozen ocean. At last the

longsought vision comes into the wintry forest; it is Emily, like the sun, bringing light and odour and new

life. Henceforth he is a world ruled by and rejoicing in these twin spheres. "As to real flesh and blood," he

said in a letter to Leigh Hunt, "you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a

ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me." Yet it is certain that the figures

behind the shifting web of metaphors are partly realthat the poisonous enchantress is his first wife, and the

moon that saved him from despair his second wife. The last part of the poem hymns the bliss of union with

the ideal. Emily must fly with him; "a ship is floating in the harbour now," and there is "an isle under Ionian

skies," the fairest of all Shelley's imaginary landscapes, where their two souls may become one. Then, at the

We have now taken some view of the chief of Shelley's longer poems. Most of these were published during

his life. They brought him little applause and much execration, but if he had written nothing else his fame

would still be secure. They are, however, less than half of the verse that he actually wrote. Besides many

completed poems, it remained for his wife to decipher, from scraps of paper, scribbled over, interlined, and

erased, a host of fragments, all valuable, and many of them gems of purest ray. We must now attempt a

It may seem strange that so much space has been occupied in the last two chapters by philosophical and

political topics, and this although Shelley is the most purely lyrical of English poets. The fact is that in nearly

all English poets there is a strong moral and philosophical strain, particularly in those of the period

17701830. They are deeply interested in political, scientific, and religious speculations in aesthetic

questions only superficially, if at all Shelley, with the taproots of his emotions striking deep into politics and

philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of

the nineteenth century owing to the state of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that

English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a weakness,

Like the other poets of the Romantic Movement Shelley expended his emotion on three main

objectspolitics, nature, and love. In each of these subjects he struck a note peculiar to himself, but his

singularity is perhaps greatest in the sphere of politics. It may be summed up in the observation that no

English imaginative writer of the first rank has been equally inspired by those doctrines that helped to

produce the French Revolution. That all men are born free and equal; that by a contract entered into in

primitive times they surrendered as much of their rights as was necessary to the wellbeing of the

community, that despotic governments and established religions, being violations of the original contract, are

encroachments on those rights and the causes of all evil; that inequalities of rank and power can be abolished

by reasoning, and that then, since men are naturally good, the golden age will returnthese are positions

which the English mind, with its dislike of the 'a priori', will not readily accept. The English Utilitarians, who

exerted a great influence on the course of affairs, and the classical school of economists that derived from

them, did indeed hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory was that, if people were left to

themselves, and if the restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation

of ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite empirical;

worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence

of the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments

were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from

making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was

incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in

the distaste he felt for historyand his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague

and fantastic. In both these respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human nature proceeding

And first as to the nature of his ideals. While all good men must sympathise with the sincerity of his passion

to remould this sorry scheme of things "nearer to the heart's desire," few will find the model, as it appears in

his poems, very exhilarating. It is chiefly expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no

marriage, no war, no crueltyman will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the earth will teem with plenty

beyond our wildest imagination, the general effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are

hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of bliss, reading Plato and eating

vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its

admixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates when he shrilly summons us to adore his

New Jerusalem. Reflecting on the narrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant and fanatical

sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. And we perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his

narrowness comes from ignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. When he visited

Southey there were hot buttered buns for tea, and he so much offended Mrs. Southey by calling them coarse,

disgusting food that she determined to make him try them. He ate first one, then another, and ended by

clearing off two plates of the unclean thing. Actively conscious of nothing in himself but aspirations towards

perfection, he never saw that, like everyone else, he was a cockpit of ordinary conflicting instincts; or, if this

tumult of lower movements did emerge into consciousness, he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it had

no connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities as a reformer. Similarly the world at large, full as it

was of nightmare oppressions of wrong, fell for him into two sharply opposed spheres of light and darkness

on one side the radiant armies of right, on the other the perverse opposition of devils.

With this hysterically oversimplified view of life, fostered by lack of selfknowledge, was connected a

corresponding mistake as to the means by which his ends could be reached. One of the first observations

which generous spirits often make is that the unsatisfactory state of society is due to some very small kink or

flaw in the dispositions of the majority of people. This perception, which it does not need much experience to

reach, is the source of the common error of youth that everything can be put right by some simple remedy. If

only some tiny change could be made in men's attitude towards one another and towards the universe, what a

flood of evil could be dammed; the slightness of the cause is as striking as the immensity of the effect. Those

who ridicule the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is perfectly true, though of course they are right

in denouncing the inference so often drawnand here lay Shelley's fundamental fallacythat the required

tiny change depends on an effort of the will, and that the will only does not make the effort because feeling is

perverted and intelligence dimmed by convention traditions, prejudices, and superstitions. It is certain, for

one thing, that will only plays a small part in our nature, and that by themselves acts of will cannot make the

world perfect. Most men are helped to this lesson by observation of themselves; they see that their high

resolves are ineffective because their characters are mixed. Shelley never learnt this. He saw, indeed, that his

efforts were futile even mischievous; but, being certain, and rightly, of the nobility of his aims, he could

never see that he had acted wrongly, that he ought to have calculated the results of his actions more

reasonably. Ever thwarted, and never nearer the happiness he desired for himself and others, he did not, like

ordinary men attain a juster notion of the relation between good and ill in himself and in the world; he lapsed

into a plaintive bewildered melancholy, translating the inexplicable conflict of right and wrong into the

But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is best in his poetry is this expression of frustrated hope. He has

indeed, when he is moved simply by public passion, some wonderful trumpetnotes; what hate and

indignation can do, he sometimes does. And his rapturous dreams of freedom can stir the intellect, if not the

blood. But it must be remarked that poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm is liable to one fatal

weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric. To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in

highflown abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness

of the classical manner. They appear now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of one another; the task

of unravelling their genealogy would be as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely the singer of

revolution, the intensity and sincerity of his feeling would still have made him a better poet than Byron; but

he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the inherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because

of his strained and false view of "the moral universe" and of himself. His song, in treating of men as citizens,

as governors and governed, could never have touched such a height as Burns' "A man's a man for a' that."

Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign tyrants. The Romantic Movement was not merely

a new way of considering human beings in their public capacity; it meant also a new kind of sensitiveness to

their environment. If we turn, say, from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's 'The Prelude', it is as

if we have passed from a saloon crowded with a bewigged and painted company, wittily conversing in an

atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, into the freshness of a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the

open air, the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our feelings with wonder and delight, so a

corresponding change may occur in our emotions towards one another; in this setting of a universe with

which we feel ourselves now rapturously, now calmly, united, we love with less artifice, with greater

impetuosity and selfabandonment. "Thomson and Cowper," says Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills

which so many ingenious gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them, and the effect of the

operation on poetry was like the discovery of a new world." The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in

their trees and hills, but when they also looked in the same spirit on their own hearts, that operation added yet

another world to poetry. In Shelley the absorption of the self in nature is carried to its furthest point. If the

passion to which nature moved him is less deeply meditated than in Wordsworth and Coleridge, its

exuberance is wilder; and in his best lyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which puts him among

Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and love that every one knows and likes best. And, in fact,

many of them seem to satisfy what is perhaps the ultimate test of true poetry: they sometimes have the power,

which makes poetry akin to music, of suggesting by means of words something which cannot possibly be

expressed in words. Obviously the test is impossible to use with any objective certainty, but, for a reason

which will appear, it seems capable of a fairly straightforward application to Shelley's work.

First we may observe that, just as the sight of some real scene not necessarily a sunset or a glacier, but a

ploughed field or a streetcornermay call up emotions which "lie too deep for tears" and cannot be put into

words, this same effect can be produced by unstudied descriptions. Wordsworth often produces it:

Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind of effect is beyond Shelley's reach, though he has many

pictures which are both detailed and emotional. Consider, for instance, these lines from 'The Invitation'

(1822). He calls to Jane Williams to come away "to the wild woods and the plains,"

This has a wonderful lightness and radiance. And here is a passage of careful description from 'Evening:

Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense that he saw details clearlyunlike Byron, who had for nature

but a vague and a preoccupied eyeand evidently, too, his observation is steeped in strong feeling, and is

expressed in most melodious language. Yet we get the impression that he neither saw nor felt anything

beyond exactly what he has expressed; there is no suggestion, as there should be in great poetry, of something

beyond all expression. And, curiously enough, this seems to be true even of those fanciful poems so

especially characteristic of him, such as 'The Cloud' and 'Arethusa', where he has dashed together on his

palette the most startling colours in nature, and composed out of them an extravagantly imaginative whole:

Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray

and thunder and lightning? We hold our breath; it is superhuman, miraculous; but he never falters, so

vehement is the impulse of his delight. It is only afterwards that we ask ourselves whether there is anything

beyond the mere delight; and realising that, though we have been rapt far above the earth, we have had no

disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slight flatness of disappointment.

But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which ecstasy is shot through with that strain of

melancholy which we have already noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so much to exult

impersonally in the force that chariots the decaying leaves, spreads the seeds abroad, wakes the

Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves the Atlantic, as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and

Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing from misty morning through blue noon to twilight, brings,

The contrast between the peaceful loveliness of nature and his own misery is a piteous puzzle. On the beach

The aching weariness that throbs in the music of these verses is not mere sentimental selfpity; it is the cry of

a soul that has known moments of bliss when it has been absorbed in the sea of beauty that surrounds it, only

the moments pass, and the reunion, ever sought, seems ever more hopeless. Over and over again Shelley's

Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in these sad 'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else?

There is one poem perhaps his greatest poemwhich may suggest the answer. In the 'Sensitive Plant'

(1820) a garden is first described on which are lavished all his powers of weaving an imaginary landscape out

of flowers and light and odour. All the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except the Sensitive

Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this Eden." "A Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended

the flowers from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died!" The

last part of the poem, a pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corruption and decay when the power of

good has vanished and the power of evil is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow,

Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we may console ourselves by believing that

The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with his philosophical ideas. It is the creed of

the student of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging is the one spirit which

interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty and delight," and this spiritthe vision which

Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'is what is always suggested

by his poetry at its highest moments. The suggestion, in its fulness, is of course ineffable; only in the case of

Shelley some approach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped in philosophical ways

of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of

idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of an unsatisfied and disappointed

His philosophy of love is but a special case of this allembracing doctrine. We saw how in 'Epipsychidion' he

rejected monogamic principles on the ground that true love is increased, not diminished, by division, and we

can now understand why he calls this theory an "eternal law." For, in this life of illusion, it is in passionate

love that we most nearly attain to communion with the eternal reality. Hence the more of it the better. The

more we divide and spread our love, the more nearly will the fragments of goodness and beauty that are in

each of us find their true fruition. This doctrine may be inconvenient in practice, but it is far removed from

vulgar sensualism, of which Shelley had not a trace. Hogg says that he was "preeminently a ladies' man,"

meaning that he had that childlike helplessness and sincerity which go straight to the hearts of women. To

this youth, preaching sublime mysteries, and needing to be mothered into the bargain, they were as iron to the

magnet. There was always an Eve in his Eden, and each was the "wonder of her kind"; but whoever she

wasHarriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Turner, Mary Godwin, Emilia

Viviani, or Jane Williamsshe was never a Don Juan's mistress; she was an incarnation of the soul of the

world, a momentary mirror of the eternal. Such an attitude towards the least controllable of passions has

several drawbacks: it involves a certain inhumanity, and it is only possible for long to one who remains

ignorant of himself and cannot see that part of the force impelling him is blind attraction towards a pretty

face. It also has the result that, if the lover is a poet, his lovesongs will be sad. Obsessed by the idea of

communion with some divine perfection, he must needs be often cast down, not only by finding that,

Ixionlike, he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said of himself and Emilia), but because, even when the

object of his affection is worthy, complete communion is easier to desire than to attain. Thus Shelley's

lovesongs are just what might be expected. If he does strain to the moment of ingress into the divine being,

it is to swoon with excess of bliss, as at the end of 'Epipsychidion', or as in the 'Indian Serenade':

Here the failure is foreseen; he knows she will not kiss him. Sometimes his sadness is faint and restrained:

Is the assertion contained in this last line universally true? Perhaps. At any rate it is true of Shelley. His

saddest songs are the sweetest, and the reason is that in them, rather than in those verses where he merely

utters ecstatic delight, or calm pleasure, or bitter indignation, he conveys ineffable suggestions beyond what

It remains to point out that there is one means of conveying such suggestions which was outside the scope of

his genius. One of the methods which poetry most often uses to suggest the ineffable is by the artful choice

and arrangement of words. A word, simply by being cunningly placed and given a certain colour, can, in the

hands of a good craftsman, open up indescribable vistas. But Keats, when, in reply to a letter of criticism, he

wrote to him, "You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your

subject with ore," was giving him advice which, though admirable, it was impossible that he should follow.

Shelley was not merely not a craftsman by nature, he was not the least interested in those matters which are

covered by the clumsy name of "technique." It is characteristic of him that, while most great poets have been

fertile coiners of new words, his only addition to the language is the ugly "idealism" in the sense of "ideal

object." He seems to have strayed from the current vocabulary only in two other cases, both

infelicitous"glode" for "glided," and "blosmy" for "blossomy." He did not, like Keats, look on fine phrases

with the eye of a lover. His taste was the conventional taste of the time. Thus he said of Byron's 'Cain', "It is

apocalyptic, it is a revelation not before communicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better

poets than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael Angelo, and the only things about which he was

enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for their associations, were the

paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects, those sublime

inventions in prosody, with which the great masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect,

and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of

complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, indeed, in simple outbursts where there is no question of

form, but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he too often sprawls and fumbles before

Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms vain. We may trace in it all kinds of 'arrieres

pensees', philosophical and sociological, that an artist ought not to have, and we may even dislike its

dominating conception of a vague spirit that pervades the universe; but we must admit that when he wrote it

was as if seized and swept away by some "unseen power" that fell upon him unpremeditated. His emotions

were of that fatal violence which distinguishes so many illustrious but unhappy souls from the mass of

peaceable mankind. In the early part of last century a set of illustrations to Faust by Retzch used to be greatly

admired; about one of them, a picture of Faust and Margaret in the arbour, Shelley says in a letter to a friend:

"The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared

look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I

knew that it was figured." So slight were the occasions that could affect him even to vertigo. When, from

whatever cause, the frenzy took him, he would write hastily, leaving gaps, not caring about the sense.

Afterwards he would work conscientiously over what he had written, but there was nothing left for him to do

but to correct in cold blood, make plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of

this method was that his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which is perhaps as great a

The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense, and no attempt will be made even to

summarise it here. A convenient onevolume edition of the poems is that edited by Professor Edward

Dowden for Messrs. Macmillan (1896); it includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There is a good selection

of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series," compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been

collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes (18761880). Of the letters there is an edition

by Mr. Roger Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A number of letters to Elizabeth Hitchener were published by Mr.

For a firsthand knowledge of a poet's life and character the student must always go to the accounts of

contemporaries. In Shelley's case these are copious. There are T. L. Peacock,s 'Memoirs' (edited by E. F. B.

BrettSmith, 1909); Peacock's 'Nightmare Abbey' contains an amusing caricature of Shelley in the person of

Scythrops; and in at least two of her novels Mary Shelley has left descriptions of her husband: Adrian Earl of

Windsor, in 'The Last Man', is a portrait of Shelley, and 'Lodore' contains an account of his estrangement

from Harriet. His cousin Tom Medwin's 'Life' (1847) is a bad book, full of inaccuracies. But Shelley had one

unique piece of good fortune: two friends wrote books about him that are masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's 'Life' is

especially valuable for the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's 'Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author',

describes him in the last year before his death. Hogg's 'Life' has been republished in a cheap edition by

Messrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of Trelawny's 'Records' in Messrs. Routledge's "New

Universal Library." But both these books, while they give incomparably vivid pictures of the poet, are

rambling and unconventional, and should be supplemented by Professor Dowden's 'Life of Shelley' (2 vols.,

1886), which will always remain the standard biography. Of other recent lives, Mr. A. CluttonBrock's

Of the innumerable critical estimates of Shelley and his place in literature, the most noteworthy are perhaps

Matthew Arnold's Essay in his 'Essays in Criticism', and Francis Thompson's 'Shelley' (1909). Vol. iv.

"Naturalism in England," of Dr. George Brandes' 'Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature' (1905),

may be read with interest, though it is not very reliable; and Prof. Oliver Elton's 'A Survey of English

Whoever wishes to follow the fortunes, after the fire of their lives was extinguished by Shelley's death, of

Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and the rest, should read, besides Trelawny's 'Records' already mentioned,

'The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley', by Mrs. Julian Marshall (2 vols., 1889), and 'The