Books: Percy Bysshe Shelley
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John Addington Symonds >> Percy Bysshe Shelley
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As at Eton, so at Oxford, Shelley refused to keep the beaten track of
prescribed studies, or to run in ordinary grooves of thought. The mere
fact that Aristotle was a duty, seems to have disgusted him with the
author of the Organon, from whom, had his works been prohibited to
undergraduates, he would probably have been eager to learn much. For
mathematics and jurisprudence he evinced a marked distaste. The common
business of the English Parliament had no attraction for him, and he
read few newspapers. While his mind was keenly interested in great
political questions, he could not endure the trivial treatment of them
in the daily press, and cared far more for principles than for the
incidents of party warfare. Here again he showed that impatience of
detail, and that audacity of self-reliant genius, which were the source
of both his weakness and his strength. He used to speak with aversion of
a Parliamentary career, and told Hogg that though this had been
suggested to him, as befitting his position, by the Duke of Norfolk, he
could never bring himself to mix with the rabble of the House. It is
none the less true, however, that he entertained some vague notion of
eventually succeeding to his father's seat.
Combined with his eager intellectual activity, there was something
intermittent and fitful in the working of his mental faculties. Hogg, in
particular, mentions one of his habits in a famous passage, which, since
it brings the two friends vividly before us, may here be quoted. "I was
enable to continue my studies afterwards in the evening, in consequence
of a very remarkable peculiarity. My young and energetic friend was then
overcome by extreme drowsiness, which speedily and completely vanquished
him; he would sleep from two to four hours, often so soundly that his
slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he lay occasionally upon the sofa,
but more commonly stretched upon the rug before a large fire, like a
cat; and his little round head was exposed to such a fierce heat, that I
used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes I have interposed
some shelter, but rarely with any permanent effect; for the sleeper
usually contrived to turn himself, and to roll again into the spot where
the fire glowed the brightest. His torpor was generally profound, but he
would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long while in his sleep. At
six he would suddenly compose himself, even in the midst of a most
animated narrative, or of earnest discussion; and he would lie buried in
entire forgetfulness, in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he
would suddenly start up, and, rubbing his eyes with great violence, and
passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, would enter at once
into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own
composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy
that were often quite painful."
Shelley's moral qualities are described with no less enthusiasm than his
intellectual and physical beauty by the friend from whom I have already
drawn so largely. Love was the root and basis of his nature: this love,
first developed as domestic affection, next as friendship, then as a
youth's passion, now began to shine with steady lustre as an
all-embracing devotion to his fellow-men. There is something inevitably
chilling in the words "benevolence" and "philanthropy." A disillusioned
world is inclined to look with languid approbation on the former, and to
disbelieve in the latter. Therefore I will not use them to describe that
intense and glowing passion of unselfishness, which throughout his life
led Shelley to find his strongest interests in the joys and sorrows of
his fellow-creatures, which inflamed his imagination with visions of
humanity made perfect, and which filled his days with sweet deeds of
unnumbered charities. I will rather collect from the page of his
friend's biography a few passages recording the first impression of his
character, the memory of which may be carried by the reader through the
following brief record of his singular career:--
"His speculations were as wild as the experience of twenty-one years has
shown them to be; but the zealous earnestness for the augmentation of
knowledge, and the glowing philanthropy and boundless benevolence that
marked them, and beamed forth in the whole deportment of that
extraordinary boy, are not less astonishing than they would have been if
the whole of his glorious anticipations had been prophetic; for these
high qualities, at least, I have never found a parallel."
"In no individual perhaps was the moral sense ever more completely
developed than in Shelley; in no being was the perception of right and
of wrong more acute.
"As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigour of
his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life
most conspicuous."
"I never knew any one so prone to admire as he was, in whom the
principle of veneration was so strong."
"I have had the happiness to associate with some of the best specimens
of gentlemen; but with all due deference for those admirable persons
(may my candour and my preference be pardoned), I can affirm that
Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found that was never
wanting, even in the most minute particular, of the infinite and various
observances of pure, entire, and perfect gentility."
"Shelley was actually offended, and indeed more indignant than would
appear to be consistent with the singular mildness of his nature, at a
coarse and awkward jest, especially if it were immodest, or uncleanly;
in the latter case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness
pre-eminent; he was, however, sometimes vehemently delighted by
exquisite and delicate sallies, particularly with a fanciful, and
perhaps somewhat fantastical facetiousness--possibly the more because he
was himself utterly incapable of pleasantry."
"I could never discern in him any more than two fixed principles. The
first was a strong irrepressible love of liberty; of liberty in the
abstract, and somewhat after the pattern of the ancient republics,
without reference to the English constitution, respecting which he knew
little and cared nothing, heeding it not at all. The second was an
equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but more especially
of religious opinions; of toleration, complete, entire, universal,
unlimited; and, as a deduction and corollary from which latter
principle, he felt an intense abhorrence of persecution of every kind,
public or private."
The testimony in the foregoing extracts as to Shelley's purity and
elevation of moral character is all the stronger, because it is given by
a man not over-inclined to praise, and of a temperament as unlike the
poet's as possible. If we were to look only upon this side of his
portrait, we should indeed be almost forced to use the language of his
most enthusiastic worshippers, and call him an archangel. But it must be
admitted that, though so pure and gentle and exalted, Shelley's virtues
were marred by his eccentricity, by something at times approaching
madness, which paralyzed his efficiency by placing him in a glaringly
false relation to some of the best men in the world around him. He
possessed certain good qualities in excess; for, though it sounds
paradoxical, it is none the less true that a man may be too tolerant,
too fond of liberty: and it was precisely the extravagance of these
virtues in Shelley which drove him into acts and utterances so
antagonistic to society as to be intolerable.
Of Shelley's poetical studies we hear but little at this epoch. His
genius by a stretch of fancy might be compared to one of those double
stars which dart blue and red rays of light: for it was governed by two
luminaries, poetry and metaphysics; and at this time the latter seems to
have been in the ascendant. It is, however, interesting to learn that he
read and re-read Landor's "Gebir"--stronger meat than either Southey's
epics or the ghost-lyrics of Monk Lewis. Hogg found him one day busily
engaged in correcting proofs of some original poems. Shelley asked his
friend what he thought of them, and Hogg answered that it might be
possible by a little alteration to turn them into capital burlesques.
The idea took the young poet's fancy; and the friends between them soon
effected a metamorphosis in Shelley's serious verses, by which they
became unmistakably ridiculous. Having achieved their purpose, they now
bethought them of the proper means of publication. Upon whom should the
poems, a medley of tyrannicide and revolutionary raving, be fathered?
Peg Nicholson, a mad washerwoman, had recently attempted George the
Third's life with a carving-knife. No more fitting author could be
found. They would give their pamphlet to the world as her work, edited
by an admiring nephew. The printer appreciated the joke no less than the
authors of it. He provided splendid paper and magnificent type; and
before long the book of nonsense was in the hands of Oxford readers. It
sold for the high price of half-a-crown a copy; and, what is hardly
credible, the gownsmen received it as a genuine production. "It was
indeed a kind of fashion to be seen reading it in public, as a mark of
nice discernment, of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry, and the
best criterion of a choice spirit." Such was the genesis of "Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name
of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor
and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost
volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty.
Shelley's next publication, or quasi-publication, was neither so
innocent in substance nor so pleasant in its consequences. After leaving
Eton, he continued the habit, learned from Dr. Lind, of corresponding
with distinguished persons whom he did not personally know. Thus we find
him about this time addressing Miss Felicia Browne (afterwards Mrs.
Hemans) and Leigh Hunt. He plied his correspondents with all kinds of
questions; and as the dialectical interest was uppermost at Oxford, he
now endeavoured to engage them in discussions on philosophical and
religious topics. We have seen that his favourite authors were Locke,
Hume, and the French materialists. With the impulsiveness peculiar to
his nature, he adopted the negative conclusions of a shallow
nominalistic philosophy. It was a fundamental point with him to regard
all questions, however sifted and settled by the wise of former ages, as
still open; and in his inordinate thirst for liberty, he rejoiced to be
the Deicide of a pernicious theological delusion. In other words, he
passed at Oxford by one leap from a state of indifferentism with regard
to Christianity, into an attitude of vehement antagonism. With a view to
securing answers to his missives, he printed a short abstract of Hume's
and other arguments against the existence of a Deity, presented in a
series of propositions, and signed with a mathematically important
"Q.E.D." This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists,
expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely
requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious
correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless
severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little
pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its
proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already
described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the
"Oxford University and City Herald". It was not, however, actually
offered for sale.
A copy of this syllabus reached a Fellow of another college, who made
the Master of the University acquainted with the fact. On the morning of
March 25, 1811, Shelley was sent for to the Senior Common Room, and
asked whether he acknowledged himself to be the author of the obnoxious
pamphlet. On his refusal to answer this question, he was served with a
formal sentence of expulsion duly drawn up and sealed. The college
authorities have been blamed for unfair dealing in this matter. It is
urged that they ought to have proceeded by the legal method of calling
witnesses; and that the sentence was not only out of all proportion to
the offence, but that it ought not to have been executed till persuasion
had been tried. With regard to the former indictment, I do not think
that a young man still in statu pupillari, who refused to purge himself
of what he must have known to be a serious charge, had any reason to
expect from his tutors the formalities of an English court of law. There
is no doubt that the Fellows were satisfied of his being the real
author; else they could not have ventured on so summary a measure as
expulsion. Their question was probably intended to give the culprit an
occasion for apology, of which they foresaw he would not avail himself.
With regard to the second, it is true that Shelley was amenable to
kindness, and that gentle and wise treatment from men whom he respected
might possibly have brought him to retract his syllabus. But it must be
remembered that he despised the Oxford dons with all his heart; and they
were probably aware of this. He was a dexterous, impassioned reasoner,
whom they little cared to encounter in argument on such a topic. During
his short period of residence, moreover, he had not shown himself so
tractable as to secure the good wishes of superiors, who prefer
conformity to incommensurable genius. It is likely that they were not
averse to getting rid of him as a man dangerous to the peace of their
society; and now they had a good occasion. Nor was it to be expected
that the champion and apostle of Atheism--and Shelley was certainly
both, in spite of Hogg's attempts to tone down the purpose of his
document--should be unmolested in his propaganda by the aspirants to fat
livings and ecclesiastical dignities. Real blame, however, attaches to
these men: first, for their dulness to discern Shelley's amiable
qualities; and, secondly, for the prejudgment of the case implied in the
immediate delivery of their sentence. Both Hogg and Shelley accused
them, besides, of a gross brutality, which was, to say the least,
unseemly on so serious an occasion. At the beginning of this century the
learning and the manners of Oxford dons were at a low ebb; and the
Fellows of University College acted harshly but not altogether unjustly,
ignorantly but after their own kind, in this matter of Shelley's
expulsion. $Non ragionem di lor, ma guarda e passa. Hogg, who stood by
his friend manfully at this crisis, and dared the authorities to deal
with him as they had dealt with Shelley, adding that they had just as
much real proof to act upon in his case, and intimating his intention of
returning the same answer as to the authorship of the pamphlet, was
likewise expelled. The two friends left Oxford together by coach on the
morning of the 26th of March.
Shelley felt his expulsion acutely. At Oxford he had enjoyed the
opportunities of private reading which the University afforded in those
days of sleepy studies and innocuous examinations. He delighted in the
security of his "oak," and above all things he found pleasure in the
society of his one chosen friend. He was now obliged to exchange these
good things for the tumult and discomfort of London. His father, after
clumsily attempting compromises, had forbidden his return to Field
Place. The whole fabric of his former life was broken up. The last hope
of renewing his engagement with his cousin had to be abandoned. His
pecuniary position was precarious, and in a short time he was destined
to lose the one friend who had so generously shared his fate. Yet the
notion of recovering his position as a student in one of our great
Universities, of softening his father's indignation, or of ameliorating
his present circumstances by the least concession, never seems to have
occurred to him. He had suffered in the cause of truth and liberty, and
he willingly accepted his martyrdom for conscience' sake.
CHAPTER 3.
LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE.
It is of some importance at this point to trace the growth and analyse
the substance of Shelley's atheistical opinions. The cardinal
characteristic of his nature was an implacable antagonism to shams and
conventions, which passed too easily into impatient rejection of
established forms as worse than useless. Born in the stronghold of
squirearchical prejudices, nursed amid the trivial platitudes that then
passed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit flew to the opposite
pole of thought with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate
negation. His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance,
his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical
sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme
opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate to suspend his
judgment, too convinced of the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to
mature his views in silence. With the unbounded audacity of youth, he
hoped to take the fortresses of "Anarch Custom" by storm at the first
assault. His favourite ideal was the vision of a youth, Laon or Lionel,
whose eloquence had power to break the bonds of despotism, as the sun
thaws ice upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to hurl the
glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face--to sow the "Necessity of
Atheism" broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his
poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must
learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality. Gifted with
a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the unmasking of hypocrisy,
he strove to lay bare the very substance of the soul beneath the crust
of dogma and the froth of traditional beliefs; nor does it seem to have
occurred to him that, while he stripped the rags and patches that
conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he might drag away the
weft and woof of nobler thought. In his poet-philosopher's imagination
there bloomed a wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that
behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a new Eternal City
of the Spirit. He never doubted whether his fellow-creatures were
certain to be equally fortunate.
Shelley had no faculty for compromise, no perception of the blended
truths and falsehoods through which the mind of man must gradually win
its way from the obscurity of myths into the clearness of positive
knowledge, for ever toiling and for ever foiled, and forced to content
itself with the increasing consciousness of limitations. Brimming over
with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions
under which they actually think and feel. Could he but dethrone the
Anarch Custom, the millennium, he argued, would immediately arrive; nor
did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from
that of the unnumbered multitudes around him. In his adoration of what
he recognized as living, he retained no reverence for the ossified
experience of past ages. The principle of evolution, which forms a
saving link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no place
in his logic. The spirit of the French Revolution, uncompromising,
shattering, eager to build in a day the structure which long centuries
of growth must fashion, was still fresh upon him. We who have survived
the enthusiasm of that epoch, who are exhausted with its passions, and
who have suffered from its reactive impulses, can scarcely comprehend
the vivid faith and young-eyed joy of aspiration which sustained Shelley
in his flight toward the region of impossible ideals. For he had a vital
faith; and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem possible--faith
in the duty and desirability of overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel
of liberty, fraternity, equality; faith in the divine beauty of nature;
faith in a love that rules the universe; faith in the perfectibility of
man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; faith
in affection as the ruling and co-ordinating substance of morality. The
man who lived by this faith was in no vulgar sense of the word an
Atheist. When he proclaimed himself to be one, he pronounced his hatred
of a gloomy religion, which had been the instrument of kings and priests
for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. As he told his friend
Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of
superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance
of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently
agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion--a
kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God
because it was all God--that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy
accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break
through and flood the world with beauty. Shelley can only be called an
Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received
conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of
cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was
an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving
the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless
utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual
heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too
religious and too sanguine to merit either epithet as vulgarly applied.
The negative side of Shelley's creed had the moral value which attaches
to all earnest conviction, plain speech, defiance of convention, and
enthusiasm for intellectual liberty at any cost. It was marred, however,
by extravagance, crudity, and presumption. Much that he would fain have
destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and
beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was
visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature
philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social
usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense,
which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm.
The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was
logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal,
fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life-force of an
incomparable nature. Such ideals are needed for sustaining man upon his
path amid the glooms and shadows of impenetrable ignorance. The form the
seal and pledge of his spiritual dignity, reminding him that he was not
born to live like brutes, or like the brutes to perish without effort.
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza.
These criticisms apply to the speculations of Shelley's earlier life,
when his crusade against accepted usage was extravagant, and his
confidence in the efficacy of mere eloquence to change the world was
overweening. The experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without
damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first fervent
speculations, and mellowed his philosophy. Had he lived to a ripe age,
there is no saying with what clear and beneficent lustre might have
shone that light of aspiration which during his turbid youth burned
somewhat luridly, and veiled its radiance in the smoke of mere
rebelliousness and contradiction.
Hogg and Shelley settled in lodgings at No. 15, Poland Street, soon
after their arrival in London. The name attracted Shelley: "it reminded
him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and of freedom." He was further fascinated by
a gaudy wall-paper of vine-trellises and grapes, which adorned the
parlour; and vowed that he would stay there for ever. "For ever," was a
word often upon Shelley's lips in the course of his chequered life; and
yet few men have been subject to so many sudden changes through the
buffetings of fortune from without and the inconstancy of their own
purpose, than he was. His biographer has no little trouble to trace and
note with accuracy his perpetual flittings and the names of his
innumerable temporary residences. A month had not elapsed before Hogg
left him in order to begin his own law studies at York; and Shelley
abode "alone in the vine-trellised chamber, where he was to remain, a
bright-eyed, restless fox amidst sour grapes, not, as his poetic
imagination at first suggested, for ever, but a little while longer."
The records of this first residence in London are meagre, but not
unimportant. We hear of negotiations and interviews with Mr. Timothy
Shelley, all of which proved unavailing. Shelley would not recede from
the position he had taken up. Nothing would induce him to break off his
intimacy with Hogg, or to place himself under the tutor selected for him
by his father. For Paley's, or as Mr. Shelley called him "Palley's,"
Evidences he expressed unbounded contempt. The breach between them
gradually widened. Mr. Shelley at last determined to try the effect of
cutting off supplies; but his son only hardened his heart, and sustained
himself by a proud consciousness of martyrdom. I agree with Shelley's
last and best biographer, Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his condemnation of the
poet's behaviour as a son. Shelley did not treat his father with the
common consideration due from youth to age; and the only instances of
unpardonable bad taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of
his conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who was really
more unfortunate than criminal in his relations to this changeling from
the realms of faery. It is not too much to say that his dislike of his
father amounted to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions
with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated fancy. How so
just and gentle a nature was brought into so false a moral situation,
whether by some sudden break-down of confidence in childhood or by a
gradually increasing mistrust, is an interesting but perhaps insoluble
problem. We only know that in his early boyhood Shelley loved his father
so much as to have shown unusual emotion during his illness on one
occasion, but that, while at Eton he had already become possessed by a
dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr.
Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expected
monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was
nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once
occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his
history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed
itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection in the process of
recovery. But the theory is too speculative and unsupported by proof to
be more than passingly alluded to.
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