Chapter XIX: Amiel 432 (16)

The italics are in the original.

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Sainte-Beuve, speaking of that exquisite master of language, the Italian poet Leopardi, remarks how often we see the alliance, singular though it may at first sight appear, of the poetical genius with the genius for scholarship and philology. Dante and Milton are instances which will occur to every one’s mind. Byron is so negligent in his poetical style, he is often, to say the truth, so slovenly, slipshod, and infelicitous, he is so little haunted by the true artist’s fine passion for the correct use and consummate management of words, that he may be described as having for this artistic gift the insensibility of the barbarian;—which is perhaps only another and a less flattering way of saying, with Scott, that he “manages his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.” Just of a piece with the rhythm of

“Dare you await the event of a few minutes’
Deliberation?”

or of

“All shall be void—
Destroy’d!”

is the diction of

‘Which now is painful to these eyes,
Which had not seen the sun to rise;

or of

“... there let him lay!”

or of the famous passage beginning

“He who hath bent him o’er the dead;”

with those trailing relatives, that crying grammatical solecism, that inextricable anacolouthon! To class the work of the author of such things with the work of the authors of such verse as

“In the dark backward and abysm of time”—

or as

“Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line,
Or the tale of Troy divine”—

is ridiculous. Shakespeare and Milton, with their secret of consummate felicity in diction and movement, are of another and an altogether higher order from Byron, nay, for that matter, from Wordsworth also; from the author of such verse as

“Sol hath dropt into his harbour”—

or (if Mr. Ruskin pleases) as

“Parching summer hath no warrant”

as from the author of

“All shall be void—
Destroy’d!”

With a poetical gift and a poetical performance of the very highest order, the slovenliness and tunelessness of much of Byron’s production, the pompousness and ponderousness of much of Wordsworth’s are incompatible. Let us admit this to the full.

Moreover, while we are hearkening to M. Scherer, and going along with him in his faultfinding, let us admit, too, that the man in Byron is in many respects as unsatisfactory as the poet. And, putting aside all direct moral criticism of him,—with which we need not concern ourselves here,—we shall find that he is unsatisfactory in the same way. Some of Byron’s most crying faults as a man,—his vulgarity, his affectation,—are really akin to the faults of commonness, of want of art, in his workmanship as a poet. The ideal nature for the poet and artist is that of the finely touched and finely gifted man, the εὐφυής of the Greeks; now, Byron’s nature was in substance not that of the εὐφυής at all, but rather, as I have said, of the barbarian. The want of fine perception which made it possible for him to formulate either the comparison between himself and Rousseau, or his reason for getting Lord Delawarr excused from a “licking” at Harrow, is exactly what made possible for him also his terrible dealings in, _An ye wool_; _I have redde thee_; _Sunburn me_; _Oons, and it is excellent well_. It is exactly, again, what made possible for him his precious dictum that Pope is a Greek temple, and a string of other criticisms of the like force; it is exactly, in fine, what deteriorated the quality of his poetic production. If we think of a good representative of that finely touched and exquisitely gifted nature which is the ideal nature for the poet and artist,—if we think of Raphael, for instance, who truly is εὐφυής just as Byron is not,—we shall bring into clearer light the connection in Byron between the faults of the man and the faults of the poet. With Raphael’s character Byron’s sins of vulgarity and false criticism would have been impossible, just as with Raphael’s art Byron’s sins of common and bad workmanship.

Yes, all this is true, but it is not the whole truth about Byron nevertheless; very far from it. The severe criticism of M. Scherer by no means gives us the whole truth about Byron, and we have not yet got it in what has been added to that criticism here. The negative part of the true criticism of him we perhaps have; the positive part, by far the more important, we have not. Byron’s admirers appeal eagerly to foreign testimonies in his favor. Some of these testimonies do not much move me; but one testimony there is among them which will always carry, with me at any rate, very great weight,—the testimony of Goethe. Goethe’s sayings about Byron were uttered, it must however be remembered, at the height of Byron’s vogue, when that puissant and splendid personality was exercising its full power of attraction. In Goethe’s own household there was an atmosphere of glowing Byron-worship; his daughter-in-law was a passionate admirer of Byron, nay, she enjoyed and prized his poetry, as did Tieck and so many others in Germany at that time, much above the poetry of Goethe himself. Instead of being irritated and rendered jealous by this, a nature like Goethe’s was inevitably led by it to heighten, not lower, the note of his praise. The Time-Spirit, or _Zeit-Geist_, he would himself have said, was working just then for Byron. This working of the _Zeit-Geist_ in his favor was an advantage added to Byron’s other advantages, an advantage of which he had a right to get the benefit. This is what Goethe would have thought and said to himself; and so he would have been led even to heighten somewhat his estimate of Byron, and to accentuate the emphasis of praise. Goethe speaking of Byron at that moment was not and could not be quite the same cool critic as Goethe speaking of Dante, or Molière, or Milton. This, I say, we ought to remember in reading Goethe’s judgments on Byron and his poetry. Still, if we are careful to bear this in mind, and if we quote Goethe’s praise correctly,—which is not always done by those who in this country quote it,—and if we add to it that great and due qualification added to it by Goethe himself,—which so far as I have seen has never yet been done by his quoters in this country at all,—then we shall have a judgment on Byron, which comes, I think, very near to the truth, and which may well command our adherence.

In his judicious and interesting Life of Byron, Professor Nichol quotes Goethe as saying that Byron “is undoubtedly to be regarded as the greatest genius of our century.” What Goethe did really say was “the greatest _talent_,” not “the greatest _genius_.” The difference is important, because, while talent gives the notion of power in a man’s performance, genius gives rather the notion of felicity and perfection in it; and this divine gift of consummate felicity by no means, as we have seen, belongs to Byron and to his poetry. Goethe said that Byron “must unquestionably be regarded as the greatest talent of the century.”[40] He said of him moreover: “The English may think of Byron what they please, but it is certain that they can point to no poet who is his like. He is different from all the rest, and in the main greater.” Here, again, Professor Nichol translates: “They can show no (living) poet who is to be compared to him;”—inserting the word _living_, I suppose, to prevent its being thought that Goethe would have ranked Byron, as a poet, above Shakespeare and Milton. But Goethe did not use, or, I think, mean to imply, any limitation such as is added by Professor Nichol. Goethe said simply, and he meant to say, “_no_ poet.” Only the words which follow[41] ought not, I think, to be rendered, “who is to be compared to him,” that is to say, “_who is his equal as a poet_.” They mean rather, “who may properly be compared with him,” “_who is his parallel_.” And when Goethe said that Byron was “in the main greater” than all the rest of the English poets, he was not so much thinking of the strict rank, as poetry, of Byron’s production; he was thinking of that wonderful personality of Byron which so enters into his poetry, and which Goethe called “a personality such, for its eminence, as has never been yet, and such as is not likely to come again.” He was thinking of that “daring, dash, and grandiosity,”[42] of Byron, which are indeed so splendid; and which were, so Goethe maintained, of a character to do good, because “everything great is formative,” and what is thus formative does us good.

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Footnote 40:

“Der ohne Frage als das grösste Talent des Jahrhunderts anzusehen
ist.”

Footnote 41:

“Der ihm zu vergleichen wäre.”

Footnote 42:

“Byron’s Kühnheit, Keckheit und Grandiosität, ist das nicht alles
bildend?—Alles Grosse bildet, sobald wir es gewahr werden.”

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The faults which went with this greatness, and which impaired Byron’s poetical work, Goethe saw very well. He saw the constant state of warfare and combat, the “negative and polemical working,” which makes Byron’s poetry a poetry in which we can so little find rest; he saw the _Hang zum Unbegrenzten_, the straining after the unlimited, which made it impossible for Byron to produce poetic wholes such as the _Tempest_ or _Lear_; he saw the _zu viel Empirie_, the promiscuous adoption of all the matter offered to the poet by life, just as it was offered, without thought or patience for the mysterious transmutation to be operated on this matter by poetic form. But in a sentence which I cannot, as I say, remember to have yet seen quoted in any English criticism of Byron, Goethe lays his finger on the cause of all these defects in Byron, and on his real source of weakness both as a man and as a poet. “The moment he reflects, he is a child,” says Goethe;—“_sobald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind_.”

Now if we take the two parts of Goethe’s criticism of Byron, the favorable and the unfavorable, and put them together, we shall have, I think, the truth. On the one hand, a splendid and puissant personality—a personality “in eminence such as has never been yet, and is not likely to come again”; of which the like, therefore, is not to be found among the poets of our nation, by which Byron “is different from all the rest, and in the main greater.” Byron is, moreover, “the greatest talent of our century.” On the other hand, this splendid personality and unmatched talent, this unique Byron, “is quite too much in the dark about himself;”[43] nay, “the moment he begins to reflect, he is a child.” There we have, I think, Byron complete; and in estimating him and ranking him we have to strike a balance between the gain which accrues to his poetry, as compared with the productions of other poets, from his superiority, and the loss which accrues to it from his defects.

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Footnote 43:

“Gar zu dunkel über sich selbst.”

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A balance of this kind has to be struck in the case of all poets except the few supreme masters in whom a profound criticism of life exhibits itself in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and beauty. I have seen it said that I allege poetry to have for its characteristic this: that it is a criticism of life; and that I make it to be thereby distinguished from prose, which is something else. So far from it, that when I first used this expression, _a criticism of life_, now many years ago, it was to literature in general that I applied it, and not to poetry in especial. “The end and aim of all literature,” I said, “is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that: _a criticism of life_.” And so it surely is; the main end and aim of all our utterance, whether in prose or in verse, is surely a criticism of life. We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth; still a truth it is, and poetry can never prosper if it is forgotten. In poetry, however, the criticism of life has to be made conformably to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of substance and matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty; and it is by knowing and feeling the work of those poets, that we learn to recognize the fulfilment and non-fulfilment of such conditions.

The moment, however, that we leave the small band of the very best poets, the true classics, and deal with poets of the next rank, we shall find that perfect truth and seriousness of matter, in close alliance with perfect truth and felicity of manner, is the rule no longer. We have now to take what we can get, to forego something here, to admit compensation for it there; to strike a balance, and to see how our poets stand in respect to one another when that balance has been struck. Let us observe how this is so.

We will take three poets, among the most considerable of our century: Leopardi, Byron, Wordsworth. Giacomo Leopardi was ten years younger than Byron, and he died thirteen years after him; both of them, therefore, died young—Byron at the age of thirty-six, Leopardi at the age of thirty-nine. Both of them were of noble birth, both of them suffered from physical defect, both of them were in revolt against the established facts and beliefs of their age; but here the likeness between them ends. The stricken poet of Recanati had no country, for an Italy in his day did not exist; he had no audience, no celebrity. The volume of his poems, published in the very year of Byron’s death, hardly sold, I suppose, its tens, while the volumes of Byron’s poetry were selling their tens of thousands. And yet Leopardi has the very qualities which we have found wanting to Byron; he has the sense for form and style, the passion for just expression, the sure and firm touch of the true artist. Nay, more, he has a grave fulness of knowledge, an insight into the real bearings of the questions which as a sceptical poet he raises, a power of seizing the real point, a lucidity, with which the author of _Cain_ has nothing to compare. I can hardly imagine Leopardi reading the

“... And _thou_ would’st go on aspiring
To the great double Mysteries! the _two Principles_!”

or following Byron in his theological controversy with Dr. Kennedy, without having his features overspread by a calm and fine smile, and remarking of his brilliant contemporary, as Goethe did, that “the moment he begins to reflect, he is a child.” But indeed whoever wishes to feel the full superiority of Leopardi over Byron in philosophic thought, and in the expression of it, has only to read one paragraph of one poem, the paragraph of _La Ginestra_, beginning

“Sovente in queste piagge,”

and ending

“Non so se il riso o la pietà prevale.”

In like manner, Leopardi is at many points the poetic superior of Wordsworth too. He has a far wider culture than Wordsworth, more mental lucidity, more freedom from illusions as to the real character of the established fact and of reigning conventions; above all, this Italian, with his pure and sure touch, with his fineness of perception, is far more of the artist. Such a piece of pompous dulness as

“O for the coming of that glorious time,”

and all the rest of it, or such lumbering verse as Mr. Ruskin’s enemy,

“Parching summer hath no warrant”—

would have been as impossible to Leopardi as to Dante. Where, then, is Wordsworth’s superiority? for the worth of what he has given us in poetry I hold to be greater, on the whole, than the worth of what Leopardi has given us. It is in Wordsworth’s sound and profound sense

“Of joy in widest commonalty spread;”

whereas Leopardi remains with his thoughts ever fixed upon the _essenza insanabile_, upon the _acerbo, indegno mistero delle cose_. It is in the power with which Wordsworth feels the resources of joy offered to us in nature, offered to us in the primary human affections and duties, and in the power with which, in his moments of inspiration, he renders this joy, and makes us, too, feel it; a force greater than himself seeming to lift him and to prompt his tongue, so that he speaks in a style far above any style of which he has the constant command, and with a truth far beyond any philosophic truth of which he has the conscious and assured possession. Neither Leopardi nor Wordsworth are of the same order with the great poets who made such verse as

Τλητὸν γὰρ Moῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ὰνθρώποισιν·

or as

“In la sua volontade e nostra pace;”

or as

“... Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.”

But as compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, though at many points less lucid, though far less a master of style, far less of an artist, gains so much by his criticism of life being, in certain matters of profound importance, healthful and true, whereas Leopardi’s pessimism is not, that the value of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the whole, stands higher for us than that of Leopardi’s, as it stands higher for us, I think, than that of any modern poetry except Goethe’s.

Byron’s poetic value is also greater, on the whole, than Leopardi’s; and his superiority turns in the same way upon the surpassing worth of something which he had and was, after all deduction has been made for his shortcomings. We talk of Byron’s _personality_, “a personality in eminence such as has never been yet, and is not likely to come again;” and we say that by this personality Byron is “different from all the rest of English poets, and in the main greater.” But can we not be a little more circumstantial, and name that in which the wonderful power of this personality consisted? We can; with the instinct of a poet Mr. Swinburne has seized upon it and named it for us. The power of Byron’s personality lies in “the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: _the excellence of sincerity and strength_.”

Byron found our nation, after its long and victorious struggle with revolutionary France, fixed in a system of established facts and dominant ideas which revolted him. The mental bondage of the most powerful part of our nation, of its strong middle-class, to a narrow and false system of this kind, is what we call British Philistinism. That bondage is unbroken to this hour, but in Byron’s time it was even far more deep and dark than it is now. Byron was an aristocrat, and it is not difficult for an aristocrat to look on the prejudices and habits of the British Philistine with scepticism and disdain. Plenty of young men of his own class Byron met at Almack’s or at Lady Jersey’s, who regarded the established facts and reigning beliefs of the England of that day with as little reverence as he did. But these men, disbelievers in British Philistinism in private, entered English public life, the most conventional in the world, and at once they saluted with respect the habits and ideas of British Philistinism as if they were a part of the order of creation, and as if in public no sane man would think of warring against them. With Byron it was different. What he called the _cant_ of the great middle part of the English nation, what we call its Philistinism, revolted him; but the cant of his own class, deferring to this Philistinism and profiting by it, while they disbelieved in it, revolted him even more. “Come what may,” are his own words, “I will never flatter the million’s canting in any shape.” His class in general, on the other hand, shrugged their shoulders at this cant, laughed at it, pandered to it, and ruled by it. The falsehood, cynicism, insolence, misgovernment, oppression, with their consequent unfailing crop of human misery, which were produced by this state of things, roused Byron to irreconcilable revolt and battle. They made him indignant, they infuriated him; they were so strong, so defiant, so maleficent,—and yet he felt that they were doomed. “You have seen every trampler down in turn,” he comforts himself with saying, “from Buonaparte to the simplest individuals.” The old order, as after 1815 it stood victorious, with its ignorance and misery below, its cant, selfishness, and cynicism above, was at home and abroad equally hateful to him. “I have simplified my politics,” he writes, “into an utter detestation of all existing governments.” And again: “Give me a republic. The king-times are fast finishing; there will be blood shed like water and tears like mist, but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”

Byron himself gave the preference, he tells us, to politicians and doers, far above writers and singers. But the politics of his own day and of his own class,—even of the Liberals of his own class,—were impossible for him. Nature had not formed him for a Liberal peer, proper to move the Address in the House of Lords, to pay compliments to the energy and self-reliance of British middle-class Liberalism, and to adapt his politics to suit it. Unfitted for such politics, he threw himself upon poetry as his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant—they were the upholders of the old order. George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world, and they were his enemies and himself.

Such was Byron’s personality, by which “he is different from all the rest of English poets, and in the main greater.” But he posed all his life, says M. Scherer. Let us distinguish. There is the Byron who posed, there is the Byron with his affectations and silliness, the Byron whose weakness Lady Blessington, with a woman’s acuteness, so admirably seized; “his great defect is flippancy and a total want of self-possession.” But when this theatrical and easily criticized personage betook himself to poetry, and when he had fairly warmed to his work, then he became another man; then the theatrical personage passed away; then a higher power took possession of him and filled him; then at last came forth into light that true and puissant personality, with its direct strokes, its ever-welling force, its satire, its energy, and its agony. This is the real Byron; whoever stops at the theatrical preludings does not know him. And this real Byron may well be superior to the stricken Leopardi, he may well be declared “different from all the rest of English poets, and in the main greater,” in so far as it is true of him, as M. Taine well says, that “all other souls, in comparison with his, seem inert”; in so far as it is true of him that with superb, exhaustless energy, he maintained, as Professor Nichol well says, “the struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul;” in so far, finally, as he deserves (and he does deserve) the noble praise of him which I have already quoted from Mr. Swinburne; the praise for “the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: _the excellence of sincerity and strength_.”

True, as a man, Byron could not manage himself, could not guide his ways aright, but was all astray. True, he has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future; “the moment he reflects, he is a child.” The way out of the false state of things which enraged him he did not see,—the slow and laborious way upward; he had not the patience, knowledge, self-discipline, virtue, requisite for seeing it. True, also, as a poet, he has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist’s nature and gifts. Yet a personality of Byron’s force counts for so much in life, and a rhetorician of Byron’s force counts for so much in literature! But it would be most unjust to label Byron, as M. Scherer is disposed to label him, as a rhetorician only. Along with his astounding power and passion he had a strong and deep sense for what is beautiful in nature, and for what is beautiful in human action and suffering. When he warms to his work, when he is inspired, Nature herself seems to take the pen from him as she took it from Wordsworth, and to write for him as she wrote for Wordsworth, though in a different fashion, with her own penetrating simplicity. Goethe has well observed of Byron, that when he is at his happiest his representation of things is as easy and real as if he were improvising. It is so; and his verse then exhibits quite another and a higher quality from the rhetorical quality,—admirable as this also in its own kind of merit is,—of such verse as

“Minions of splendor shrinking from distress,”

and of so much more verse of Byron’s of that stamp. Nature, I say, takes the pen for him; and then, assured master of a true poetic style though he is not, any more than Wordsworth, yet as from Wordsworth at his best there will come such verse as

“Will no one tell me what she sings?”

so from Byron, too, at his best, there will come such verse as

“He heard it, but he heeded not; his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away.”

Of verse of this high quality, Byron has much; of verse of a quality lower than this, of a quality rather rhetorical than truly poetic, yet still of extraordinary power and merit, he has still more. To separate, from the mass of poetry which Byron poured forth, all this higher portion, so superior to the mass, and still so considerable in quantity, and to present it in one body by itself, is to do a service, I believe, to Byron’s reputation, and to the poetic glory of our country.

Such a service I have in the present volume attempted to perform. To Byron, after all the tributes which have been paid to him, here is yet one tribute more—

“Among thy mightier offerings here are mine!”

not a tribute of boundless homage certainly, but sincere; a tribute which consists not in covering the poet with eloquent eulogy of our own, but in letting him, at his best and greatest, speak for himself. Surely the critic who does most for his author is the critic who gains readers for his author himself, not for any lucubrations on his author:—gains more readers for him, and enables those readers to read him with more admiration.

And in spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet, perhaps, had the serious admiration which he deserves. Society read him and talked about him, as it reads and talks about _Endymion_ to-day; and with the same sort of result. It looked in Byron’s glass as it looks in Lord Beaconsfield’s, and sees, or fancies that it sees, its own face there; and then it goes its way, and straightway forgets what manner of man it saw. Even of his passionate admirers, how many never got beyond the theatrical Byron, from whom they caught the fashion of deranging their hair, or of knotting their neck-handkerchief, or of leaving their shirt-collar unbuttoned; how few profoundly felt his vital influence, the influence of his splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength!

His own aristocratic class, whose cynical make-believe drove him to fury; the great middle-class, on whose impregnable Philistinism he shattered himself to pieces,—how little have either of these felt Byron’s vital influence! As the inevitable break-up of the old order comes, as the English middle-class slowly awakens from its intellectual sleep of two centuries, as our actual present world, to which this sleep has condemned us, shows itself more clearly,—our world of an aristocracy materialized and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal,—we shall turn our eyes again, and to more purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who, ignorant of the future and unconsoled by its promises, nevertheless waged against the conversation of the old impossible world so fiery battle; waged it till he fell,—waged it with such splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength.

Wordsworth’s value is of another kind. Wordsworth has an insight into permanent sources of joy and consolation for mankind which Byron has not; his poetry gives us more which we may rest upon than Byron’s,—more which we can rest upon now, and which men may rest upon always. I place Wordsworth’s poetry, therefore, above Byron’s on the whole, although in some points he was greatly Byron’s inferior, and although Byron’s poetry will always, probably, find more readers than Wordsworth, and will give pleasure more easily. But these two, Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and preeminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century. Keats had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic gift than either of them: but he died having produced too little and being as yet too immature to rival them. I for my part can never even think of equalling with them any other of their contemporaries;—either Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves. When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first names with her will be these.

VII.

SHELLEY[44]

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Footnote 44:

Published in _The Nineteenth Century_, January, 1888.

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Nowadays all things appear in print sooner or later; but I have heard from a lady who knew Mrs. Shelley a story of her which, so far as I know, has not appeared in print hitherto. Mrs. Shelley was choosing a school for her son, and asked the advice of this lady, who gave for advice—to use her own words to me—“Just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with: Oh, send him somewhere where they will teach him to think for himself!” I have had far too long a training as a school inspector to presume to call an utterance of this kind a _banality_; however, it is not on this advice that I now wish to lay stress, but upon Mrs. Shelley’s reply to it. Mrs. Shelley answered: “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!”

To the lips of many and many a reader of Professor Dowden’s volumes a cry of this sort will surely rise, called forth by Shelley’s life as there delineated. I have read those volumes with the deepest interest, but I regret their publication, and am surprised, I confess, that Shelley’s family should have desired or assisted it. For my own part, at any rate, I would gladly have been left with the impression, the ineffaceable impression, made upon me by Mrs. Shelley’s first edition of her husband’s collected poems. Medwin and Hogg and Trelawny had done little to change the impression made by those four delightful volumes of the original edition of 1839. The text of the poems has in some places been mended since; but Shelley is not a classic, whose various readings are to be noted with earnest attention. The charm of the poems flowed in upon us from that edition and the charm of the character. Mrs. Shelley had done her work admirably; her introductions to the poems of each year, with Shelley’s prefaces and passages from his letters, supplied the very picture of Shelley to be desired. Somewhat idealized by tender regret and exalted memory Mrs. Shelley’s representation no doubt was. But without sharing her conviction that Shelley’s character, impartially judged, “would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary,” we learned from her to know the soul of affection, of “gentle and cordial goodness,” of eagerness and ardor for human happiness, which was in this rare spirit,—so mere a monster unto many. Mrs. Shelley in her general preface to her husband’s poems: “I abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions which they engendered inspired his poetry; this is not the time to relate the truth.” I for my part could wish, I repeat, that that time had never come.

But come it has, and Professor Dowden has given us the Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in two very thick volumes. If the work was to be done, Professor Dowden has indeed done it thoroughly. One or two things in his biography of Shelley I could wish different, even waiving the question whether it was desirable to relate in full the occurrences of Shelley’s private life. Professor Dowden holds a brief for Shelley; he pleads for Shelley as an advocate pleads for his client, and this strain of pleading, united with an attitude of adoration which in Mrs. Shelley had its charm, but which Professor Dowden was not bound to adopt from her, is unserviceable to Shelley, nay, injurious to him, because it inevitably begets, in many readers of the story which Professor Dowden has to tell, impatience and revolt. Further, let me remark that the biography before us is of prodigious length, although its hero died before he was thirty years old, and that it might have been considerably shortened if it had been more plainly and simply written. I see that one of Professor Dowden’s critics, while praising his style for “a certain poetic quality of fervor and picturesqueness,” laments that in some important passages Professor Dowden “fritters away great opportunities for sustained and impassioned narrative.” I am inclined much rather to lament that Professor Dowden has not steadily kept his poetic quality of fervor and picturesqueness more under control. Is it that the Home Rulers have so loaded the language that even an Irishman who is not one of them catches something of their full habit of style? No, it is rather, I believe, that Professor Dowden, of poetic nature himself, and dealing with a poetic nature like Shelley, is so steeped in sentiment by his subject that in almost every page of the biography the sentiment runs over. A curious note of his style, suffused with sentiment, is that it seems incapable of using the common word _child_. A great many births are mentioned in the biography, but always it is a poetic _babe_ that is born, not a prosaic _child_. And so, again, André Chénier is not guillotined, but “too foully done to death.” Again, Shelley after his runaway marriage with Harriet Westbrook was in Edinburgh without money and full of anxieties for the future, and complained of his hard lot in being unable to get away, in being “chained to the filth and commerce of Edinburgh.” Natural enough; but why should Professor Dowden improve the occasion as follows? “The most romantic of northern cities could lay no spell upon his spirit. His eye was not fascinated by the presences of mountains and the sea, by the fantastic outlines of aërial piles seen amid the wreathing smoke of Auld Reekie, by the gloom of the Canongate illuminated with shafts of sunlight streaming from its interesting wynds and alleys; nor was his imagination kindled by storied house or palace, and the voices of old, forgotten, far-off things, which haunt their walls.” If Professor Dowden, writing a book in prose, could have brought himself to eschew poetic excursions of this kind and to tell his story in a plain way, lovers of simplicity, of whom there are some still left in the world, would have been gratified, and at the same time his book would have been the shorter by scores of pages.

These reserves being made, I have little except praise for the manner in which Professor Dowden has performed his task; whether it was a task which ought to be performed at all, probably did not lie with him to decide. His ample materials are used with order and judgment; the history of Shelley’s life develops itself clearly before our eyes; the documents of importance for it are given with sufficient fulness, nothing essential seems to have been kept back, although I would gladly, I confess, have seen more of Miss Clairmont’s journal, whatever arrangement she may in her later life have chosen to exercise upon it. In general all documents are so fairly and fully cited, that Professor Dowden’s pleadings for Shelley, though they may sometimes indispose and irritate the reader, produce no obscuring of the truth; the documents manifest it of themselves. Last but not least of Professor Dowden’s merits, he has provided his book with an excellent index.

Undoubtedly this biography, with its full account of the occurrences of Shelley’s private life, compels one to review one’s former impression of him. Undoubtedly the brilliant and attaching rebel who in thinking for himself had of old our sympathy so passionately with him, when we come to read his full biography makes us often and often inclined to cry out: “My God! he had far better have thought like other people.” There is a passage in Hogg’s capitally written and most interesting account of Shelley which I wrote down when I first read it and have borne in mind ever since; so beautifully it seemed to render the true Shelley. Hogg has been speaking of the intellectual expression of Shelley’s features, and he goes on: “Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellect; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration that characterizes the best work and chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls) of the great masters of Florence and of Rome.” What we have of Shelley in poetry and prose suited with this charming picture of him; Mrs. Shelley’s account suited with it; it was a possession which one would gladly have kept unimpaired. It still subsists, I must now add; it subsists even after one has read the present biography; it consists, but so as by fire. It subsists with many a scar and stain; never again will it have the same pureness and beauty which it had formerly. I regret this, as I have said, and I confess I do not see what has been gained. Our ideal Shelley was the true Shelley after all; what has been gained by making us at moments doubt it? What has been gained by forcing upon as much in him which is ridiculous and odious, by compelling any fair mind, if it is to retain with a good conscience its ideal Shelley, to do that which I propose to do now? I propose to mark firmly what is ridiculous and odious in the Shelley brought to our knowledge by the new materials, and then to show that our former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless survives.

Almost everybody knows the main outline of the events of Shelley’s life. It will be necessary for me, however, up to the date of his second marriage, to go through them here. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792. He was of an old family of country gentlemen, and the heir to a baronetcy. He had one brother and five sisters, but the brother so much younger than himself as to be no companion for him in his boyhood at home, and after he was separated from home and England he never saw him. Shelley was brought up at Field Place with his sisters. At ten years old he was sent to a private school at Isleworth, where he read Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances and was fascinated by a popular scientific lecturer. After two years of private school he went in 1804 to Eton. Here he took no part in cricket or football, refused to fag, was known as “mad Shelley” and much tormented; when tormented beyond endurance he could be dangerous. Certainly he was not happy at Eton; but he had friends, he boated, he rambled about the country. His school lessons were easy to him, and his reading extended far beyond them; he read books on chemistry, he read Pliny’s _Natural History_, Godwin’s _Political Justice_, Lucretius, Franklin, Condorcet. It is said he was called “atheist Shelley” at Eton, but this is not so well established as his having been called “mad Shelley.” He was full, at any rate, of new and revolutionary ideas, and he declared at a later time that he was twice expelled from the school but recalled through the interference of his father.

In the spring of 1810 Shelley, now in his eighteenth year, entered University College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner. He had already written novels and poems; a poem on the Wandering Jew, in seven or eight cantos, he sent to Campbell, and was told by Campbell, that there were but two good lines in it. He had solicited the correspondence of Mrs. Hemans, then Felicia Browne and unmarried; he had fallen in love with a charming cousin, Harriet Grove. In the autumn of 1810 he found a publisher for his verse; he also found a friend in a very clever and free-minded commoner of his college, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who has admirably described the Shelley of those Oxford days, with his chemistry, his eccentric habits, his charm of look and character, his conversation, his shrill discordant voice. Shelley read incessantly. Hume’s _Essays_ produced a powerful impression on him; his free speculation led him to what his father, and worse still his cousin Harriet, thought “detestable principles”; his cousin and family became estranged from him. He, on his part, became more and more incensed against the “bigotry” and “intolerance” which produced such estrangement. “Here I swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me—here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance.” At the beginning of 1811 he prepared and published what he called a “leaflet for letters,” having for its title _The Necessity of Atheism_. He sent copies to all the bishops, to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and to the heads of houses. On Lady Day he was summoned before the authorities of his College, refused to answer the question whether he had written _The Necessity of Atheism_, told the Master and Fellows that “their proceedings would become a court of inquisitors but not free men in a free country,” and was expelled for contumacy. Hogg wrote a letter of remonstrance to the authorities was in his turn summoned before them and questioned as to his share in the “leaflet,” and, refusing to answer, he also was expelled.

Shelley settled with Hogg in lodgings in London. His father, excusably indignant, was not a wise man and managed his son ill. His plan of recommending Shelley to read Paley’s _Natural Theology_, and of _reading it with him himself_, makes us smile. Shelley, who about this time wrote of his younger sister, then at school at Clapham, “There are some hopes of this dear little girl, she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her,” was not to have been cured by Paley’s _Natural Theology_ administered through Mr. Timothy Shelley. But by the middle of May Shelley’s father had agreed to allow him two hundred pounds a year. Meanwhile in visiting his sisters at their school in Clapham, Shelley made the acquaintance of a schoolfellow of theirs, Harriet Westbrook. She was a beautiful and lively girl, with a father who had kept a tavern in Mount Street, but had now retired from business, and one sister much older than herself, who encouraged in every possible way the acquaintance of her sister of sixteen with the heir to a baronetcy and a great estate. Soon Shelley heard that Harriet met with cold looks at her school for associating with an atheist; his generosity and his ready indignation against “intolerance” were roused. In the summer Harriet wrote to him that she was persecuted not at school only but at home also, that she was lonely and miserable, and would gladly put an end to her life. Shelley went to see her; she owned her love for him, and he engaged himself to her. He told his cousin Charles Grove that his happiness had been blighted when the other Harriet, Charles’s sister, cast him off; that now the only thing worth living for was self-sacrifice. Harriet’s persecutors became yet more troublesome, and Shelley, at the end of August, went off with her to Edinburgh and they were married. The entry in the register is this:—

“_August 28, 1811._—Percy Bysshe Shelley, farmer, Sussex, and Miss
Harriet Westbrook, St. Andrew Church Parish, daughter of Mr. John
Westbrook, London.”

After five weeks in Edinburgh the young farmer and his wife came southwards and took lodgings at York, under the shadow of what Shelley calls that “gigantic pile of superstition,” the Minster. But his friend Hogg was in a lawyer’s office in York, and Hogg’s society made the Minster endurable. Mr. Timothy Shelley’s happiness in his son was naturally not increased by the runaway marriage; he stopped his allowance, and Shelley determined to visit “this thoughtless man,” as he calls his parent, and to “try the force of truth” upon him. Nothing could be effected; Shelley’s mother, too, was now against him. He returned to York to find that in his absence his friend Hogg had been making love to Harriet, who had indignantly repulsed him. Shelley was shocked, but after a “terrible day” of explanation from Hogg, he “fully, freely pardoned him,” promised to retain him still as “his friend, his bosom friend,” and “hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue was.” But for the present it seemed better to separate. In November he and Harriet, with her sister Eliza, took a cottage at Keswick. Shelley was now in great straits for money; the great Sussex neighbor of the Shelleys, the Duke of Norfolk, interposed in his favor, and his father and grandfather seem to have offered him at this time an income of £2000 a year, if he would consent to entail the family estate. Shelley indignantly refused to “forswear his principles,” by accepting “a proposal so insultingly hateful.” But in December his father agreed, though with an ill grace, to grant him his allowance of £200 a year again, and Mr. Westbrook promised to allow a like sum to his daughter. So after four months of marriage the Shelleys began 1812 with an income of £400 a year.

Early in February they left Keswick and proceeded to Dublin, where Shelley, who had prepared an address to the Catholics, meant to “devote himself towards forwarding the great ends of virtue and happiness in Ireland.” Before leaving Keswick he wrote to William Godwin, “the regulator and former of his mind,” making profession of his mental obligations to him, of his respect and veneration, and soliciting Godwin’s friendship. A correspondence followed; Godwin pronounced his young disciple’s plans for “disseminating the doctrines of philanthropy and freedom” in Ireland to be unwise; Shelley bowed to his mentor’s decision and gave up his Irish campaign, quitting Dublin on the 4th of April 1812. He and Harriet wandered first to Nant-Gwillt in South Wales, near the upper Wye, and from thence after a month or two to Lynmouth in North Devon, where he busied himself with his poem of _Queen Mab_, and with sending to sea boxes and bottles containing a _Declaration of Rights_ by him, in the hope that the winds and waves might carry his doctrines where they would do good. But his Irish servant, bearing the prophetic name of Healy, posted the _Declaration_ on the walls of Barnstaple and was taken up; Shelley found himself watched and no longer able to enjoy Lynmouth in peace. He moved in September, 1812, to Tremadoc, in North Wales, where he threw himself ardently into an enterprise for recovering a great stretch of drowned land from the sea. But at the beginning of October he and Harriet visited London, and Shelley grasped Godwin by the hand at last. At once an intimacy arose, but the future Mary Shelley—Godwin’s daughter by his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft—was absent on a visit in Scotland when the Shelleys arrived in London. They became acquainted, however, with the second Mrs. Godwin, on whom we have Charles Lamb’s friendly comment: “A very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles!”; with the amiable Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Imlay, before her marriage with Godwin; and probably also with Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin’s daughter by a first marriage, and herself, afterwards the mother of Byron’s Allegra. Complicated relationships, as in the Theban story! and there will be not wanting, presently, something of the Theban horrors. During this visit of six weeks to London Shelley renewed his intimacy with Hogg; in the middle of November he returned to Tremadoc. There he remained until the end of February 1813, perfectly happy with Harriet, reading widely, and working at his _Queen Mab_ and at the notes to that poem. On the 26th of February an attempt was made, or so he fancied, to assassinate him, and in high nervous excitement he hurriedly left Tremadoc and repaired with Harriet to Dublin again. On this visit to Ireland he saw Killarney, but early in April he and Harriet were back again in London.

There in June 1813 their daughter Ianthe was born; at the end of July they moved to Bracknell, in Berkshire. They had for neighbors there a Mrs. Boinville and her married daughter, whom Shelley found to be fascinating women, with a culture which to his wife was altogether wanting. Cornelia Turner, Mrs. Boinville’s daughter, was melancholy, required consolation, and found it, Hogg tells us, in Petrarch’s poetry; “Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest melancholy as every true poet ought.” Peacock, a man of keen and cultivated mind, joined the circle at Bracknell. He and Harriet, not yet eighteen, used sometimes to laugh at the gushing sentiment and enthusiasm of the Bracknell circle; Harriet had also given offense to Shelley by getting a wet-nurse for her child; in Professor Dowden’s words, “the beauty of Harriet’s motherly relation to her babe was marred in Shelley’s eyes by the introduction into his home of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother’s tenderest office.” But in September Shelley wrote a sonnet to his child which expresses his deep love for the mother also, to whom in March, 1814, he was remarried in London, lest the Scotch marriage should prove to have been in any point irregular. Harriet’s sister Eliza, however, whom Shelley had at first treated with excessive deference, had now become hateful to him. And in the very month of the London marriage we find him writing to Hogg that he is staying with the Boinvilles, having “escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself.” Cornelia Turner, he adds, whom he once thought cold and reserved, “is the reverse of this, as she is the reverse of everything bad; she inherits all the divinity of her mother.” Then comes a stanza, beginning

“Thy dewy looks sink in my breast,
Thy gentle words stir poison there.”

It has no meaning, he says; it is only written in thought. “It is evident from this pathetic letter,” says Professor Dowden, “that Shelley’s happiness in his home had been fatally stricken.” This is a curious way of putting the matter. To me what is evident is rather that Shelley had, to use Professor Dowden’s words again—for in these things of high sentiment I gladly let him speak for me—“a too vivid sense that here (in the society of the Boinville family) were peace and joy and gentleness and love.” In April come some more verses to the Boinvilles, which contain the first good stanza that Shelley wrote. In May comes a poem to Harriet, of which Professor Dowden’s prose analysis is as poetic as the poem itself. “If she has something to endure (from the Boinville attachment), it is not much, and all her husband’s weal hangs upon her loving endurance, for see how pale and wildered anguish has made him!” Harriet, unconvinced, seems to have gone off to Bath in resentment, from whence, however, she kept up a constant correspondence with Shelley, who was now of age, and busy in London raising money on post-obit bonds for his own wants and those of the friend and former of his mind, Godwin.