Chapter XIV: Front Matter (14)

The Dialogue in the second volume between Pericles and Sophocles breathes the spirit of patriotism and of antiquity, perhaps in a still higher strain, with a bastard allusion, we suspect, to recent politics. The Conversations between Aristotle and Callisthenes, and between Lord Chatham and Lord Chesterfield, (also in the second volume), contain an admirable estimate, equally sound and acute, of the characters of Aristotle and Plato. Our critic appears to have studied and to have understood these authors well. In our opinion, he rates Cicero too high; we do not mean as to style or oratory, but as a thinker. In this respect, there is little memorable, or new, or profound, in him; and ‘he was at best’ (as it has been said) ‘but an elegant reporter of the Greek philosophy.’ Neither can we agree that his historian, Middleton, is so entirely free from affectation as our author supposes. It is Lord Chatham who is made to pronounce the panegyric upon Locke, as ‘the most elegant of English prose writers,’ which, if our author were not a deliberate paradox-monger, might seem an uncivil irony. His eulogist does not mend the matter much by his definition of elegance, which one would think intended as a test of Lord Chesterfield’s politeness. He makes it to consist in a mean between too much prolixity and too much conciseness. Now, (supposing this to be intended seriously) Mr. Locke was certainly one of the most circuitous and diffuse of all writers. This distinguished person neither excelled in the graces of style, according to our author’s singular assertion, nor was he (according to the common opinion) the founder of the modern system of metaphysical philosophy. The credit of having laid the basis of this system, and of having completed the great outline of the plan, is beyond all question due to the philosopher of Malmesbury. Mr. Locke’s real _forte_ was great practical good sense, a determination to look at every question, free from prejudice and according to the evidence suggested to him, and a patient and persevering _doggedness_ of understanding in contending with difficulties, and finding out and weighing arguments of opposite tendency. The most valuable parts of his celebrated Essay are those which relate not to the _nature_ but to the _conduct_ of the understanding; and on that subject, he often proves himself a most sage and judicious adviser. Mr. Locke’s Treatise on Education (with all its defects, and an occasional appearance of pedantry), laid the foundation of the modern improvements in that important branch of study; and his book upon Government (written in defence of the Revolution of 1688) remained unimpeached up to the period of the battle of Waterloo. The author of the _Essay on Human Understanding_ undoubtedly ranks as the third name in English philosophy, after Newton and Bacon; yet perhaps others, as Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Hartley, and, even in our own times, Horne Tooke, have shown a firmer grasp of mind, as well as greater originality and subtlety of invention, in the same field of inquiry. This opinion may, however, be thought by some petulant and daring, not to say profane; and we may be accused, in forming or delivering it, of having encroached unawares on the exercise of Mr. Landor’s exclusive right of private judgment and free inquiry.

The controversy between the Abbé Delille and our author in person, of which Boileau is the leading subject, is an amusing specimen of verbal criticism. All that it proves however is, that this kind of criticism proves nothing but the acuteness of the writer, and also that those poets who pique themselves on being most exempt from it are the most liable to it. Pope is an example among ourselves. Those who are in the habit of attending to the smallest things, do not see the farthest before them; and, in polishing and correcting one line, they overlook or fall into some fresh mistake in another. The altering and retouching, after a lapse of time, or during the probation of Horace’s ‘nine years,’ is sure to lead to inconsistency and partial oversights. Mr. Landor, in some instances, we imagine, confounds humour with blunders. Thus the truism in the line—

‘Que, si sous Adam même, _et loin avant Noë_,’

we should consider as a mere piece of _naïveté_, in the manner of La Fontaine. We will give up, however, without scruple, Boileau’s mock-heroics, as we would some English ones of later date. But his satire and his sense we cannot relinquish all at once, though he was a Frenchman, and, what is still worse, a Frenchman of the age of Louis XIV.! It is hard that a people who arrogate all perfections to themselves should possess none; nor can we think that so vast and magnificent a reputation as their literature has acquired, could be raised, as Mr. L. would persuade us, without either art or genius? The Dialogue between Kosciusko and Poniatowski (a subject capable of better things) is remarkable for nothing but a mawkish philanthropy, and a problematical defence of General Pichegru for betraying the Republic and leaguing with the Bourbons. We have nothing to say to this; but, as our author has dedicated one of these volumes to General Mina, will he forgive our recommending him to write a third, in order to inscribe it to Balasteros?

When our literary dramatist attempts common or vulgar humour, he fails totally, as in the slang Conversation entitled _Cavaliere Punto Michino, and Mr. Denis Eusebius Talcranagh_. The interview between David Hume and John Home is another failure, at least in so far as relates to character. The author represents the latter as a quiet contented parish minister,—the fact being, that soon after the publication of his play, he abandoned the clerical profession, and went about a fine gentleman, with a blue coat and a pigtail. Horne Tooke’s collision with Dr. Johnson produces only some meagre etymologies and orthographical pedantry, and a tolerably just and highly pointed character of Junius; that between Washington and Franklin only a dull recipe for curing the disorders of Ireland. Prince Maurocordoto and General Colocotroni defend the Greeks, in the Twelfth Conversation of the second volume, on very new and learned principles; but as we have no skill in wood craft, nor in flat-bottomed boats, we pass it over. The last Conversation (supposed to take place between Marcus Tullius Cicero, and his brother Quintus, on the night before his death) is full of an eloquent and philosophic melancholy, which makes it on the whole our favourite:—that between Lopez Banos and Romero Alpuente, we dare be sworn, is the author’s; at least it had need, it will be _caviare to the multitude_. _Par example._

‘_Banos._ At length, Alpuente, the saints of the Holy Alliance have declared war against us.

‘_Alpuente._ I have not heard it until now.

‘_Banos._ They have directed a memorial to the king of France, inviting him to take such measures as his Majesty, in his wisdom, shall deem convenient, in order to avert the calamities of war, and the dangers of discord, from his frontier.

‘_Alpuente._ God forbid that so great a king should fall upon us! O Lord, save us from our enemy, who would eat us up quick, so despitefully and hungrily is he set against us.

‘_Banos._ Read the manifesto ... why do you laugh? Is not this a declaration of hostilities?

‘_Alpuente._ To Spaniards, yes. I laughed at the folly and impudence of men, who, for the present of a tobacco-box with a fool’s head upon it, string together these old peeled pearls of diplomatic eloquence, and foist them upon the world as arguments and truths. Do kings imagine that they can as easily deceive as they can enslave? and that the mind is as much under their snaffle, as the body is under their axe and halter? Show me one of them, Lopez, who has not violated some promise, who has not usurped some territory, who has not oppressed and subjugated some neighbour; then I will believe him, then I will obey him, then I will acknowledge that those literary heralds who trumpet forth his praises with the newspaper in their hands, are creditable and upright and uncorrupted. The courage of Spain delivered these wretches from the cane and drumhead of a Corsican. Which of them did not crouch before him? which did not flatter him? which did not execute his orders? which did not court his protection? which did not solicit his favour? which did not entreat his forbearance? which did not implore his pardon? which did not abandon and betray him?’

_’Tis a pretty picture_; and did the author suppose, in his blindness to the past and to the future, that the august personages of whom he speaks, after escaping from this state of abject degradation and subjection to that iron scourge, would voluntarily submit to be at the beck and nod of every puny pretender who sets up an authority over them, and undertakes to tutor and _cashier_ kings at his discretion? But not to interrupt the dialogue, which thus continues:—

‘No ties either of blood or of religion, led or restrained these neophytes in holiness. And now, forsooth, the calamities of war, and the dangers of discord are to be averted, by arming one part of our countrymen against the other, by stationing a military force on our frontier, for the reception of murderers and traitors and incendiaries, and by pointing the bayonet and cannon in our faces. When we smiled at the insults of a beaten enemy, they dictated terms and conditions. At last, his _most Christian Majesty_ tells his army, that the nephew of Henry the fourth shall march against us ... with his feather!

‘_Banos._ Ah! that weighs more. The French army will march over fields which cover French armies, and over which the oldest and bravest part of it fled in ignominy and dismay, before our shepherd boys and hunters. What the veterans of Napoleon failed to execute, the household of Louis will accomplish. Parisians! let your comic opera-house lie among its ruins; it cannot be wanted this season.

‘_Alpuente._ Shall these battalions which fought so many years for freedom, so many for glory, be supplementary bands to barbarians from Caucasus and Imaus? Shall they shed the remainder of their blood to destroy a cause, for the maintenance of which they offered up its first libation? Time will solve this problem, the most momentous in its solution that ever lay before man. If we are conquered, of which at present I have no apprehension, Europe must become the theatre of new wars, and be divided into three parts, afterwards into two, and the next generation will see all her states and provinces the property of one autocrat, and governed by the most ignorant and lawless of her nations.[17]

‘_Banos._ Never was there a revolution, or material change in government, effected with so little bloodshed, so little opposition, so little sorrow or disquietude, as ours. Months had passed away, years were rolling over us, institutions were consolidating, superstition was relaxing, ingratitude and perfidy were as much forgotten by us, as our services and sufferings were forgotten by Ferdinand, when emissaries, and gold and arms, and FAITH, inciting to discord and rebellion, crossed our frontier ... and our fortresses were garnished with the bayonets of France, and echoed with the watchwords of the Vatican. If Ferdinand had regarded his oath, and had acceded, in _our_ sense of the word _faith_, to the constitution of his country, from which there was hardly a dissentient voice among the industrious and the unambitious, among the peaceable and the wise, would he have eaten one dinner with less appetite, or have embroidered one petticoat with less taste? Would the saints along his chapel-walls have smiled upon him less graciously, or would thy tooth, holy Dominic, have left a less pleasurable impression on his lips? His most Christian Majesty demands _that Ferdinand the seventh may give his people those institutions which they can have from him only_! Yes, these are his expressions, Alpuente; these the doctrines, for the propagation of which our country is to be invaded with fire and sword; this is government, this is order, this is faith! Ferdinand _was_ at liberty to give us his institutions: he gave them: what were they? The inquisition in all its terrors, absolute and arbitrary sway, scourges and processions, monks and missionaries, and a tooth of St. Dominic to crown them all.... To support the throne that crushes us, and the altar that choaks us, march forward the warlike Louis and the _preux_ Chateaubriant, known among his friends to be as firm in belief as Hobbes, Talleyrand, or Spinoza; and behold them advancing, side by side, against the calm opponents of Roman bulls and French charts. Although his Majesty be brave as Maximin at a breakfast, he will find it easier to eat his sixty-four cutlets than to conquer Spain. I doubt whether the same historian shall have to commemorate both exploits.

‘_Alpuente._ In wars the least guilty are the sufferers. In these, as in everything, we should contract as much as possible the circle of human misery. The deluded and enslaved should be so far spared as is consistent with security: the most atrocious of murderers and incendiaries, the purveyors and hirers of them, should be removed at any expense or hazard. If we show little mercy to the robber who enters a house by force, and if less ought to be shown to him who should enter it in the season of distress and desolation, what portion of it ought to be extended towards those who assail every house in our country? How much of crime and wretchedness may often be averted, how many years of tranquillity may sometimes be ensured to the world _by one well-chosen example_! Is it not better than to witness the grief of the virtuous for the virtuous, and the extinction of those bright and lofty hopes, for which the best and wisest of every age contended? Where is the man, worthy of the name, who would be less affected at the lamentation of one mother for her son, slain in defending his country, than at _the extermination of some six or seven usurpers_, commanding or attempting its invasion? National safety legitimates every mean employed upon it. Criminals have been punished differently in different countries: but all enlightened, all honest, all civilised men, must agree _who_ are criminals. The Athenians were perhaps as well-informed and intelligent as the people on lake Ladoga: they knew nothing of the _knout_, I confess; and no family amongst them boasted a succession of _assassins_, in wives, sons, fathers, and husbands: but he who endangered or injured his country was condemned to the draught of hemlock! They could punish the offence in another manner: if any nation cannot, shall that nation therefore leave it unpunished? And shall the guiltiest of men enjoy impunity, from a consideration of modes and means? Justice is not to be neglected, because what is preferable is unattainable. A house-breaker is condemned to die, a city-breaker is celebrated by an inscription over the gate. The murder of thousands, soon perpetrated and past, is not the greatest mischief he does: it is followed by the baseness of millions, deepening for ages. Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too powerful, and provide that it be duly executed. It is just, and it is necessary, that those who pertinaciously insist on so unnatural a state of society, should suffer by the shock things make in recovering their equipoise.’ II. 269.

We have given this _tirade_, not with any view to comment on the sentiments it conveys, but to justify what we have said of the outrageous spirit that so frequently breaks out in the present work, and that might reasonably ‘condemn the author to the draught of hellebore.’ We believe the attempt to revive the exploded doctrine of tyrannicide is peculiar to the reformed Jacobins. We remember a long and well-timed article in the FRIEND, some years ago, on this subject; nor do the strong allusions to the same remedy, in a celebrated journal, form an exception to this remark, at a time when a renegado from the same school directed its attacks upon the Corsican hero. These modern monks and literary jesuits, who would fain set up their own fanatic notions against law and reason, and dictate equally to legitimate kings and revolutionary usurpers, find fault with Napoleon for having thrown his sword into the scale of opinion; and now, finding the want of it, sooner than be baulked of their fancy, would (as far as we can understand their meaning) substitute the dagger. We cannot applaud their expedients; nor sympathize with that ‘final hope’ which seems ‘flat despair.’ If these pragmatical persons could have every thing their own way—if they could confer power and take away the abuse of it—if they could put down tyrants with the sword, and give the law to conquerors with the pen—we should not despair of seeing some good result from this new theocracy. The worst we could fear would be from their fickleness, rashness, and inconsiderate thirst for novelty; but they would not, by their ill-timed servility and gratuitous phrensy, help to bring down the iron hand of power upon us, or enclose us in the dungeons of prejudice and superstition! As it is, they have contrived to throw open the flood-gates of despotism—‘to shut exceeds their power:’ they have got rid of one tyrant, to establish the principle in perpetuity, and to root out the very name of Freedom. Those of them who are sincere, who are not bribed to silence by places and pensions obtained by their momentary complaisance and seeming inconsistency, speak out, and are sorry for the part they have taken, now that it is too late. They strike ‘the marble table with their palm’—they call their country recreant and base—they invoke the shade of Leonidas—they apostrophize the spirit of Bolivar—they polish their style like a steel breastplate—they point their sentences like daggers against the bloated apathy of legitimacy—they publish satires on the constitution, and print libels on departed ministers in asterisks—they invent new modes of warfare, and recommend new modes of extermination against despots;—and, in return for all this, the Holy Allies laugh at them, their credulity, their rage, their helplessness, and disappointment. There was one man whom they did not laugh at, but whom they feared and hated; and they persuaded Mr. Landor and others that what they feared and hated above all other things, was out of love to Liberty and Humanity!

Mr. Landor has interspersed some pieces of poetry through these volumes. His muse still retains her _implicit_ and inextricable style. The author, some five-and-twenty years ago, published a poem under the title of Gebir, in Latin and English, and equally unintelligible in both, but of which we have heard two lines quoted by his admirers.

‘Pleas’d they remember their august abodes,
And murmur as the ocean murmurs there.’

This relates to the sound which sea-shells make if placed close to the ear, and is beautiful and mystic, like something composed in a dream. His tragedy of Count Julian we have not seen.

SHELLEY’S POSTHUMOUS POEMS

VOL. XL.] [_July 1824._

Mr. Shelley’s style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry—out of nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): But, in him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination—and was not sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We thank him—but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley’s mind was of ‘too fiery a quality’ to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true—it soared ‘beyond the visible diurnal sphere,’ to the strange, the improbable, and the impossible. He mistook the nature of the poet’s calling, which should be guided by involuntary, not by voluntary impulses. He shook off, as an heroic and praiseworthy act, the trammels of sense, custom, and sympathy, and became the creature of his own will. He was ‘all air,’ disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould. He ransacked his brain for incongruities, and believed in whatever was incredible. Almost all is effort, almost all is extravagant, almost all is quaint, incomprehensible, and abortive, from aiming to be more than it is. Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fireworks in the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor discriminate form. Yet Mr. Shelley, with all his faults, was a man of genius; and we lament that uncontrollable violence of temperament which gave it a forced and false direction. He has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and, in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most. If some casual and interesting idea touched his feelings or struck his fancy, he expressed it in pleasing and unaffected verse: but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system. The fumes of vanity rolled volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy tabernacle of his thought. The success of his writings is therefore in general in the inverse ratio of the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon, and outstripped his powers of execution.

Mr. Shelley was a remarkable man. His person was a type and shadow of his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light, and his spirit within him

——‘so divinely wrought,
That you might almost say his body thought.’

He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid’s fables. His form, graceful and slender, drooped like a flower in the breeze. But he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy! He mistook the nature of his own faculties and feelings—the lowly children of the valley, by which the skylark makes its bed, and the bee murmurs, for the proud cedar or the mountain-pine, in which the eagle builts its eyry, ‘and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.’—He wished to make of idle verse and idler prose the frame-work of the universe, and to bind all possible existence in the visionary chain of intellectual beauty—

‘More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in th’ air more lightly flee.’

Perhaps some lurking sense of his own deficiencies in the lofty walk which he attempted, irritated his impatience and his desires; and urged him on, with winged hopes, to atone for past failures by more arduous efforts, and more unavailing struggles.

With all his faults, Mr. Shelley was an honest man. His unbelief and his presumption were parts of a disease, which was not combined in him either with indifference to human happiness, or contempt for human infirmities. There was neither selfishness nor malice at the bottom of his illusions. He was sincere in all his professions; and he practised what he preached—to his own sufficient cost. He followed up the letter and the spirit of his theoretical principles in his own person, and was ready to share both the benefit and the penalty with others. He thought and acted logically, and was what he professed to be, a sincere lover of truth, of nature, and of human kind. To all the rage of paradox, he united an unaccountable candour and severity of reasoning: in spite of an aristocratic education, he retained in his manners the simplicity of a primitive apostle. An Epicurean in his sentiments, he lived with the frugality and abstemiousness of an ascetick. His fault was, that he had no deference for the opinions of others, too little sympathy with their feelings (which he thought he had a right to sacrifice, as well as his own, to a grand ethical experiment)—and trusted too implicitly to the light of his own mind, and to the warmth of his own impulses. He was indeed the most striking example we remember of the two extremes described by Lord Bacon as the great impediments to human improvement, the love of Novelty, and the love of Antiquity. ‘The first of these (impediments) is an extreme affection of two extremities, the one Antiquity, the other Novelty; wherein it seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while Antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and Novelty cannot be content to add, but it must deface. Surely the advice of the Prophet is the true direction in this matter: _Stand upon the old ways, and see which is the right and good way, and walk therein_. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression. And to speak truly, _Antiquitas seculi Juventus mundi_. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we count ancient, _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation backwards from ourselves.’ (ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, Book I. p. 46.)—Such is the text: and Mr. Shelley’s writings are a splendid commentary on one half of it. Considered in this point of view, his career may not be uninstructive even to those whom it most offended; and might be held up as a beacon and warning no less to the bigot than the sciolist. We wish to speak of the errors of a man of genius with tenderness. His nature was kind, and his sentiments noble; but in him the rage of free inquiry and private judgment amounted to a species of madness. Whatever was new, untried, unheard of, unauthorized, exerted a kind of fascination over his mind. The examples of the world, the opinion of others, instead of acting as a check upon him, served but to impel him forward with double velocity in his wild and hazardous career. Spurning the world of realities, he rushed into the world of nonentities and contingencies, like air into a _vacuum_. If a thing was old and established, this was with him a certain proof of its having no solid foundation to rest upon: if it was new, it was good and right. Every paradox was to him a self-evident truth; every prejudice an undoubted absurdity. The weight of authority, the sanction of ages, the common consent of mankind, were vouchers only for ignorance, error, and imposture. Whatever shocked the feelings of others, conciliated his regard; whatever was light, extravagant, and vain, was to him a proportionable relief from the dulness and stupidity of established opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet, jostle,—and confirm one another. The infirmities of age are a foil to the presumption of youth; and ‘there the antics sit,’ mocking one another—the ape Sophistry pointing with reckless scorn at ‘palsied eld,’ and the bed-rid hag. Legitimacy, rattling her chains, counting her beads, dipping her hands in blood, and blessing herself from all change and from every appeal to common sense and reason! Opinion thus alternates in a round of contradictions: the impatience or obstinacy of the human mind takes part with, and flies off to one or other of the two extremes ‘of affection’ and leaves a horrid gap, a blank sense and feeling in the middle, which seems never likely to be filled up, without a total change in our mode of proceeding. The martello-towers with which we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and oppression should not be castles in the air, or clouds in the verge of the horizon, but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have arisen out of their continuance. The principles of sound morality, liberty and humanity, are not to be found only in a few recent writers, who have discovered the secret of the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers, but are truths as old as the creation. To be convinced of the existence of wrong, we should read history rather than poetry: the levers with which we must work out our regeneration are not the cobwebs of the brain, but the warm, palpitating fibres of the human heart. It is the collision of passions and interests, the petulance of party-spirit, and the perversities of self-will and self-opinion that have been the great obstacles to social improvement—not stupidity or ignorance; and the caricaturing one side of the question and shocking the most pardonable prejudices on the other, is not the way to allay heats or produce unanimity. By flying to the extremes of scepticism, we make others shrink back, and shut themselves up in the strongholds of bigotry and superstition—by mixing up doubtful or offensive matters with salutary and demonstrable truths, we bring the whole into question, fly-blow the cause, risk the principle, and give a handle and a pretext to the enemy to treat all philosophy and all reform as a compost of crude, chaotic, and monstrous absurdities. We thus arm the virtues as well as the vices of the community against us; we trifle with their understandings, and exasperate their self-love; we give to superstition and injustice all their old security and sanctity, as if they were the only alternatives of impiety and profligacy, and league the natural with the selfish prejudices of mankind in hostile array against us. To this consummation, it must be confessed that too many of Mr. Shelley’s productions pointedly tend. He makes no account of the opinions of others, or the consequences of any of his own; but proceeds—tasking his reason to the utmost to account for every thing, and discarding every thing as mystery and error for which he cannot account by an effort of mere intelligence—measuring man, providence, nature, and even his own heart, by the limits of the understanding—now hallowing high mysteries, now desecrating pure sentiments, according as they fall in with or exceeded those limits; and exalting and purifying, with Promethean heat, whatever he does not confound and debase.

Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and ‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! To this band of immortals a third has since been added!—a mightier genius, a haughtier spirit, whose stubborn impatience and Achilles-like pride only Death could quell. Greece, Italy, the world, have lost their poet-hero; and his death has spread a wider gloom, and been recorded with a deeper awe, than has waited on the obsequies of any of the many great who have died in our remembrance. Even detraction has been silent at his tomb; and the more generous of his enemies have fallen into the rank of his mourners. But he set like the sun in his glory; and his orb was greatest and brightest at the last; for his memory is now consecrated no less by freedom than genius. He probably fell a martyr to his zeal against tyrants. He attached himself to the cause of Greece, and dying, clung to it with a convulsive grasp, and has thus gained a niche in her history; for whatever _she_ claims as hers is immortal, even in decay, as the marble sculptures on the columns of her fallen temples!

The volume before us is introduced by an imperfect but touching Preface by Mrs. Shelley, and consists almost wholly of original pieces, with the exception of _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_, which was out of print; and the admirable Translation of the _May-day Night_, from Goethe’s Faustus.

_Julian and Maddalo_ (the first Poem in the collection) is a Conversation or Tale, full of that thoughtful and romantic humanity, but rendered perplexing and unattractive by that veil of shadowy or of glittering obscurity, which distinguished Mr. Shelley’s writings. The depth and tenderness of his feelings seems often to have interfered with the expression of them, as the sight becomes blind with tears. A dull, waterish vapour, clouds the aspect of his philosophical poetry, like that mysterious gloom which he has himself described as hanging over the Medusa’s Head of Leonardo da Vinci. The metre of this poem, too, will not be pleasing to every body. It is in the antique taste of the rhyming parts of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson—blank verse in its freedom and unbroken flow, falling into rhymes that appear altogether accidental—very colloquial in the diction—and sometimes sufficiently prosaic. But it is easier showing than describing it. We give the introductory passage.

‘I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this: an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with a remember’d friend I love
To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening North;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.
So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,
Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,
But flew from brain to brain,—such glee was ours,
Charged with light memories of remembered hours,
None slow enough for sadness: till we came
Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.’ &c.
‘Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight
O’er the horizon of the mountains—Oh!
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!
Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers
Of cities they encircle!—It was ours
To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,
Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men
Were waiting for us with the gondola.
As those who pause on some delightful way,
Tho’ bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood,
Looking upon the evening and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky; the hoar
And aery Alps, towards the North, appeared,
Thro’ mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills—they were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolv’d into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”
Said my companion, “I will show you soon
A better station.” So, o’er the lagune
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven.
I was about to speak, when—“We are even
Now at the point I meant”—said Maddalo,
And bade the gondolieri cease to row.
“Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well
If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.”
I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island, such an one
As age to age might add, for uses vile—
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief. “What you behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,”—
Said Maddalo, “and even at this hour,
Those who may cross the water hear that bell,
Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,
To vespers,” &c.

‘The broad star
Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill;
And the black bell became invisible;
And the red tower looked grey; and all between,
The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen
Huddled in gloom. Into the purple sea
The orange hues of heaven sunk silently.
We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola
Conveyed me to my lodging by the way.’

The march of these lines is, it must be confessed, slow, solemn, sad: there is a sluggishness of feeling, a dearth of imagery, an unpleasant glare of lurid light. It appears to us, that in some poets, as well as in some painters, the organ of colour (to speak in the language of the adepts) predominates over that of form; and Mr. Shelley is of the number. We have everywhere a profusion of dazzling hues, of glancing splendours, of floating shadows, but the objects on which they fall are bare, indistinct, and wild. There is something in the preceding extract that reminds us of the arid style and matter of Crabbe’s versification, or that apes the labour and throes of parturition of Wordsworth’s blank verse. It is the preface to a story of Love and Madness—of mental anguish and philosophic remedies—not very intelligibly told, and left with most of its mysteries unexplained, in the true spirit of the modern metaphysical style—in which we suspect there is a due mixture of affectation and meagreness of invention.

This poem is, however, in Mr. Shelley’s best and _least mannered_ manner. If it has less brilliancy, it has less extravagance and confusion. It is in his stanza-poetry, that his Muse chiefly runs riot, and baffles all pursuit of common comprehension or critical acumen. The _Witch of Atlas_, the _Triumph of Life_, and _Marianne’s Dream_, are rhapsodies or allegories of this description; full of fancy and of fire, with glowing allusions and wild machinery, but which it is difficult to read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions, and of which, after reading them through, it is impossible, in most instances, to guess the drift or the moral. They abound in horrible imaginings, like records of a ghastly dream;—life, death, genius, beauty, victory, earth, air, ocean, the trophies of the past, the shadows of the world to come, are huddled together in a strange and hurried dance of words, and all that appears clear, is the passion and paroxysm of thought of the poet’s spirit. The poem entitled the _Triumph of Life_, is in fact a new and terrific _Dance of Death_; but it is thus Mr. Shelley transposes the appellations of the commonest things, and subsists only in the violence of contrast. How little this poem is deserving of its title, how worthy it is of its author, what an example of the waste of power, and of genius ‘made as flax,’ and devoured by its own elementary ardours, let the reader judge from the concluding stanzas.

... ‘The grove
Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,
The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air
Was peopled with dim forms; as when there hovers

A flock of vampire-bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian vale;—thus were

Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling
Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,
Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

Were lost in the white day; others like elves
Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes
Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

And others sate chattering shrill like restless apes
On vulgar hands, * * * * *
Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

Of kingly mantles; some across the tire
Of pontiffs rode, like demons; others played
Under the crown which girded with empire

A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made
Their nests in it. The old anatomies
Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes
To reassume the delegated power,
Array’d in which those worms did monarchize,

Who make this earth their charnel. Others more
Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist
Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist
On evening marshes, thronged about the brow
Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist;—

And others, like discoloured flakes of snow,
On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,
Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

Which they extinguished * * * * *

The marble brow of youth was cleft
With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone,
Desire, even like a lioness bereft

Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one
Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

In autumn evening from a poplar tree.
Each like himself, and like each other were
At first; but some, distorted, seemed to be

Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air;
And of this stuff the car’s creative ray
Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,

As the sun shapes the clouds, &c.’

Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying soul. We cannot help preferring _The Witch of Atlas_ to _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_; for, though the purport of each is equally perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental voyage through the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other. In the ‘Witch,’ he has indulged his fancy more than his melancholy, and wantoned in the felicity of embryo and crude conceits even to excess.

‘And there lay Visions, swift, and sweet, and quaint,
Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;
Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint
With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;

‘And odours in a kind of aviary
Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,
Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy
Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept;
As bats at the wired window of a dairy,
They beat their vans; and each was an adept,
When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds,
To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.’ p. 34.

We give the description of the progress of the ‘Witch’s’ boat as a slight specimen of what we have said of Mr. Shelley’s involved style and imagery.

‘And down the streams which clove those mountains vast,
Around their inland islets, and amid
The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast
Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid
In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past:
By many a star-surrounded pyramid
Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky,
And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

· · · · ·

‘And down the earth-quaking cataracts which shiver
Their snow-like waters into golden air,
Or under chasms unfathomable ever
Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear
A subterranean portal for the river,
It fled—the circling _sunbows_ did upbear
Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray,
Lighting it far upon its lampless way.’

This we conceive to be the very height of wilful extravagance and mysticism. Indeed it is curious to remark every where the proneness to the marvellous and supernatural, in one who so resolutely set his face against every received mystery, and all traditional faith. Mr. Shelley must have possessed, in spite of all his obnoxious and indiscreet scepticism, a large share of credulity and wondering curiosity in his composition, which he reserved from common use, and bestowed upon his own inventions and picturesque caricatures. To every other species of imposture or disguise he was inexorable; and indeed it is only his antipathy to established creeds and legitimate crowns that ever tears the veil from his _ideal_ idolatries, and renders him clear and explicit. Indignation makes him pointed and intelligible enough, and breathes into his verse a spirit very different from his own boasted spirit of Love.

The _Letter to a Friend in London_ shows the author in a pleasing and familiar, but somewhat prosaic light; and his _Prince Athanase, a Fragment_, is, we suspect, intended as a portrait of the writer. It is amiable, thoughtful, and not much overcharged. We had designed to give an extract, but from the apparently personal and doubtful interest attached to it, perhaps it had better be read altogether, or not at all. We rather choose to quote a part of the _Ode to Naples_, during her brief revolution,—in which immediate and strong local feelings have at once raised and pointed Mr. Shelley’s style, and made of light-winged “toys of feathered cupid,” the flaming ministers of Wrath and Justice.

· · · · ·

‘Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!
Elysian City which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

· · · · ·

‘What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee! thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer.
A new Acteon’s error
Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds!
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dead risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk,
Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;
If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great—All hail!

· · · · ·

‘Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Æean[18]
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desart streets of Venice, laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The vipers[19] palsying venom, lifts her heel
To braise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

‘Florence! beneath the sun,
Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation;
From eyes of quenchless hope
Rome tears the priestly cope,
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration
An athlete stript to run
From a remoter station
For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,
So now may Fraud and Wrong!—O hail!

‘Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the everliving Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes
Of crags and thunder-clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden, wide
With iron light is dyed!
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions,
Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,—down the aërial regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust
On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—
They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary
With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

‘Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;
Who spreadest heaven around it,
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it:
Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor,
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison
From the Earth’s bosom chill;
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand
Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!
Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!
Bid thy bright heaven above,
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine!
Or with thine harmonising ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—
Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
And frowns and fears from Thee
Would not more swiftly flee
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, O let be
This city of thy worship ever free!’

This Ode for Liberty, though somewhat turbid and overloaded in the diction, we regard as a fair specimen of Mr. Shelley’s highest powers—whose eager animation wanted only a greater sternness and solidity to be sublime. The poem is dated _September 1820_. Such were then the author’s aspirations. He lived to see the result,—and yet Earth does not roll its billows over the heads of its oppressors! The reader may like to contrast with this the milder strain of the following stanzas, addressed to the same city in a softer and more desponding mood.

‘The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent light
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

‘I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

‘Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.