Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 74Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822
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[Illustration: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. From the portrait by Amelia Curran, National Portrait Gallery.]
Life.—Another fiery spirit of the Revolution was Shelley, born in 1792, in a home of wealth, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. He was one of the most ardent, independent, and reckless English poets inspired by the French Revolution. He was a man who could face infamy and defy the conventionalities of the world, and, at the same moment, extend a helpful hand of sympathy to a friend or sit for sixty hours beside the sick bed of his dying child. Tender, pitying, fearless, full of a desire to reform the world, and of hatred for any form of tyranny, Shelley failed to adjust himself to the customs and laws of his actual surroundings. He was calumniated and despised by the public at large, and almost idolized by his intimate friends.
At Eton he denounced the tyranny of the larger boys. At Oxford he decried the tyranny of the church over freedom of thought, and was promptly expelled for his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. This act so increased his hatred for despotic authority that he almost immediately married Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful school girl of sixteen, to relieve her from the tyranny of her father who wanted her to return to school. Shelley was then only nineteen and very changeable. He would make such a sudden departure from a place where he had vowed "to live forever," that specially invited guests sometimes came to find him gone. He soon fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant woman who later wrote the weird romance Frankenstein, and he married her after Harriet Shelley had drowned herself. These acts alienated his family and forced him to forfeit his right to Field Place.
[Illustration: SHELLEY'S BIRTHPLACE, FIELD PLACE.]
His repeatedly avowed ideas upon religion, government, and marriage brought him into conflict with public opinion. Unpopular at home, he left England in 1818, never to return. Like Byron, he was practically an exile.
The remaining four years of Shelley's life were passed in comparative tranquillity in the "Paradise of exiles," as he called Italy. He lived chiefly at Pisa, the last eighteen months of his life. Byron rented the famous Lanfranchi Palace in Pisa and became Shelley's neighbor, often entertaining him and a group of English friends, among whom were Edward Trelawny, the Boswell of Shelley's last days, and Leigh Hunt, biographer and essayist.
On July 7, 1822, Shelley said: "If I die to-morrow, I have lived to be older than my father. I am ninety years of age." The young poet was right in claiming that it is not length of years that measures life. He had lived longer than most people who reach ninety. The next day he started in company with two others to sail across the Bay of Spezzia to his summer home. Friends watching from the shore saw a sudden tempest strike his boat. When the cloud passed, the craft could not be seen. Not many months before, he had written the last stanza of Adonais:—
"…my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
Shelley's body was washed ashore, July 18, and it was burned near the spot, in accordance with Italian law; but the ashes and the unconsumed heart were interred in the beautiful Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from where Keats was buried the previous year.
Few poets have been loved more than Shelley. Twentieth century visitors to his grave often find it covered with fresh flowers. The direction which he wrote for finding the tomb of Keats is more applicable to Shelly's own resting place:—
"Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread."[22]
Works.—Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1816) is a magnificent expression of Shelley's own restless, tameless spirit, wandering among the grand solitudes of nature in search of the ineffably lovely dream maiden, who was his ideal of beauty. He travels through primeval forests, stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirlpools, all of which are symbolic of the soul's wayfaring, until at last,—
"When on the threshold of the green recess,"
his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds eternal peace. The general tone of this poem is painfully despairing, but this is relieved by the grandeur of the natural scenes and by many imaginative flights.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF SHELLEY, PROTESTANT CEMETERY, ROME.]
The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique among Shelley's productions, The Cenci. This is a drama based upon the tragic story of Beatrice Cenci. The poem deals with human beings, human passions, real acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually preferred to treat of metaphysical theories, personified abstractions, and the world of fancy. This strong drama was the most popular of his works during his lifetime.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF STANZA FROM "TO A SKYLARK".]
He returned to the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). This poem is the apotheosis of the French Revolution. Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth, and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something of the stateliness of its Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.
The Witch of Atlas (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), Adonais (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, The Cloud, To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands—
"…'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;"
where all is—
"Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]
Adonais is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's Lycidas. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it "the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English singer," who
"…bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the eternal."
Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between the leaves of Adonais, which spoke to her of his own immortality and omnipresence:—
"Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning? * * * * * He is a portion of the loveliness, Which once he made more lovely."
Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing that he ever wrote surpasses Adonais in completeness, poetic thought, and perfection of artistic finish.
Treatment of Nature.—Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, To Night, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them—
"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24]
In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In The Prelude he says:—
"To unorganic natures were transferred My own enjoyments."
Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, The Cloud, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:—
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. * * * * * I sift the snow on the mountains below And their great pines groan aghast."
He thus begins the song, To a Skylark—
"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert,"
and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."
He peoples the garden in his lyric, The Sensitive Plant, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.
"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew."
The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have imagined that garden.
In the exquisite Ode to the West Wind, he calls to that "breath of Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:—
"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, * * * * * Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness."
We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.
General Characteristics.—Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful, and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts. His Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples, and, above all, his Prometheus Unbound, are some of the works inspired by a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for experience which mark a time of revolt.
The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, and Prometheus Unbound, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."
Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.