340 SHELLEY'S POEMS. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. 4 Vols. Edward Moxon, London. 1839. it. THE time appears to have nearly arrived when justice will be done to the genius of Shelley; and the publication of these volumes is an indication of An admirer of his muse has resolved that oblivion, like the " remorseless waves," shall not "close o'er the head of our lov'd Lycidas;" and it is our wish that criticism should applaud the attempt, hazardous in a worldly sense though it be; nor, though somewhat analogous to the process of gilding refined gold or painting the lily, suffer the object of it to go to the tomb unhonoured, "Without the meed of one melodious tear." No great reputation in our day suffered more than Shelley's, for the press unfortunately is a passive instrument at the service of all opinions. Biographical or critical notices, written under the direction of party spirit, are only registers of lies. Impartial history will one day be greatly embarrassed to choose between those contradictory hatreds and apotheoses which excite our horror or our pity. Our literary criticisms are for the most part, however, written under this deplorable inspiration; for the probity that is exempt from blindness and error in those questions wherein that factitious conscience, called "opinion," becomes interested, is rarely to be met with. It has been suspected that it is not in the pompous independence of even Tacitus himself that it is to be found: where then should Shelley find it? The passions which agitate men are the same in every age, and every thing thus becomes symbolical in our life of imitation. Whoever has fought in the ranks of the people against power, fancies himself a partisan of Milton' or Hampden; and whoever has defended his king, right or wrong, feels the yearnings of a brother towards Strafford. A sincere and candid criticism disinterestedly drawn between the two extremes has thus, in the case of Shelley, been rendered necessary by the false enthusiasm of factions, — a work claimed by the charity we owe to the memory of the dead. Fortunately, public opinion has at no former period had larger indulgence for error, enthusiasm, or the fanaticism of elevated sentiments. We have begun to comprehend one of the most striking moral facts of our nature, viz. that there may be many vicious excesses in sincerity, and much sincerity in extremes. Knowing that the names of five or six writers, at the most, escape in every age the contempt of succeeding ones, and that our age especially, distracted by so many serious pursuits, is far from surpassing former ones in durable productions, we can now, perhaps, approximately assign his true position to Shelley. It is not thus that contemporaneous criticism treated him when alive. Posterity will there learn with astonishment, from its admiring pages, the immense merit of the laureate Southey, the fine and exquisite, talent of Mr. Maturin, the ardent and coloured style of Mr. Croly, the astounding universality of Mr. Haynes Bailey: posterity will there see with astonishment that the sceptre of elegiac and moral poetry was in the hands of Mr. Bowles, if indeed it were not disputed by Ebenezer, the Corn Law Rhymer, and that Professor Milman had discovered the secret of Euripides. A conservative Philpotts will be a Fenelon for his biographer a liberal Heber a Homer for his! To these it will add the immortals mentioned in English bards and Scotch reviewers, and their successors, who on the throne of fashion now reign paramount. All these "Lights of the world and demigods of fame," exceedingly remarkable at times, to whom criticism paid in obsequious articles its interested homage, will only make the blush of shame mount upon the foreheads of our successors, and prove to them that living talents cannot be fairly judged while they live, and that final justice in literature, as in all else, is only for the dead. : At the beginning of the present century, Byron and Scott, those representatives of life in its two worlds, the subjective and the objective, made their appearance; and with those giants came two currents of poetry, new, magical, and unknown until these days. A sound as of the winds and waters in unwonted commotion was heard throughout the republic of letters: it was the shock of two worlds. the world of the past and the world of the future the battle of motion against inertness, which for centuries had been the law. Among the band of living contemporaries, Goëthe reduced life into a formula of indifference-Byron into a lofty hymn of despair they prostrated man in the dust, and rolled over his head the stone of his sepulchre, instead of saying to him with one accord, "Arise, creature of God, made after his own image, and proceed!" One only of these great poets lived in the faith, and died hoping; and now we hasten to appreciate him; and when the fame of the others shall have diminished, and "the blazing star of Byron shall have receded from its pride of place," future generations will perhaps worship in Shelley one of the elect of poetry. Some few awarded to his strains their meed of cold admiration; then came the night— the fatal night — the great night of indifference and oblivion, which involves men and things, and cancels in these years of transition so many cherished names- so many uncontaminated glories. But we remember the day when, beholding in the far horizon a dubious image of the promised land, fervid with youth and hope, living with the life of a new era, enthusiastic for the indefinite perfectibility of man, the doctrine of Plato and of Bacon, fair as the day and vast as hope itself, and which, despised and neglected now-a-days, is still the asylum of all choice spirits, we remember when, panting for an interpreter, the powerful voice of Shelley sounded to our ears revered and infallible. Notwithstanding the repugnance now felt for generalisations in literature, we think that the fundamental idea of all art must be the religious opinion of its era. We shall take three poets, Eschylus, Shakspeare, and Shelleythree poetical worlds, as reflecting in their writings the idea which defines a period of civilisation. Eschylus has the soul of Greek poetry—the fatality arising from the struggle of free Greece against the despotic Oriental world his form is rough, but Titanic, vast and monumental; his touches are few, but they exhibit the skeleton of a world. The poetic period in Greece did nothing but expound its religious problem; hence its predominant narrative character, and the reason that the conscience of the poet, so seldom apparent in the classics, is a sphere of images altogether objective, throwing a quiet and a repose over all poetical creations, which it is difficult to designate as a sign of the security of victory or of the calm of resignation. Shakspeare has the soul of the middle ages, of which he is the great epitome. Moral and religious liberty is his principle; his drama is confessedly that of the individual, and his men have life as they would have issued from the hands of Nature herself, one and various, complex and harmonious. It neither defines man by the most predominant of his faculties, nor life by the most powerful of its many manifestations, but it gives life and being in all their shades and tints. From the unprecedented popularity of Shakspeare and Scott, it is seen that people love to generalise for themselves to have individual portraits of human beings, which are alike every where, and from these to draw their own inferences and systems. Still, individuality is not the sole province of high art; it is only a legitimate province of it, when, like Shakspeare, it paints an individual who is the type of a genus; if the individual portrait be not this type, it is only a representation of an exceptional mind, a modified madness. Originals are generally representative modifications of that insanity with which poor human nature is more or less inoculated; so that, even in the drama of individuality, there must exist generalisation, or it cannot be said to be truly significant. Schiller in Germany, and Shelley in England, represent the great idea of modern civilisation, the idea, namely, of Providence; and, as a corollary, those universal laws which exercise themselves upon collective humanity. Wordsworth himself, quel signor dell' altisimo canto, narrows the sphere of his philosophy, as is well known, within the world, kingly and ecclesiastic, of an age irrevocably spent ; consequently we think he is less emblematical than Shelley, however greatly he may surpass him in precision, though not in that vivid force of mind which exalts the poet beyond the flammantia mænia mundi, like the eagle, "Sailing with supreme dominion Through the azure fields of air." The profundity of Shelley's metaphysics was an obstacle to his popularity. Obscurity is another great defect. The brilliant qualities by which it was accompanied have however changed it into a beauty in the eyes of his enthusiastic admirers whose productions frequently exhibit little else. There is some danger that Shelley may become the Gongora or Marini of English literature, if certain fashionable theories regarding the inherent impossibility of minds of a high order ever becoming extensively popular, be allowed to establish themselves as infallible. German mysticism has already made great inroads upon classical purity, but there is a fund of sound sense at the bottom of English intellect, which will not suffer it to have more than its reign of an hour, and in that faith we live. We distrust all esoteric doctrines. All mysteries are frauds. We desire to see a democratic revolution in philosophy and poetry, — Both them I serve, and of their train am I. — MILTON. "Genius is bright, and whatever is not clear is not French!" So says Voltaire, in a maxim of unchanging truth. When a writer fails to impart a strict and accurate conception of the thought that animates him, the multitude conceive, and rightly too, that the truth is not there entire; nor do they make any allowance that it is easy to be precise when one is incomplete. Spontaneity and clearness are what they desire in every production of art; and they possess a marvellous instinct in appreciating and rewarding with their enthusiasm those creations of art which come home to their business and their bosoms. There is a point of view, according to Madame de Stael, from which the highest truths are per ceptible to the meanest minds; to seize and present that point of view is the triumph of good writing. If an author fail in it, let him rest assured that the fault is with himself and not with the world. If this proposition be false, genius must write for itself: the more general truths are, the simpler they are. The analytical expression of the physical laws of the universe is comprised in five or six algebraic letters. Even the depths of Hamlet's mind, which may be incompleteness of conception, or the arcana poeta, will be plain to all men, when a greater than Shakspeare shall appear to explain them, for omne majus continet in se minus, as say the metaphysicians. The public, therefore, requires that its favourites shall despise all doubts, ambiguities, and tortuous preambles, all German mysticism, which is in truth but the symptoms of a nation still in the middle ages: it requires that they shall go straight to the point, like an arrow to the mark, and yield at once the expression of their hearts educated in the school of the passions. They require something simple, intelligible, and beautiful; and if philosophy cannot produce this, she goes for nothing with them. Like the ardent lover, they exclaim impatiently, hang up philosophy! Unless philosophy can make a Juliet." "Your writing has too many words and too few ideas," writes the young Napoleon to his brother Lucien, in one of his recently discovered letters. "You are running after the pathetic; that is not the way to address the people-they have more sense and tact than you give them credit for." The public requires that the voices of its favourites shall be the faithful echo of their times, like that alabaster vase in the Roman forum, which was The people believed to enlarge when struck by the tones of the orators. know how to appreciate real benefits; they penetrate instinctively into the secrets of art; and instinct alone enables them to contrast it with the Comprehending in marvels of nature, ever powerful over their minds. "Where the devil their ignorance only what exists, they hate change. does this strange fellow come from, who pretends to deny, with his hard words and abusive names, all that we are most deeply convinced of?" Every man passes the author by, and laughs, as he thinks, at the quackery and sophistry. But to those who pause to demand from the new preacher tidings of the unknown muse, to which they had ignorantly dedicated an altar, the philosophy of Shelley's poetry is not so recondite or abstruse. We think that it is easy to learn from it the organic idea of the poetry of the future; the conception of the destinies of humanity as contradistinguished to those of the individual. It is wrong to deem the Me the microcosm of the universe. The synthesis which fills up the complement of man's incomplete terrestrial destinies, by referring them to Heaven, has, in the hands of ignorant, hypocritical, or venal writers, weakened an active belief in an indefinite perfectibility through the miracles of association, a progress without any assignable term; and in the country of Bacon, Shelley has been deemed an enthusiast for inculcating it; for it must always be kept in mind, that Shelley was a great political reformer as well as a poet. There is nothing so unreasonable in this doctrine. It is at least a doctrine of hope; and in this sense we apply to Shelley the epithet of the poet of hope. Even if perfection be interdicted to man in this world by reason of the internal malady, or primal curse, under which he labours, it ought not the less to be the term towards which all his labours ought to tend, the goal of all his desires - the summit towards which all his efforts should incessantly aspire. Except a few sluggards, whom the night has surprised in the past, there is no one now-a-days who does not clearly see that all the fractions of the human race are gravitating towards a unity, which, sooner or later, will be constituted. Poetry must follow the social movement. The laws of her development (for who can doubt that the development of the general mind follows certain fixed laws now unknown to us?) must be the same as those which form the universal synthesis of the age. To endeavour, therefore, to reanimate the forms of a past world, to seek her inspirations in the monarchical and ecclesiastical Middle Ages, the Greek or the Roman classicism, or the childish Oriental world, is vanity. We may ask, like the prophet Ezekiel, "Can these dry bones live?" The two greatest poetical geniuses of France at the present day, George Sand and the Abbé de Lamennais, (the Rousseau of the age without his vices,) agitated by the secret grief of the time, the void created in the heart by selfishness and egotism, are enlarging the patrimony of ideas, and embracing the whole circle of humanity, for Genius is essentially social and cosmopolitan. They have lifted up the mantle which fell from Shelley, and are inspired with the same inspiration, with the organic idea of the present time, the idea, viz. of Providence; and certainly there seems nothing irrational in the religious conviction, that the full scheme of Providence, with regard to man and his true end in the creation, will be developed by means of association beyond any conceivable perfection. The great Shakspeare himself, it has been suggested, felt and described the emptiness of life when a faith in progress does not connect it with other lives, when he wrote the touching lines which he has put into the mouth of Macbeth, comparing life to an idiot's tale, signifying nothing. But man was surely not placed here below to act the part of an idiot, unprofitable to himself and barren to his neighbour; and Schiller and Shelley, the poets of the nineteenth century, have sung a vaster mission, a higher notion, than that of the individual-than the obstinacy of a contest between man and the universe: and it is in this sense, we again say, that Shelley is essentially a poet of liberty and hope. The delights of materialism and indifference were not suited to that mind so restless and anti-vegetative. Educated in the school of the passions, the pathetic translator of the universal hopes and fears, he gathers the tears and bitters of adversity, and extracts from them the balm of the comforter, to pour upon the wounds of the heart; for he, whom the sudden overflow of the waters in the days of the deluge frightened not, even whilst deploring the griefs that tried so powerfully the manliest hearts, knew that from that momentary grief joy would swiftly emerge, and that that disorder of nature was the promise of a better harvest and a serener sky,— "Where at the last the bright consummate flower Two or three phases in his poetry mark the changes in Shelley's experience of life. The Titanic vigour of Queen Mab, the force and genius with which he attacked the objects of his hatred, his prophetic denunciations of "all the oppressions that are done under the sun," clothed in the magic of a style that winds with a serpent's fascination, fixed the attention of the world at once upon him as upon one of those imposing figures- those majestic individualities whose grand and striking forms stand out at once strange and prominent in the age in which they live. Dark, deep, and cloudy, like Dante's "Inferno," we heard from the abyss voices of anger, words of grief, and with these sounds of the beating of hands, accenté d'ira, |