it is a reservation, there a deception, perhaps wilful, which arrests our attention. But there is, if the word be allowed, a Shelley Gospel, a body of opinion from which we receive a vivid impression of the ideal poet. Ardent, yet gentle, unselfish, of a crystalline sincerity, and a generosity unhappily too rare, he was filled with the enthusiasm of humanity,' he was the champion of lost causes and forlorn hopes, the eternal rebel. The engraving from Miss Curran's portrait of the poet, which Mary Shelley regarded as much more successful than the original, does not belie this conception. Hogg, re-viewing his friend through the mists of memory, ascribed to him an air of 'profound religious veneration,' a phrase of which much has been made by those who would fain mould a Shelley to their liking. In this portrait the head is slightly bowed, and there is in truth a look of adoration in the eyes; it is, perhaps, his vision of 'Nature's naked loveliness' that he sees. In the National Gallery there is a wonderful portrait of a young man, by Bernardino Licinio, which has something of the same look. Shelley revered what were to him the highest things, 'Love, and Beauty, and Delight,' but of authority he was the fearless enemy. Such scorn of authority is incompatible with religious veneration. In his well-known essay Matthew Arnold deals only with Shelley's life. Professor Dowden's apologetics, couched as they sometimes are in words of stilted sentimentality, offered, no less than his homilies, a fair mark for satire, though it was unjust to make the poet suffer vicariously for the sins of his biographer. A more profitable exercise of the critical faculty would have laid bare a graver defect in Professor Dowden's book. Stories from any source, so that they be about Shelley, are grist to Professor Dowden's mill; no attempt is made to sift evidence: he reposes faith as implicit in Medwin's lucubrations as in a legal document, nay, a legend grows under his hands. Why was it that a mind like Arnold's could disregard the singularly uncritical character of this biography, finding, indeed, that the ample materials had been used with order and judgment'? To describe the attitude which Arnold adopts towards Shelley we must use in its acquired meaning a word which has dropped out of current use: it is a genteel attitude, that is to say, it exceeds the point of dignity and becomes slightly ridiculous. He is shocked and disgusted to a degree which is unnatural. What a set! what a world!' he exclaims, after a picturesque description of what purports to be Shelley's circle, and he applies to it the epithet sale. But why does he include in his • Nineteenth Century, January 1888. description persons whom Shelley disliked and with whom he did not associate, and omit such friends as Peacock and Horace Smith, who were eminently respectable? There is a hint of disingenuousness in this. Passing strange, too, is his inability to appreciate at any rate the courage of Shelley's fight for freedom of thought, in an age when Eaton for republishing Paine's Age of Reason was imprisoned for eighteen months, and pilloried once a month during his incarceration. He brands Shelley's philosophy as 'pernicious nonsense.' Doubtless Literature and Dogma has been censured by many with the same lack of urbanity. Could not Matthew Arnold, then, admire the heroism of a frontal attack, he who adopted the devices of the sapper and miner in his effort to capture the Christian position for the Stoic forces? We know that he could do so. The last word might have been written of Shelley himself. They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee? Fired their ringing shot and pass'd, Hotly charged-and sank at last. Charge once more, then, and be dumb! When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall! In the temperament of the two men we must seek the explanation of what appears to be not only Arnold's lack of sympathy but his actual hostility. It is the difference between the man with ichor in his veins and the man with ice. If we turn to Arnold's love poems, so chilly and so reasonable, we perceive at once the cause of the antagonism. A score of pages contain them all, so thin a strain it is, so exiguous a muse. Exquisite as are his elegiacs, inimitable as he is in reflective verse, in such pieces as A Summer Night, Dover Beach, The Buried Life, poems of rare distinction in which is mirrored the mental unrest of his own generation, to Arnold the poetry of love, the passionate temperament, was a closed book. It is the reason why he cannot rank with the masters. His 'sails were never to the tempest given.' And when he is brought in contact with this temperament, from which he instinctively shrinks, his critical vision is blinded. This is to be seen occasionally in his treatment of Heine, and of Keats, through the tragedy of whose life he picks his way, pouncet-box in hand. But it is Shelley who exasperates him, for Shelley's passionate temperament burnt clear. Arnold would seem to apply the formula, 'If passionate he must be gross.' Straightway he looks for evil, and finds it. God forbid,' he cries, that I should go into the scandals about Shelley's "Neapolitan charge," about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it.' The scandal about Shelley and Miss Clairmont was set on foot by a servant who was discharged for knavery, Paolo Foggi, and by his wife, a So nurse, who had also been discharged from the Shelleys' employ. far from its being true that if Shelley is left much alone with Miss Clairmont he evidently makes Mary uneasy,' Mary herself indignantly denies the imputation. I swear by the life of my child,' she writes to Mrs. Hoppner, 'that I know the accusations to be false.' Scandal is certainly not the word to use in regard to the attraction which the interesting Emilia had for Shelley, if for no other reason because throughout their acquaintance the lady lived in a convent. 'My Neapolitan charge' is an expression used once by Shelley in reference to a little girl in whom he was interested, and who died in 1820 in a hospital at Naples. Nothing is known about her. If a theory is desired, what more likely than that the philanthropist, who at Marlow contracted ophthalmia through visiting the sick, had interested himself in some waif or child of poor parents? But Professor Dowden yearns for mystery. He concludes at once that the child was to some extent placed under Shelley's charge or wardship'; he recalls Foggi's slanders, makes some fanciful conjectures of his own, and suggests that there is more here than meets the eye. That guilt should be assumed till innocence be proved is hardly a principle we expect to inform the practice of men reared in the English tradition. In all the chances and changes of his life Shelley's was a spirit of white fire. That he conceived more than one passion for a woman is not gainsaid, but his were passions, not indecencies. Had there been a strain of grossness in Shelley, the grossness which we find in Rabelais and Shakespeare, it would have enriched his genius, for the greatest writers are those who can range the whole gamut of emotions, from the obscene to the spiritual. None saw more clearly than Arnold that to be contemptful of what we do not understand is to be Philistine; yet in this case he sinned against his own canons. He finds neither Shelley nor his poetry entirely sane.' His criticism of the poetry is given in the essay on Maurice de Guérin, and it is an astounding one. Whatever Shelley achieves as a poet, he writes, 'he in general fails to achieve natural magic in his expression.' In a note he adds, 'I will not deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm; what I deny is that he has it in his language. . . The medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough.' This of the poet whose work teems with such instances of natural magic in words as Daisies, those pearl'd Arcturi of the earth A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift lines which are doubly magical in the context from which they are torn, in that there they have both the qualities which Arnold VOL. LXIII-No. 375 3 H insists are the highest in poetry, natural magic and moral profundity. To illustrate this twofold quality let one line be given with the context, the cry of Beatrice Cenci when suddenly she doubts: Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world! In one phrase Arnold crystallised his prejudice when he wrote, 'In Mr. Palgrave's charming Treasury may be seen a gallery of his failures.' Among the noble pictures in this gallery of failures' are the Lines to an Indian Air, Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples, To a Lady with a Guitar, One word is too often profaned,' To a Skylark, To Night, A Lament (Threnos), and the Ode to the West Wind. These are lyrics which we are accustomed to consider among the finest in the language; to call them a gallery of failures is not criticism, it has the unfortunate semblance of animosity. Arnold has himself supplied the fit reproof: If the current view is, after all, the truer one, the note is a freak. But even if its disparaging view is right, the note is a violence; for, abandoning the true mode of intellectual action-persuasion, the instilment of conviction-it simply astounds and irritates the hearer by contradicting without a word of proof or preparation his fixed and familiar notions; and this is mere violence." It has, in short, that note of provinciality which Arnold so often deplored. It is idle to press the point further; twenty years have passed, and we, who are able now clearly to realise Matthew Arnold's limitations, may gently set aside those subjects, few in number, with which he was unfitted by his temperament to deal, and continue to enjoy his pellucid and fascinating prose. How musical a sentence it is in which he embodied his conception of Shelley, the sentence which he graved upon the minds of men- a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.' When we reflect on the transient influence exerted by Arnold himself there is a pathos attaching to it other than the writer deemed. Shelley is a more brilliant soldier in the Liberation war of humanity' than his critic, and the appeal he makes is wider. Matthew Arnold in his controversial writings appeals to dilettanti; Shelley will ever be a bright torch to youth at the moment of generous revolt. ARTHUR P. NICHOLSON. Essays in Criticism. Literary influence of Academies. THE DECLINE OF THE KINGDOM OF JUDAH THE difficulties in the way of the historian of the people of Israel have increased rather than diminished. As long as it was thought that the history of Israel could be written on the basis of the Old Testament, investigating that basis by the methods of the higher criticism, and interpreting the results from a purely Western point of view, it was a comparatively easy task. Now, however, that we have come to understand much more fully than before that the Old Testament is an Oriental product, and that its language often means something very different and much less ordinary than appears on the surface-now that results of exploration are beginning to be offered us which do not by any means always fit in with the much-edited and corrupted Biblical tradition-now, too, that we are beginning to comprehend the true object of textual criticism, which is to restore the original underlying text in its naked simplicity, and with its frequent historical and exegetical surprises, we feel the need of no common degree of courage to undertake the performance of so hard a task. We would most gladly postpone it, but how can we ? Each generation insists on making its own attempt, however incomplete, at a solution of the same perennially fascinating problem. The next half-century will certainly see a much-increased amount of pioneering work. To-day, work of that sort is still very generally censured alike by moderate and by advanced critics of the older school. Nor can it be denied that pioneering work has great dangers, and that it is not difficult to pick holes in those who practise it. The true pioneer is well aware of this, and is ever correcting his own work. He therefore shows a mutability in criticism which is puzzling both to the outsider and to some higher critics.' We will not blame the outsider for this, but only invite him to try and get inside a strange, new variety of human nature. Nor will we find fault with the oldfashioned higher critic, but only ask him not to judge the pioneers by wrong standards, and not to ignore the emergence of new problems. Pioneers heartily recognise the educational value of moderate criticism-a criticism which twenty years ago would have been called |