professor dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point—his sudden separation from harriet westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given—the professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. professor dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. a beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. he is given early to blaspheming whatever{88} society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the king and his father—an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the church of england. his charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another—a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet—notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. he adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies—by name harriet westbrook, elizabeth hitchener, and emilia viviani—with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres (witness “epipsychidion”); and, anon, harriet is “a frantic idiot,” elizabeth a “brown demon,” and emilia a “centaur.” “it was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst.” it is, perhaps, fortunate that providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such “infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than mere{89} saints and poets. the hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit—at least, when it suited his mood and convenience—for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting harriet westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. he was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming” eccentricities. “when bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have ‘a little hell of his own.’” at eton “in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor.” on another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “what on earth are you doing, shelley?” he replied, “please, sir, i’m raising the devil.” the pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “here i swear,” he writes to mr. hogg, “and as i break my oaths, may infinity, eternity blast me—here i swear that never will i forgive intolerance! it is the only point on which i allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” his resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such a{90} world! he had all the na?veté as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. he had no sooner become an undergraduate at oxford than he printed a pamphlet on “the necessity of atheism,” and sent copies to the vice-chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. he was summoned before the university authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others.” much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. hogg—the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife—writes: “he rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘i am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘i am expelled!’... he sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words ‘expelled! expelled!’” professor dowden thinks “it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the creed,{91}” compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the university? the conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have mr. hogg’s authority for the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in shelley.” of course, in face of such an authority as mr. hogg, the assertion of thornton hunt that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by horror,’” is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. professor dowden rightly thinks that shelley might have been all the better had he left the university at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “his voyage,” says his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast below before she raced into the gale.” every one knows how the craft raced into the gale, with miss westbrook on board, as soon as the oxford hawser was cut.{92} shelley might have done much worse. she was a good and attractive person. he began by liking her. “there are some hopes,” he says, “of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if i could get hold of her.” she seems to have been sincerely devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the “frantic idiot” who, though she would give shelley money when she had it, was apparently not sufficiently “tolerant” upon other points—such as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the “eternal rapture” and “divine aspirations” which her husband was enjoying in the arms of another woman. poor little “idiot” as she was, she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering “romance of reality” upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.
what shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy—constitutionally indifferent to money, generous by{93} impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of all that it most behoves a responsible being to know, and so conceited that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility; and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. if to do what is right in one’s own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then shelley was the saint and martyr which a large number of—chiefly young—persons consider him to have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and liberty, is to be a “supreme” poet, then shelley undoubtedly was such. but, as a man, shelley was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the “political animal,” which aristotle defines a man to be. if he could not see the reasons for any social institution or custom, he could not feel any; and forthwith set himself to convince the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. he was equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection. the ties of relationship were no ties to him: for he could only{94} see them as accidents. “i, like the god of the jews,” writes shelley, “set up myself as no respecter of persons; and relationship is regarded by me as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.” as these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and little or no true wisdom or true love. the very texture of his verse suffers from these causes. in his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and melodious; but the more serious and subtle music of life which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of tennyson’s or wordsworth’s, far less with the best of our really “supreme” poets. a very great deal of his poetry is much like the soap-bubbles he was so fond of blowing—its superficies beauty, its substance wind; or like many a young lady who looks and moves and modulates her speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape.
after shelley, the chief male figure in this romance—which would be altogether incredible were it not real—is that of the guide, philosopher, and friend of the poet’s youth, godwin. pecksniff is genteel comedy compared with the grim farce{95} of this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in himself. like the german poet who was entrusted by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, godwin “sincerely abhorred all that was sordid and mean; but he liked sausage”; and the way he combined the necessity for nibbling at shelley’s future fortune by making incessant claims, which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a man whom shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond description. his writing to tell shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to his (godwin’s) own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift at all, unless the name was changed to “hume” or any other the poet might select, is a touch which shakespeare might have coveted for ancient pistol.
it appears that there still exists a good deal of writing by and concerning shelley which it has not been deemed expedient to publish. a footnote, for instance, assures us that “a poetical epistle to graham referring to his father in odious terms” is still “in existence”; and various other unprinted{96} letters and poems are alluded to. but it is scarcely to be supposed that any future life of shelley will supersede professor dowden’s—unless, indeed, it should be an abridgment, more suitable in bulk and perhaps in tone than the present publication is, for the use of those who, undazzled, or possibly repelled, by the glamour of shelley’s personality and revolutionary convictions, admire the meteoric splendour of his genius and allow it its not unimportant place in the permanent literature of england.
