CHAPTER V. SHELLEY. [Born at Field Place, Sussex, August 4th, 1792. 1810. Meets Lord Byron at Geneva, 1816. of Spezzia, July 8th, 1822.] Poems first published HE name of Shelley is irresistibly suggested by the They were contemporaries, and their lives interlaced in many ways, and profoundly affected each other. The influence of Byron upon Shelley was comparatively slight; the influence of Shelley upon Byron was high and stimulating. In life, in habits, in modes of thought, no two men could be more diverse, and yet both shared a common obloquy and exile. Both were at war with society, and each has left an imperishable inheritance in English literature. The main point that unites spirits so different as Shelley's and Byron's is that they were both poets of the Revolution. Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were equally fascinated by that immense awakening of Europe, and in the early days of its Titanic movement could feel that at such an hour "it was bliss to be alive." But as the lurid light of the days of the Terror fell upon the scene, each receded in astonishment and horror. Coleridge watched the transformation in silent dismay; Southey took refuge in violent Toryism; Wordsworth retreated to the cloistered calm of Nature, Byron and Shelley alone remained, and still championed the cause of human liberty. But Byron's was the cry of despair; Shelley's the trumpet-voice of perpetual hope. The one gazed like a dark spirit on the general overthrow, and uttered mocking, bitter, angry words, and felt the wild storm of the nations akin to the storm within his own heart, and the ruin but the picture of his life; the other rose above the red scenes of revolution, and built up in the realms of fantasy a new and golden age. It is this idea that colours Shelley's poetry throughout. He really believed in an age of unrestrained personal liberty and consequent happiness. He believed that he was helping it on. The fine thrill of a rapt enthusiasm is felt in all he said and wrote. He denounces the old with the fervour of a prophet, and heralds the new with the passionate joy of a poet. "Queen Mab" marks the rise of this conception of a golden age in the mind of Shelley; the "Revolt of Islam" expresses the sacrificial side of the revolution he desires; the "Prometheus Unbound" paints the apotheosis of his thought, and is his completed picture of a regenerated universe, the magnificent song which ushers in a liberated world. Shelley sets the French Revolution to music; but he does his work with such an ethereal magic, that its earthly and faulty aspects are forgotten, and it is lifted into a realm of pure enchantment, where all its errors are obliterated, and all its boundless hopes are crowned with a more than human fulfilment. It is necessary always to recollect how controlling was the force of these ideas upon the life of Shelley, if we are to gain a clue to the strange vicissitudes of his career. The circumstances of his life and the peculiarities of his thought have been so variously represented by his biographers, that it is quite possible to rise from the perusal of one life of Shelley with the impression that he was a gifted madman of impure mind, and to close another biography with the feeling that of all poets he was the most spiritual, the most unselfish, the most ideally pure-minded. In point of fact, there is evidence to sustain both conclusions, that is, to the critic who has a cause to plead, and enters on the study of Shelley in the spirit of a special advocate. There were certain ideas which Shelley held which almost savoured of a disturbed sanity. The very recurrence and insistence of such ideas leads the reader to suspect a mental twist. To the staid and respectable people of his day, who only knew him by his advocacy of these ideas, it is not surprising that he was-to quote his own phrase—“ a monster of pollution whose very presence might infect." When a serious and fatal error in his own conduct added impetus to the resentment which his sentiments had produced, it is easy to understand the position Shelley occupied in the opinion of his contemporaries. Yet, on the other hand, there was about Shelley an atmosphere of unworldliness and purity, which struck all who knew him with surprise and admiration. It was a sort of unearthly charm which invested him with the purity and irresponsibility of a fairy or a spirit. There was a boyish impulsiveness, a childlike simplicity and unselfishness about him which he never lost. He was in truth an eternal child. He was unfitted for the rough shocks of life, and never grew familiar with, or tolerant of, the compromises on which society is built. When he believed in an idea he was always ready to carry it to its utmost logical sequence, and to suffer martyrdom rather than forswear it. Of the generosity of Shelley's impulses there can be no question. When Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London coffee-house keeper, threw herself on him for protection from the persecutions of home, he instantly married her. When he discovered the recklessness and injustice of British government in Ireland, he at once proceeded to Dublin to proclaim a revolution, which should be accomplished by the moral regeneration of the people. When he found a Sussex schoolmistress who sympathised with his vast schemes for the regeneration of Ireland and the world, he instantly persuaded her to sell all she had, and live with him for ever in platonic friendship. He was incapable of prudence; the tide of impulse always mastered him. He never paused for the mitigating caution of the second thought. If he did an act of charity—and he did many-he performed it with complete self-forgetfulness. He could pinch himself to be munificent to others, and when most in want of money always found ways of relieving the embarrassments of his friends. His wants were few and of the simplest. He was perfectly content with a couple of rooms, cold water, and a diet of bread and vegetables. Delicate and frail as he appeared, he could endure the strain of prolonged intellectual toil, and was absolutely happy if Homer or Euripides shared his shabby solitude. It was in such a lodging in Oxford Street that Leigh Hunt discovered him, and said that, with his slight figure, his bright colour, his flying hair, he only wanted a green sod beneath his feet to become a sort of human lark, pouring out in the sunlight a song of unearthly sweetness. Everyone who knew Shelley realised something of this feeling which Hunt expressed in his graceful fancy. They felt that Shelley was an ethereal creature, whose life was so purely one of the imagination that he seemed outside the world of common human action, with its customs built upon the traditions of the centuries, and its prudence taught by the sorrows of experience. This, then, was the sort of nature which was given to the world on August 4th, 1792, when the first thunders of the great Revolution were already in the air. We can easily picture Shelley, the frail and visionary child, of quick imagination, eager, resolute, and yet brooding, moved by the strangest impulses, and acting on them with an utter scorn of consequence. His imagination was his life, and it took very little to set those delicately-strung nerves of his vibrating and tingling with ecstasy or terror. As was the child so was the man. The first movement of his mind was towards the supernatural, and his first published writing a worthless romance, in which the supernatural and the terrible were the chief elements. The first man who really influenced his mind was a Dr. Lind, of Eton, who shared the revolutionary ferment of the times, and dropped its fiery leaven into the inflammable nature of Shelley. Even at Eton the wild and dreamy lad was known as "mad Shelley." Then followed the brief residence at Oxford, from which he was expelled at seventeen for having published a pamphlet on the "Necessity of Atheism." There can be little doubt that in his expulsion from the University unnecessary harshness was displayed. The pamphlet was a declaration of ideas-not of convictions, and was really a series of logical propositions, in which Shelley challenged the first minds of the University to dispute after the fashion of the mediaval schoolmen. It was one of those impracticable notions with which the mind |