and disapproval; and he withdrew to France and the lake of Geneva. Very soon Byron, another outcast from society, arrived there; and the two poets spent much time together, exploring the mountains, discussing poetry, and boating on the lake. Shelley's opinion of Byron was far from flattering: he described him as "an exceedingly interesting person," and yet, unfortunately, a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds." He reserved his admiration for Byron's poetry and his powers of swimming. Of Shelley himself, his boatman related that 66 66 "He was in the habit of lying down in the bottom of the vessel, and gazing at heaven, where he would never enter." To this period of his life belong the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc," poems far beyond anything he had yet achieved, both in their inspiration and melody. It was not long before the exiles were again in England, resolving to find some settled home there; but before they could succeed, there occurred two most tragical deaths by suicide, which served to revive and intensify all the opprobrium under which Shelley already suffered. The first was the suicide of Godwin's stepdaughter, Fanny, a gentle and unhappy girl; the second was that of Harriet, Shelley's wife, who, after his desertion and the unkindness of her own family, had fallen into utter degradation, and finally in despair or remorse had thrown herself into the Serpentine. Shelley himself was obliged to see and recognise his wife's body, and to know that his own two children were to be placed under the care of strangers, as the law considered him unfit to be their guardian. This public disgrace and private sorrow left a mark on him which he bore till his death. He never acknowledged himself to blame, but it must be remembered that he could not do so without including another person in the disgrace-namely, Mary Godwin, who considered that she had done nothing to be ashamed of, as she had merely acted on the principles inculcated by her revered parent, the author of Political Justice.' As soon as possible after Harriet's death, Shelley married Mary Godwin, and they again left England for Italy with their two children, one of whom died an infant very soon afterwards, and the other at the age of three died in Rome. It was a changed Shelley who lived, and learned, and wrote poetry in Italy for the few years that remained to him of life. His youth had been spent in active political agitation, in the absorption of many and contradictory philosophical systems, and in eloquent denunciation of men and things as they are. His poetical works had been few and fitful, and not considered very seriously by himself any more than by others, except, of course, mer at the Bagni di Lucca, when scandal lent its never-fail- "in watching the changes of ing interest, as to the youthful Oxford pamphlet, so afterwards to 'Queen Mab.' It was in the strife of politics that he had taken himself seriously; and now he definitely abandoned politics, and recognised that life is too wide and complicated a thing to be contained within any rigid philosophical system. His own sorrowful experience had taught him this. He no longer attacked Christianity, or maintained that "Tous les rois et tous les prêtres Sont des fripons et des traîtres." Rather slowly he came to the "I take great delight," he wrote, while staying one sum the atmosphere here, and the growth of the thunder-showers with which the noon is often overshadowed, and which break and fade away towards evening into flocks of delicate clouds. Our fire-flies are fading away fast; but there is the planet Jupiter, who rises majestically on the right in the forestcovered mountains to the south, and the pale summer lightning, which is spread out every night, at intervals, over the sky. No doubt Providence has contrived these things, that, when the fire-flies go out, the lowflying owl may see her way home." Shelley's letters, written from Italy to his few friends in England, are among the best letters that were ever penned. For some reason Mrs Campbell has included but very few paragraphs from them in her book, which seems a great pity. Matthew Arnold, whose depreciation of Shelley's poetry is one of the puzzles of criticism, considered that his letters, for their exquisite prose, would survive the fame of his poems. One letter was written to his friend Peacock, and gives an account of his first visit to Pompeii. "This scene was what the Greeks beheld [Pompeii, you know, was a Greek city]. They lived in harmony with nature; and the interstices of their incomparable columns were portals, as it were, to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was was Athens... I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and, above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theatres were all open to the mountains and the sky. Their columns, the ideal types of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind; the odour and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly hupaithric; and the flying clouds, the stars, or the deep sky, were seen above. Oh, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman Conquest of the world, but for the Christian religion which put the finishing stroke on the ancient system, but for those changes that conducted Athens to its ruin-to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!" mortals had its usual effect of deepening and revealing to him the mystery and the meaning of life. Dante, who might have seemed, superficially speaking, the least "suited" to his type of mind, received nevertheless his fervent homage, and with deep insight he wrote of him "His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought, and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially." Nothing has ever been said of Dante more adequate than this, or more original. Perhaps only a poet could have said it; yet the humblest lover of the 'Divina Commedia ' must recognise instantly the truth in that image of the words that burn with their own light, spirit." "instinct with Shelley's study of the Greek poets was probably the second strongest influence among all those which worked upon him in Italy. He felt deeply the Shelley now became enthu- harmony, the perfect proporsiastic in the study of the tion, the inevitability of the Greek poets, which Scott so Greek drama. He was himself many years before had re- no dramatist. This, in spite commended to him in his youth. of "The Cenci," and in spite The Greek poets, with Shakes- of the form of "Prometheus peare, Dante, and Calderon, Unbound," every one will conmade his chief reading. His cede; that he wrote some of intellect was full-grown, and the most perfect lyrics, and this communion with the im- three at least of the most beautiful odes in our language, no one will deny. There has been for long a popular charge brought against Shelley's poetry of being vague, profitless, unsubstantial. "Shelley's creed," Shelley's creed," said one critic, "means only a vague longing." Another complains that "Shelley teaches us nothing and leads us nowhere, but cries and flies round us like a sea-bird." Matthew Arnold's verdict is only too well known, that Shelley is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." We hold that the charge is "not proven." "Vague" is not the right word for that floating melody that is hardly caught by a dull ear. "Profitless" can never be said of a poem so empty of didactic intention and yet so thrilling with beauty as the "Hymn of Pan." "Unsubstantial "is an epithet which , some would willingly apply to all those noble conceptions that are closest to reality, and "Give grace and truth to life's unquiet dream." Mrs Campbell is far nearer the root of the matter when she says that "The infinite variety in which he represents the world, man and the elements, sorrow and joy, life and death, chance and change, has underlying it an all-pervading unity, as of a single heart animating the whole. Man is tameless and swift like the wind, and fades like the clouds; the clouds and winds rejoice and sorrow and triumph like men; time like a sea beats on the human heart; life is death, and death is life; the one remains, the many change and pass. The song of the skylark is like moonlight, and the light of a star as the scent of a jonquil; music falls upon the heart like dew upon a violet; 'music and moonlight and feeling are one.' All things are blent and kindred. All"Interpenetrated lie, By the glory of the sky, Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of all, Which from Heaven like dew doth fall." It is with no wish to derogate from Shelley's high rank as poet that we aver he is not a poet for all, his appeal is not universal. But he is the poet of youth, and he is also the poets' poet. The heart of youth thrills to that wonderful lyrical passion of his, to his soaring music, to his worship of the unknown. The poets also love Shelley, for theirs is the eternal youth of heart, and before the rush and the daring flight as of an escaped spirit, they stand and gaze in a sweet ecstasy of despair. Robert Browning was not easily overawed, nor yet Giosué Carducci, the greatest Italian of the Victorian age, and both these poets named Shelley with bated breath. It was not only the attraction of an opposite; undoubtedly they felt in him some divine essence of perfection by themselves unattainable. Possibly it was because Shelley is the most unearthly of poets, while Browning and Carducci worked in a very different medium; their concern was with the human, the dramatic, and the concrete. Shelley's concern was less for human beings than for humanity. "The most important of his beliefs, the motive power of his life and work, was his immense faith in man. With Plato, Shelley had far more in common than with any other ... and two of the ideas which recur most frequently in his prose and poetry are essentially Platonism-though they were probably not derived from Plato, whom Shelley did not study deeply till long after his early speculative days. These were the belief that life, as man knows it, is only an unreal show or a dream; and the conception of some allpervading Spirit of Reality dwelling behind this painted veil of life. But the likeness between Shelley and Plato was deeper than this; there is a profound resemblance in their whole outlook. Shelley is a Plato spoiled, or Plato réussi, according as one values most philosophy or poetry. Both were inspired almost entirely by what Jowett calls, the passion of the idea'; both seemed to see life not in its transient and imperfect form so much as in its eternal relation to the future and the ideal, and to value it for the unrealised (but not unrealisable) more than for the actual. Both not only taught but vividly felt that between the shadowlife on earth and the immortal world of ideas there was only a mist of ignorance or error which any man might dispel at any time-if he had sufficient wisdom, according to Plato, and according to Shelley, sufficient love. For both the possible was the foundation of the actual, and the abstract perfection of the human character a reflexion from the actual perfection of the divine." It is easily seen that Shelley had moved a long way ahead of the superficial infidelity of his youth. He had never been a Materialist; and once, at least, in his later years he spoke to a friend as if he were a believer in Christianity. His words were "Assent to the supernatural part of it is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines of Christianity I am a more decided disciple than many of its most ostentatious professors." This was strictly true. We have many testimonies to Shelley's character from the friends who knew him in Italy, and spite of Mrs Campbell's caustic comments on the characters of these friends themselves-or rather perhaps on account of them-we are the more impressed by their united witness to Shelley's gentleness and generosity, his candour and perfect courtesy, the unselfishness of his sympathy, and his readiness to help all who needed his help, quite irrespective of their deserving. These things are the essence |