Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Byron lent the Sh.e.l.leys his villa of the Cappuccini near Este, where they spent some weeks in the autumn. Here "Prometheus Unbound" was begun, and the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills" were composed; and here Clara became so ill that her parents thought it necessary to rush for medical a.s.sistance to Venice. They had forgotten their pa.s.sport; but Sh.e.l.ley"s irresistible energy overcame all difficulties, and they entered Venice--only in time, however, for the child to die.
Nearly the whole of the winter was spent in Naples, where Sh.e.l.ley suffered from depression of more than ordinary depth. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley attributed this gloom to the state of his health, but Medwin tells a strange story, which, if it is not wholly a romance, may better account for the poet"s melancholy. He says that so far back as the year 1816, on the night before his departure from London, "a married lady, young, handsome, and of n.o.ble connexions," came to him, avowed the pa.s.sionate love she had conceived for him, and proposed that they should fly together. (Medwin"s Life of Sh.e.l.ley, volume 1 324. His date, 1814, appears from the context to be a misprint.) He explained to her that his hand and heart had both been given irrevocably to another, and, after the expression of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, they parted. She followed him, however, from place to place; and without intruding herself upon his notice, found some consolation in remaining near him. Now she arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of Sh.e.l.ley"s life was a wide one, and included more destinies than his own.
G.o.dwin, as we have reason to believe, attributed the suicide of f.a.n.n.y Imlay to her hopeless love for Sh.e.l.ley; and the tale of Harriet has already been told. Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in Medwin"s story, especially when we remember what Hogg half-humorously tells us about Sh.e.l.ley"s attraction for women in London. At any rate, the excessive wretchedness of the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be accounted for by the "constant and poignant physical sufferings" of which Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley speaks, since these were habitual with him. She was herself, moreover under the impression that he was concealing something from her, and we know from her own words in another place that his "fear to wound the feelings of others" often impelled him to keep his deepest sorrows to himself. (Note on the Revolt of Islam.)
All this while his health was steadily improving. The menace of consumption was removed; and though he suffered from severe attacks of pain in the side, the cause of this persistent malady does not seem to have been ascertained. At Naples he was under treatment for disease of the liver. Afterwards, his symptoms were ascribed to nephritis, and it is certain that his greater or less freedom from uneasiness varied with the quality of the water he drank. He was, for instance, forced to eschew the drinking water of Ravenna, because it aggravated his symptoms; while Florence, for a similar reason, proved an unsuitable residence. The final settlement of the Sh.e.l.leys at Pisa seems to have been determined by the fact that the water of that place agreed with him. That the spasms which from time to time attacked him were extremely serious, is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived with him at this period, and by his own letters. Some relief was obtained by mesmerism, a remedy suggested by Medwin; but the obstinacy of the torment preyed upon his spirits to such an extent, that even during the last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. It may be added that mental application increased the mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt that the composition of "The Cenci" had cost him a fresh seizure. Yet though his sufferings were indubitably real, the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic disease; and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when he attributed Sh.e.l.ley"s spasms to insufficient and irregular diet, and to a continual over-taxing of his nervous system.
Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley states that the change from England to Italy was in all respects beneficial to her husband. She was inclined to refer the depression from which he occasionally suffered, to his solitary habits; and there are several pa.s.sages in his own letters which connect his melancholy with solitude. It is obvious that when he found himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amus.e.m.e.nts of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven. Byron, who had some right to express a judgment in such a matter, described him as the most companionable man under the age of thirty he had ever met with. Sh.e.l.ley rode and practised pistol-shooting with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes, and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.
All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution, remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordinary kind he hated. The voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with Sh.e.l.ley"s almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on his mistaking his wife"s mention of the Aziola, a little owl common enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some disagreement between him and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, and kept him further apart from Byron than he might otherwise have been. In a valuable letter recently published by Mr. Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to Trelawny, he said:--"She can"t bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead."
In the year 1818-19 the Sh.e.l.leys had no friends at all in Italy, except Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs.
Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and G.o.dwin. She was a woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less enthusiastic than Sh.e.l.ley liked, quite capable of appreciating the inestimable privilege of his acquaintance. Her husband, to use a now almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his wife"s enlightened opinions, and remained staunch through good and ill report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew absolutely no one. Sh.e.l.ley"s time was therefore pa.s.sed in study and composition. In the previous summer he had translated the "Symposium" of Plato, and begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a fragment. Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Ta.s.so struck him as cold and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely characteristic. "How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations. His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine. He often expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very beautiful kind. He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one little remark, or rather maxim of his, which might do some good to the common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,--"Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnouva, come fa la luna"?" Dante and Petrarch remained the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of the "Inferno" seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of Italian poems. Of Petrarch"s "tender and solemn enthusiasm," he speaks with the sympathy of one who understood the inner mysteries of idealizing love.
It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that Sh.e.l.ley, notwithstanding is profound study of style and his exquisite perception of beauty in form and rhythm, required more than merely artistic excellences in poetry. He judged poems by their content and spirit; and while he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic manner, he held that art must be moralized in order to be truly great. The distinction he drew between Theocritus and the earlier Greek singers in the "Defence of Poetry", his severe strictures on "The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen" in a letter to Mary (August 20, 1818) and his phrase about Ariosto, "who is entertaining and graceful, and SOMETIMES a poet,"
ill.u.s.trate the application of critical canons wholly at variance with the "art for art" doctrine.
While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek. Plato was often in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable companions. How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be gathered from the following extract:--"I congratulate you on your conquest of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer there truly begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole b.l.o.o.d.y tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Autos," he writes to Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820. "Faust", too, was a favourite. "I have been reading over and over again "Faust", and always with sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained." The profound impression made upon him by Margaret"s story is expressed in two letters about Retzsch"s ill.u.s.trations:--"The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured."
The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German were Sh.e.l.ley"s translations from Homer and Euripides, from Dante, from Calderon"s "Magico Prodigioso", and from "Faust", translations which have never been surpa.s.sed for beauty of form and complete transfusion of the spirit of one literature into the language of another. On translation, however, he set but little store, a.s.serting that he only undertook it when he "could do absolutely nothing else," and writing earnestly to dissuade Leigh Hunt from devoting time which might be better spent, to work of subordinate importance. (Letter from Florence, November 1819.) The following version of a Greek epigram on Plato"s spirit will ill.u.s.trate his own method of translation:--
Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?
To what sublime and star-y-paven home Floatest thou?
I am the image of swift Plato"s spirit, Ascending heaven:--Athens does inherit His corpse below.
Some time in the year 1820-21, he composed the "Defence of Poetry", stimulated to this undertaking by his friend Peac.o.c.k"s article on poetry, published in the Literary Miscellany. (See Letter to Ollier, January 20, 1820, Sh.e.l.ley Memorials, page 135.) This essay not only sets forth his theory of his own art, but it also contains some of his finest prose writing, of which the following pa.s.sage, valuable alike for matter and style, may be cited as a specimen:--
"The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the acc.u.mulation of the materials of external life exceed the quant.i.ty of the power of a.s.similating them to the internal laws of human nature.
The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.
"Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circ.u.mference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit--what were our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to a.s.sert that the finest pa.s.sages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the s.p.a.ces between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the "Paradise Lost" as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother"s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes a.s.sociated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, partic.i.p.ating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced princ.i.p.ally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a pa.s.sion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man."
In the midst of these aesthetic studies, and while producing his own greatest works, Sh.e.l.ley was not satisfied that his genius ought to be devoted to poetry. "I consider poetry," he wrote to Peac.o.c.k, January 26th, 1819, "very subordinate to moral and political science, and if I were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter; for I can conceive a great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, and harmonizing the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled. Far from me is such an attempt, and I shall be content, by exercising my fancy, to amuse myself, and perhaps some others, and cast what weight I can into the scale of that balance which the Giant of Arthegall holds." Whether he was right in the conviction that his genius was no less fitted for metaphysical speculation or for political science than for poetry, is a question that admits of much debate. (See Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley"s note on the Revolt of Islam, and the whole Preface to the Prose Works.) We have nothing but fragments whereby to form a definite opinion--the unfinished "Defence of Poetry", the unfinished "Essay on a Future State", the unfinished "Essay on Christianity", the unfinished "Essay on the Punishment of Death", and the scattered "Speculations on Metaphysics".
None of these compositions justify the belief so confidently expressed by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley in her Preface to the prose works, that "had not Sh.e.l.ley deserted metaphysics for poetry in his youth, and had he not been lost to us early, so that all his vaster projects were wrecked with him in the waves, he would have presented the world with a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, and unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of these writers." Their incompleteness rather tends to confirm what she proceeds to state, that the strain of philosophical composition was too great for his susceptible nerves; while her further observation that "thought kindled imagination and awoke sensation, and rendered him dizzy from too great keenness of emotion," seems to indicate that his nature was primarily that of a poet deeply tinctured with philosophical speculation, rather than that of a metaphysician warmed at intervals to an imaginative fervour. Another of her remarks confirms us in this opinion. "He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry." (Note on Prometheus.) This is the position of the poet rather than the a.n.a.lyst; and on the whole, we are probably justified in concluding with Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, that he followed a true instinct when he dedicated himself to poetry, and trained his powers in that direction. (Note on Revolt of Islam.) To dogmatize upon the topic would be worse than foolish. There was something incalculable, incommensurable, and daemonic in Sh.e.l.ley"s genius; and what he might have achieved, had his life been spared and had his health progressively improved, it is of course impossible to say.
In the spring of 1819 the Sh.e.l.leys settled in Rome, where the poet proceeded with the composition of "Prometheus Unbound". He used to write among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled of all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of flowers and shrubs described in his incomparable letter of March the 23rd to Peac.o.c.k. Rome, however, was not destined to retain them long. On the 7th of June they lost their son William after a short illness. Sh.e.l.ley loved this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours without taking rest. He was now practically childless; and his grief found expression in many of his poems, especially in the fragment headed "Roma, Roma, Roma! non e piu com" era prima." William was buried in the Protestant cemetery, of which Sh.e.l.ley had written a description to Peac.o.c.k in the previous December. "The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright gra.s.s, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion."
Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they established themselves at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. Here Sh.e.l.ley began and finished "The Cenci" at the instance of his wife, who rightly thought that he undervalued his own powers as a dramatic poet. The supposed portrait of Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affected his imagination, and he fancied that her story would form the fitting subject for a tragedy. It is fortunate for English literature that the real facts of that domestic drama, as recently published by Signor Bertolotti, were then involved in a tissue of romance and legend. During this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family. Mrs. Gisborne"s son by a previous marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer, and Sh.e.l.ley conceived a project of helping him build a steamer which should ply between Leghorn and Ma.r.s.eilles. He was to supply the funds, and the pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne family. The scheme eventually fell through, though Sh.e.l.ley spent a good deal of money upon it; and its only importance is the additional light it throws upon his public and private benevolence. From Leghorn the Sh.e.l.leys removed in the autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th of November, the present Sir Percy Florence Sh.e.l.ley was born. Here Sh.e.l.ley wrote the last act of "Prometheus Unbound", which, though the finest portion of that unique drama, seems to have been an afterthought. In the Cascine outside Florence he also composed the "Ode to the West Wind", the most symmetrically perfect as well as the most impa.s.sioned of his minor lyrics. He spent much time in the galleries, made notes upon the princ.i.p.al antique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study.
The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the month of January, 1820, they took up their abode at Pisa.
1819 was the most important year in Sh.e.l.ley"s life, so far as literary production is concerned. Besides "The Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound", of which it yet remains to speak, this year saw the production of several political and satirical poems--the "Masque of Anarchy", suggested by the news of the Peterloo ma.s.sacre, being by far the most important. Sh.e.l.ley attempted the composition of short popular songs which should stir the English people to a sense of what he felt to be their degradation. But he lacked the directness which alone could make such verses forcible, and the pa.s.sionate apostrophe to the Men of England in his "Masque of Anarchy" marks the highest point of his achievement in this style:--
Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty mother, Hopes of her, and one another!
Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fall"n on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
"Peter Bell the Third", written in this year, and "Swellfoot the Tyrant", composed in the following autumn, are remarkable as showing with what keen interest Sh.e.l.ley watched public affairs in England from his exile home; but, for my own part, I cannot agree with those critics who esteem their humour at a high rate. The political poems may profitably be compared with his contemporary correspondence; with the letters, for instance, to Leigh Hunt, November 23rd, 1819; and to Mr.
John Gisborne, April 10th, 1822; and with an undated fragment published by Mr. Garnett in the "Relics of Sh.e.l.ley", page 84. No student of English political history before the Reform Bill can regard his apprehensions of a great catastrophe as ill-founded. His insight into the real danger to the nation was as penetrating as his suggestion of a remedy was moderate. Those who are accustomed to think of the poet as a visionary enthusiast, will rub their eyes when they read the sober lines in which he warns his friend to be cautious about the security offered by the English Funds. Another letter, dated Lerici, June 29, 1822, ill.u.s.trates the same practical temper of mind, the same logical application of political principles to questions of public economy.
That "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci" should have been composed in one and the same year must be reckoned among the greatest wonders of literature, not only because of their sublime greatness, but also because of their essential difference. Aeschylus, it is well known, had written a sequel to his "Prometheus Bound", in which he showed the final reconciliation between Zeus, the oppressor, and Prometheus, the champion, of humanity. What that reconciliation was, we do not know, because the play is lost, and the fragments are too brief for supporting any probable hypothesis. But Sh.e.l.ley repudiated the notion of compromise. He could not conceive of the t.i.tan "unsaying his high language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary."
He therefore, approached the theme of liberation from a wholly different point of view. Prometheus in his drama is the human vindicator of love, justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prometheus is the mind of man idealized, the spirit of our race, as Sh.e.l.ley thought it made to be.
Jove is the incarnation of all that thwarts its free development. Thus counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental ant.i.theses of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate. They give the form of personality to Sh.e.l.ley"s Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already expressed in the first canto of "Laon and Cythna"; but, instead of being represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry. Prometheus resists Jove to the uttermost, endures all torments, physical and moral, that the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives; Jove disappears; the burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes in the emanc.i.p.ation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain, but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia. Asia, withdrawn from sight during the first act, but spoken of as waiting in her exile for the fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit. She is the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean. Like Aphrodite, she rises in the Aegean near the land called by her name; and in the time of tribulation she dwells in a far Indian vale. She is the Idea of Beauty incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor"s vision, the breathing image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part. At the moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot see her, only feels her influence. The essential thought of Sh.e.l.ley"s creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made real by a spirit, which he sometimes called the spirit of Nature, but which is always conceived as more than Life, as that which gives its actuality to Life, and lastly as Love and Beauty. To adore this spirit, to clasp it with affection, and to blend with it, is, he thought the true object of man. Therefore the final union of Prometheus with Asia is the consummation of human destinies. Love was the only law Sh.e.l.ley recognized. Unterrified by the grim realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and society, he held fast to the belief that, if we could but pierce to the core of things, if we could but be what we might be, the world and man would both attain to their perfection in eternal love.
What resolution through some transcendental harmony was expected by Sh.e.l.ley for the palpable discords in the structure of the universe, we hardly know. He did not give his philosophy systematic form: and his new science of love remains a luminous poetic vision--nowhere more brilliantly set forth than in the "sevenfold hallelujahs and harping symphonies" of this, the final triumph of his lyrical poetry.
In "Prometheus", Sh.e.l.ley conceived a colossal work of art, and sketched out the main figures on a scale of surpa.s.sing magnificence. While painting in these figures, he seems to reduce their proportions too much to the level of earthly life. He quits his G.o.d-creating, heaven-compelling throne of mythopoeic inspiration, and descends to a love-story of Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these incarnated abstractions; nor, on the other hand, has he so elaborated their characters in detail as to give them the substantiality of persons. There is therefore something vague and hollow in both figures. Yet in the subordinate pa.s.sages of the poem, the true mythopoeic faculty--the faculty of finding concrete forms for thought, and of investing emotion with personality--shines forth with extraordinary force and clearness. We feel ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while we read the description of Ocea.n.u.s, and the raptures of the Earth and Moon.
A genuine liking for "Prometheus Unbound" may be reckoned the touch-stone of a man"s capacity for understanding lyric poetry. The world in which the action is supposed to move, rings with spirit voices; and what these spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than any other poet"s ear has caught, while listening to his own heart"s song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are hymns in "Prometheus", which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from meaning, the substance of a new ethereal music; and yet, although their verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance for those who understand. Sh.e.l.ley scorned the aesthetics of a school which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man whose sense of hearing is too gross for the tenuity of a bat"s cry. A voice in the air thus sings the hymn of Asia at the moment of her apotheosis:--
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them, As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds, ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee whereso"er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee.
But thy voice sounds low and tender, Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost for ever!
Lamp of Earth! where"er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
It has been said that Sh.e.l.ley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque; and there is much in "Prometheus Unbound" to justify this opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.
Sh.e.l.ley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.
The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and beyond it. "I seek," he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object." For him, as for the poet described by one of the spirit voices in "Prometheus", the bees in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,--
Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.
And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom, more perfectly before us than that picture does? (Forman, volume 2 page 181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act? (Forman, volume 2 page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have ill.u.s.trated this drama. He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and the charioted Hour. Prometheus, too, with his "flowing limbs," has just Blake"s fault of impersonation--the touch of unreality in that painter"s Adam.
Pa.s.sing to "The Cenci", we change at once the moral and artistic atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is absent. Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded. Instead of soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into the sphere of dreadful pa.s.sions--all the agony, endurance, and half-maddened action, of which luckless human innocence is capable. To tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed. Her father, a monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage. At last her patience ended; and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness in living man, she wrought his death. For this she died upon the scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided in the execution of the murder. The interest of "The Cenci", and it is overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality. Perhaps Sh.e.l.ley intended this--as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through extraordinary suffering in circ.u.mstances of exceptional horror--the innocence of a n.o.ble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger, and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action, the glance of self-a.s.sured purity with which she annihilates the cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate and powerful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the other world, as once he came to her on earth.
Sh.e.l.ley dedicated "The Cenci" to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work, and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peac.o.c.k requesting him to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O"Neil, he thought, would play the part of Beatrice admirably. The manager, however, did not take this view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even submitted to an actress like Miss O"Neil. Sh.e.l.ley"s self-criticism is always so valuable, that it may be well here to collect what he said about the two great dramas of 1819. Concerning "The Cenci" he wrote to Peac.o.c.k:--"It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterize my other compositions; I having attended simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced by such a development." ""Cenci" is written for the mult.i.tude, and ought to sell well." "I believe it singularly fitted for the stage." ""The Cenci" is a work of art; it is not coloured by my feelings, nor obscured by my metaphysics. I don"t think much of it. It gave me less trouble than anything I have written of the same length." "Prometheus", on the other hand, he tells Ollier, "is my favourite poem; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and feed him with fine ink and good paper"--which was duly done.
Again:--"For "Prometheus", I expect and desire no great sale; Prometheus was never intended for more than five or six persons; it is in my judgment of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it; it is original, and cost me severe mental labour." Sh.e.l.ley was right in judging that "The Cenci" would be comparatively popular; this was proved by the fact that it went through two editions in his lifetime. The value he set upon "Prometheus" as the higher work, will hardly be disputed.
Unique in the history of literature, and displaying the specific qualities of its author at their height, the world could less easily afford to lose this drama than "The Cenci", even though that be the greatest tragedy composed in English since the death of Shakespeare. For reasons which will be appreciated by lovers of dramatic poetry, I refrain from detaching portions of these two plays. Those who desire to make themselves acquainted with the author"s genius, must devote long and patient study to the originals in their entirety.
"Prometheus Unbound", like the majority of Sh.e.l.ley"s works, fell still-born from the press. It furnished punsters with a joke, however, which went the round of several papers; this poem, they cried, is well named, for who would bind it? Of criticism that deserves the name, Sh.e.l.ley got absolutely nothing in his lifetime. The stupid but venomous reviews which gave him occasional pain, but which he mostly laughed at, need not now be mentioned. It is not much to any purpose to abuse the authors of mere rubbish. The real lesson to be learned from such of them as may possibly have been sincere, as well as from the failure of his contemporaries to appreciate his genius--the sneers of Moore, the stupidity of Campbell, the ignorance of Wordsworth, the priggishness of Southey, or the condescending tone of Keats--is that nothing is more difficult than for lesser men or equals to pay just homage to the greatest in their lifetime. Those who may be interested in studying Sh.e.l.ley"s att.i.tude toward his critics, should read a letter addressed to Ollier from Florence, October 15, 1819, soon after he had seen the vile attack upon him in the "Quarterly", comparing this with the fragments of an expostulatory letter to the Editor, and the preface to "Adonais".
(Sh.e.l.ley Memorials, page 121. Garnett"s Relics of Sh.e.l.ley, pages 49, 190. Collected Letters, page 147, in Moxon"s Edition of Works in one volume 1840.) It is clear that, though he bore scurrilous abuse with patience, he was prepared if needful to give blow for blow. On the 11th of June, 1821, he wrote to Ollier:--"As yet I have laughed; but woe to those scoundrels if they should once make me lose my temper!" The stanzas on the "Quarterly" in "Adonais", and the invective against Lord Eldon, show what Sh.e.l.ley could have done if he had chosen to castigate the curs. Meanwhile the critics achieved what they intended. Sh.e.l.ley, as Trelawny emphatically tells us, was universally shunned, coldly treated by Byron"s friends at Pisa, and regarded as a monster by such of the English in Italy as had not made his personal acquaintance. On one occasion he is even said to have been knocked down in a post-office by some big bully, who escaped before he could obtain his name and address; but this is one of the stories rendered doubtful by the lack of precise details.
CHAPTER 6.
RESIDENCE AT PISA.
On the 26th of January, 1820, the Sh.e.l.ley"s established themselves at Pisa. From this date forward to the 7th of July, 1822, Sh.e.l.ley"s life divides itself into two periods of unequal length; the first spent at Pisa, the baths of San Giuliano, and Leghorn; the second at Lerici, on the Bay of Spezia. Without entering into minute particulars of dates or recording minor changes of residence, it is possible to treat of the first and longer period in general. The house he inhabited at Pisa was on the south side of the Arno. After a few months he became the neighbour of Lord Byron, who engaged the Palazzo Lanfranchi it order to be near him; and here many English and Italian friends gathered round them. Among these must be mentioned in the first place Captain Medwin, whose recollections of the Pisan residence are of considerable value, and next Captain Trelawny, who has left a record of Sh.e.l.ley"s last days only equalled in vividness by Hogg"s account of the Oxford period, and marked by signs of more unmistakable accuracy. Not less important members of this private circle were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Elleker Williams, with whom Sh.e.l.ley and his wife lived on terms of the closest friendship. Among Italians, the physician Vacca, the improvisatore Sgricci, and Rosini, the author of "La Monaca di Monza", have to be recorded. It will be seen from this enumeration that Sh.e.l.ley was no longer solitary; and indeed it would appear that now, upon the eve of his accidental death, he had begun to enjoy an immunity from many of his previous sufferings. Life expanded before him: his letters show that he was concentrating his powers and preparing for a fresh flight; and the months, though ever productive of poetic masterpieces, promised a still more magnificent birth in the future.
In the summer and autumn of 1820, Sh.e.l.ley produced some of his most genial poems: the "Letter to Maria Gisborne", which might be mentioned as a pendent to "Julian and Maddalo" for its treatment of familiar things; the "Ode to a Skylark", that most popular of all his lyrics; the "Witch of Atlas", unrivalled as an Ariel-flight of fairy fancy; and the "Ode to Naples", which, together with the "Ode to Liberty", added a new lyric form to English literature. In the winter he wrote the "Sensitive Plant", prompted thereto, we are told, by the flowers which crowded Mrs.
Sh.e.l.ley"s drawing room, and exhaled their sweetness to the temperate Italian sunlight. Whether we consider the number of these poems or their diverse character, ranging from verse separated by an exquisitely subtle line from simple prose to the most impa.s.sioned eloquence and the most ethereal imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Every chord of the poet"s lyre is touched, from the deep ba.s.s string that echoes the diurnal speech of such a man as Sh.e.l.ley was, to the fine vibrations of a treble merging its rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary ears. One pa.s.sage from the "Letter to Maria Gisborne" may here be quoted, not for its poetry, but for the light it casts upon the circle of his English friends.
You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the sh.o.r.e Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.