Literary and General Lectures and Essays Part 2

We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had a strength. They have exercised an influence. And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, did not see. Strangely enough, Sh.e.l.ley, the man who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly. His influence, therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in men's hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the drama itself begun.

Such is the way of Providence; the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the prophecy to the wise. The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and sends on his errands--those who deny Him, rebel against Him--profligates, madmen, and hysterical Rousseaus, hysterical Sh.e.l.leys, uttering words like the east wind.

He uses strange tools in His cosmogony: but He does not use them in vain. By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, G.o.d's work is done, and done right well.

There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these men; and it was this--that more or less clearly, they all felt that they were standing between two worlds; and the ruins of an older age; upon the threshold of a new one. To Byron's mind, the decay and rottenness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Sh.e.l.ley's, the possible glory of the new. Wordsworth declared--a little too noisily, we think, as if he had been the first to discover the truth--the dignity and divineness of the most simple human facts and relations.h.i.+ps.

Coleridge declares that the new can only a.s.sume living form by growing organically out of the old inst.i.tutions. Keats gives a sad and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and pa.s.sionate, he goes down with Faust "to the Mothers"--

To the rich warm youth of the nations, Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in pa.s.sion and pleasure, Childlike still, still near to the G.o.ds, while the sunset of Eden Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian mountains.

And there, amid the old cla.s.sic forms, he cries: "These things, too, are eternal--

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

These, or things even fairer than they, must have their place in the new world, if it is to be really a home for the human race." So he sings, as best he can, the half-educated and consumptive stable- keeper's son, from his prison-house of London brick, and in one mighty yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, breaks his young heart, and dies, leaving a name not "writ in water," as he dreamed, but on all fair things, all lovers' hearts, for evermore.

Here, then, to return, is the reason why the hearts of the present generation have been influenced so mightily by these men, rather than by those of whom Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity:

Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try 'Gainst you the question with posterity.

These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Whether they be altogether just or unjust is not now the question. It must seem somewhat strange to our young poets that Sh.e.l.ley's name is not among those who are to try the question of immortality against the Lake School; and yet many of his most beautiful poems had been already written. Were, then, "The Revolt of Islam" and "Alastor" not destined, it seems, in Byron's opinion, to live as long as the "Lady of the Lake" and the "Mariners of England?" Perhaps not. At least the omission of Sh.e.l.ley's name is noteworthy. But still more noteworthy are these words of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819:

"Read Pope--most of you don't--but do . . . and the inevitable consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever written, and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain."

And here arises a new question--Is Sh.e.l.ley, then, among the Claudians? It is a hard saying. The present generation will receive it with shouts of laughter. Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain the little notice which Byron takes of Sh.e.l.ley's poetry, and the fact that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in any wise "pull together" during the sojourn in Italy. Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those who loved them best. Friends.h.i.+p can only consist with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it. But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Sh.e.l.ley's fever was not Byron's.

Now it is worth remarking, that it is Sh.e.l.ley's form of fever, rather than Byron's, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.

Since Sh.e.l.ley's poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, Byron's fiercer wine has lost favour.

Well--at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation. And there is an excuse for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and qua.s.sia, salt and cocculus indicus. Nevertheless, worse ingredients than oenanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devil's Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate. The private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Sh.e.l.ley. It is not surprising. Byron's Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during the thirty years' peace! and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amus.e.m.e.nts, and often require a good private fortune--rare among poets. They have, therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting moustaches and Mazzini hats. But even among them, and among their betters--rather their more-respectables--nine-tenths of the bad influence which is laid at Byron's door really is owing to Sh.e.l.ley.

Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horror--he is "so wicked," forsooth; while poor Sh.e.l.ley, "poor dear Sh.e.l.ley," is "very wrong, of course," but "so refined," "so beautiful," "so tender"--a fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil. We boldly deny the verdict. Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Sh.e.l.ley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is. And as for the satyr; the less that is said for Sh.e.l.ley, on that point, the better. If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Sh.e.l.ley's pa.s.sions were

As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion and proclaim the wors.h.i.+p of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of "pure" humanity. No--Byron may be brutal; but he never cants. If at moments he finds himself in h.e.l.l, he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late has been not his faults but his excellences. His artistic good taste, his cla.s.sical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible--these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Sh.e.l.ley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism. The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the st.u.r.dy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and "had no objection to a pot of beer;" and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant English gentleman; while Sh.e.l.ley, if once his intense self-opinion had deserted him, would have probably ended in Rome as an Oratorian or a Pa.s.sionist.

We would that it were only for this count that Byron has had to make way for Sh.e.l.ley. There is, as we said before, a deeper moral difference between the men, which makes the weaker, rather than the stronger, find favour in young men's eyes. For Byron has the most intense and awful sense of moral law--of law external to himself.

Sh.e.l.ley has little or none; less, perhaps, than any known writer who has ever meddled with moral questions. Byron's cry is, I am miserable because law exists; and I have broken it, broken it so habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it. I have tried to eradicate the sense of it by speculation, by action; but I cannot--

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very marrow of our life, which punishes and rewards us by no arbitrary external penalties, but by our own consciousness of being what we are:

The mind which is immortal, makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts; Is its own origin of ill, and end-- And its own place and time--its innate sense When stript of this mortality derives No colour from the fleeting things about, But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms of evil--for it was not discovered, but only in the process of discovery--is the one which comes out with greater and greater strength, through all Corsairs, Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in "Cain" and in "Manfred," of both of which we do boldly say, that if any sceptical poetry at all be right, which we often question, they are right and not wrong; that in "Cain," as in "Manfred," the awful problem which, perhaps, had better not have been put at all, is nevertheless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen, fairly confessed; namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists eternally, and will a.s.sert itself. If this be not the meaning of "Manfred,"

especially of that great scene in the chamois hunter's cottage, what is?--If this be not the meaning of "Cain," and his awful awakening after the murder, not to any mere dread of external punishment, but to an overwhelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done wrong, what is?

Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is the real meaning of Byron, down to that last terrible "Don Juan," in which he sits himself down, in artificial calm, to trace the gradual rotting and degradation of a man without law, the slave of his own pleasures; a picture happily never finished, because he who painted it was taken away before he had learnt, perhaps when he was beginning to turn back from--the lower depth within the lowest deep.

Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor Sh.e.l.ley's mind is altogether antipodal. His whole life through was a denial of external law, and a subst.i.tution in its place of internal sentiment.

Byron's cry is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable. Why cannot I keep the law? Sh.e.l.ley's is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable. Why should not the law be abolished?--Away with it, for it interferes with my sentiments--Away with marriage, "custom and faith, the foulest birth of time."--We do not wish to follow him down into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of reasoning--and they were peculiarly small--which he possessed. Let any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between Byron's mind and Sh.e.l.ley's, compare the writings in which each of them treats the same subject--namely, that frightful question about the relation of the s.e.xes, which forms, evidently, Manfred's crime; and see if the result is not simply this, that Sh.e.l.ley glorifies what Byron d.a.m.ns. "Lawless love" is Sh.e.l.ley's expressed ideal of the relation of the s.e.xes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally lawless. "Follow your instincts," is his one moral rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to the level of sentiments. "Follow your instincts"--But what if our instincts lead us to eat animal food? "Then you must follow the instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley. I think it horrible, cruel; it offends my taste." What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise over our fellow-men? "Then you must repress those instincts. I, Sh.e.l.ley, think that, too, horrible and cruel." Whether it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the same--sentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the private sentiments of the writer. This is Sh.e.l.ley; a sentimentalist pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning; unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the "Ode to Liberty," which, had it been written by any other man but Sh.e.l.ley, possessing the same knowledge as he, one would have called a wicked and deliberate lie--but in his case, is to be simply pa.s.sed over with a sigh, like a young lady's proofs of table-turning and rapping spirits. She wished to see it so--and therefore so she saw it.

For Sh.e.l.ley's nature is utterly womanish. Not merely his weak points, but his strong ones, are those of a woman. Tender and pitiful as a woman; and yet, when angry, shrieking, railing, hysterical as a woman. The physical distaste for meat and fermented liquors, coupled with the hankering after physical horrors, are especially feminine. The nature of a woman looks out of that wild, beautiful, girlish face--the nature: but not the spirit; not

The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.

The lawlessness of the man, with the sensibility of the woman. . . .

Alas for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong. Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the clouds of selfish sorrow:

Alas, I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within, nor calm around; Nor that content surpa.s.sing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned.

"Nor"--alas for the spiritual bathos, which follows that short gleam of healthy feeling, and coming to himself--

--fame nor power, nor love, nor leisure, Others I see whom these surround, Smiling they live and call life pleasure, To me that cup has been dealt in another measure!

Poor Sh.e.l.ley! As if the peace within, and the calm around, and the content surpa.s.sing wealth, were things which were to be put in the same category with fame, and power, and love, and leisure. As if they were things which could be "dealt" to any man; instead of depending (as Byron, who, amid all his fearful sins, was a man, knew well enough) upon a man's self, a man's own will, and that will exerted to do a will exterior to itself, to know and to obey a law.

But no, the cloud of sentiment must close over again, and

Yet now despair itself is mild Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care, Which I have borne, and still must bear, Till death like sleep might seize on me, And I might feel in the warm air, My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony!

Too beautiful to laugh at, however empty and sentimental. True: but why beautiful? Because there is a certain sincerity in it, which breeds coherence and melody, which, in short, makes it poetry. But what if such a tone of mind be consciously encouraged, even insincerely affected as the ideal state for a poet's mind, as his followers have done?

The mischief which such a man would do is conceivable enough. He stands out, both by his excellences and his defects, as the spokesman and ideal of all the unrest and unhealth of sensitive young men for many a year after. His unfulfilled prophecies only help to increase that unrest. Who shall blame either him for uttering those prophecies, or them for longing for their fulfilment? Must we not thank the man who gives us fresh hope that this earth will not be always as it is now? His notion of what it will be may be, as Sh.e.l.ley's was, vague, even in some things wrong and undesirable.

Still, we must accept his hope and faith in the spirit, not in the letter. So have thousands of young men felt, who would have shrunk with disgust from some of poor Sh.e.l.ley's details of the "good time coming." And shame on him who should wish to rob them of such a hope, even if it interfered with his favourite "scheme of unfulfilled prophecy." So men have felt Sh.e.l.ley's spell a wondrous one--perhaps, they think, a life-giving regenerative one. And yet what dream at once more shallow and more impossible? Get rid of kings and priests; marriage may stay, pending discussions on the rights of women. Let the poet speak--what he is to say being, of course, a matter of utterly secondary import, provided only that he be a poet; and then the millennium will appear of itself, and the devil be exorcised with a kiss from all hearts--except, of course, these of "pale priests"

and "tyrants with their sneer of cold command" (who, it seems, have not been got rid of after all), and the Cossacks and Croats whom they may choose to call to their rescue. And on the appearance of the said Cossacks and Croats, the poet's vision stops short, and all is blank beyond. A recipe for the production of millenniums which has this one advantage, that it is small enough to be comprehended by the very smallest minds, and reproduced thereby, with a difference, in such spasmodic melodies as seem to those small minds to be imitations of Sh.e.l.ley's nightingale notes.

For nightingale notes they truly are. In spite of all his faults-- and there are few poetic faults in which he does not indulge, to their very highest power--in spite of his "interfluous" and "innumerous," and the rest of his bad English--in spite of bombast, horrors, maundering, sheer stuff and nonsense of all kinds, there is a plaintive natural melody about this man, such as no other English poet has ever uttered, except Shakespeare in some few immortal songs.