Henry S. Salt

I know not the internal constitution of other men.... I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land.—Shelley.

THE words quoted above would savour of self-righteousness, if put into the mouth of any one but the poet who wrote them. Coming from Shelley, they do not give that impression; for we feel of him that, as Leigh Hunt used to say, he was “a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world ... he had come from the planet Mercury.” Or, rather, he was a prophet and forerunner of a yet distant state of society upon this planet Earth, when the savagery of our past and present shall have been replaced by a civilization that is to be.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century Shelley’s influence was very powerful, not only upon the canons of poetry, but upon ideals of various kinds—upon free-thought, socialism, sex-questions, food-reform, and not a few other problems of intellectual and ethical import. The Chartist movement set the example. In a letter which I received from Eleanor Marx in 1892 she spoke of the “enormous influence” exercised by Shelley’s writings upon leading Chartists: “I have heard my father and Engels again and again speak of this; and I have heard the same from the many Chartists it has been my good fortune to know—Ernest Jones, Richard Moore, the Watsons, G. J. Harvey, and others.” What was true of Chartism held equally good of other movements; as indeed was admitted by Shelley’s detractors as well as claimed by his friends: witness Sir Leslie Stephen’s complaint that “the devotees of some of Shelley’s pet theories” had become “much noisier.” In the ’eighties, the interest aroused by the controversies that raged about Shelley, both as poet and as pioneer, was especially strong, as was proved by the renewed output of Shelleyan literature, such as Mr. Forman’s and Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s editions of the works, the biography of Dr. Dowden, and the numerous publications of the Shelley Society, dating from 1886 to 1892. It was a time when the old abusive view of Shelley, as a fiend incarnate, was giving way to the equally irrational apologetic view—the “poor, poor Shelley” period—of which Dowden was the spokesman; yet a good deal of the old bitterness still remained, and Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson’s lurid fiction, entitled “The Real Shelley,” was published as late as 1885.

It is difficult for a humble student of such a genius as Shelley to speak frankly of the debt that he owes to him, without seeming to forget his own personal unimportance; but I prefer to risk the misunderstanding than to leave the tribute unsaid. From the day when at a preparatory school I was first introduced to Shelley’s lyrics by having some stanzas of “The Cloud” set for translation into Latin, I never doubted that he stood apart from all other poets in the enchantment of his verse; and I soon learnt that there was an equal distinction in the beauty and wisdom of his thoughts; so that he became to me, as to others, what Lucretius found in Epicurus, a guide and solace in all the vicissitudes of life:

At Eton there was little knowledge of Shelley, and still less understanding. When it was first proposed to place a bust of the poet in the Upper School, Dr. Hornby is said to have replied: “No: he was a bad man,” and to have expressed a humorous regret that he had not been educated at Harrow. I once read a paper on Shelley before the Ascham Society, and was amazed at the ignorance that prevailed about him among Eton masters: only one or two of them had any acquaintance with the longer poems; the rest had read the lines “To a Skylark”; one told us with a certain amount of pride that he had read “Adonais”; many thought the poet a libertine; and though they did not say that he was a disgrace to Eton, it was evident that that was the underlying sentiment. Several years after I had left Eton, William Cory wrote a paper for the Shelley Society on “Shelley’s Classics” (viz. his knowledge of Greek and Latin), which, in his absence, I read at one of the Society’s meetings; and I remember being surprised to find that even he regarded Shelley as a verbose and tedious writer.

From Mr. Kegan Paul, who was a friend of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, I had heard all that was known of the inner history of Shelley’s life; and as, after the publication of Dowden’s biography in 1886, the main facts were no longer in dispute, it seemed to me that the best service that could then be rendered to his memory was to show how, far from being a “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” he was a beautiful but very efficient prophet of reform. This I did, or tried to do, in various essays published about the time when the Shelley Society was beginning its work; and I was thus brought into close touch with it during the seven years of its existence. As illustrating how the old animosities still smouldered, more than sixty years after Shelley’s death, I am tempted to quote a testimonial received by me from a critic in the Westminster Review, where I found myself described as one of the writers who grubbed amongst “the offensive matter” of Shelley’s life “with gross minds and grunts of satisfaction,” and as having made “an impudent endeavour to gain the notoriety of an iconoclast amongst social heretics with immoral tendencies and depraved desires.” There was the old genuine ring about this, and I felt that I must be on the right track as a Shelley student. I knew, too, from letters which I had received from Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law, whose Shelley Memorials was the starting-point of all the later appreciations, that I was not writing without credentials. “For the last thirty-five years,” she wrote to me in 1888, speaking for Sir Percy Shelley and herself, “we have suffered so much from what has been written on Shelley by those who had not the capacity of understanding his character, and were utterly ignorant of the circumstances which shaped his life, that I cannot refrain from expressing our heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the comfort and pleasure we have had in reading your paper.” And later: “It is a great happiness to me to know, in my old age, that when I am gone there will be some one left to do battle for the truth against those whose nature prevents them from seeing in Shelley’s beautiful unselfish love and kindness anything but evil.”

The Shelley Society, founded by Dr. F. J. Furnivall in 1886, had the support of a large number of the poet’s admirers, among whom were Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Mr. Buxton Forman, Mr. Hermann Vezin, Dr. John Todhunter, Mr. F. S. Ellis, Mr. Stanley Little, and Mr. Bernard Shaw; and much useful work was done in the way of meetings and discussions, the publication of essays on Shelley, and facsimile reprints of some of his rarer volumes, thus throwing new light, biographical or bibliographical, on many doubtful questions. I will refer only to one of these, in which I was myself concerned, a study of “Julian and Maddalo,” which I read at a meeting in 1888, and which was subsequently printed in the Shelley Society’s Papers and reissued as a pamphlet. Its object was to make clear what had been overlooked by Dowden, Rossetti, and the chief authorities, though hinted at by one or two writers, viz. that the story of “the maniac” (in “Julian and Maddalo”) was not, as generally supposed, a mere fanciful interpolation, but a piece of poetical autobiography, a veiled record of Shelley’s own feelings at the time of his separation from Harriet. On this point Dr. Furnivall wrote to me (April 16, 1888): “Robert Browning says he has always held the main part of your view, from the first publication of ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ but you must not push it into detail. I had a long talk with him last night.”

The greatest single achievement of the Shelley Society was the staging of The Cenci at the Islington Theatre, in 1886. The performance was technically a private one, as the Licenser of Plays had refused his sanction; but great public interest was aroused, and the acting of Mr. Hermann Vezin as Count Cenci, and of Miss Alma Murray as Beatrice—“the poetic actress without a rival” was Browning’s description of her—made the event one which no lover of Shelley could forget. If the Society had done nothing else than this, its existence would still have been justified.

Every literary association, like every social movement, is sure to have a humorous aspect as well as a serious one, and the Shelley Society was very far from being an exception to this beneficent rule; indeed, on looking back over its career, one has to check the impulse to be absorbed in the laughable features of the proceedings, to the exclusion of its really valuable work. The situation was rich in delightful incongruities; for the bulk of the Committee, while admiring Shelley’s poetical genius, seemed quite unaware of the conclusions to which his principles inevitably led, and of the live questions which any genuine study of Shelley was certain to awake. Accordingly, when Mr. G. W. Foote, the President of the National Secular Society, gave an address before a very large audience on Shelley’s religion, the Committee, with a few exceptions, marked their disgust for the lecturer’s views, which happened also to be Shelley’s, by the expedient of staying away. I think it was on an earlier occasion that Bernard Shaw appalled the company by commencing a speech with the words: “I, as a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian....” I remember how the honorary secretary, speaking to me afterwards, as to a sympathetic colleague, said that he had always understood that if a man avowed himself an atheist it was the proper thing “to go for him”; but when I pointed out that, whatever might be thought of such a course as a general rule, it would be a little difficult to act on it in a Shelley Society, he seemed struck by my suggestion. Anyhow, we did not go for Shaw; perhaps we knew that he had studied the noble art of self-defence.

Then there was sad trouble on the Committee when Dr. Aveling applied for membership, for the majority decided to refuse it—his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s—and it was only by the determined action of the chairman, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who threatened to resign if the resolution were not cancelled, that the difficulty was surmounted. This was by no means the only occasion on which William Rossetti’s sound sense rescued the Society from an absurd and impossible position; but sane as were his judgments in all practical matters, he was himself somewhat lacking in humour, as was made evident by a certain lecture which he gave us on “Shelley and Water”; a title, by the way, which might have been applied, not inaptly, to the sentiments of several of our colleagues. There are, as all Shelley students know, some curious references, in the poems, to death by drowning; and we thought that the lecturer intended to comment on these, and on any passages which might illustrate the love which Shelley felt for sailing on river or sea; we were therefore rather taken aback when we found that the lecture, which was divided into two parts, viz. “Shelley and Salt Water” and “Shelley and Fresh Water,” consisted of little more than the quotation of a number of passages. We heard the first part (I forget whether it was the salt or the fresh), and then, at Dr. Furnivall’s suggestion, the second was withdrawn. There was comedy in this; but none the less all lovers of Shelley owe gratitude to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, for he was one of the first critics to understand the real greatness of Shelley’s genius, and to appreciate not the poetry alone, but the conceptions by which it was inspired. He likewise did good service in introducing to the public some original writers, Walt Whitman among them, whose recognition might otherwise have been delayed.

But the outstanding figure of the Shelley Society was that of its founder, Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the veteran scholar and sculler, a grand old man whose unflagging ardour in his favourite pursuits might have shamed many enthusiasts who were his juniors by half a century. A born fighter, the vehemence of his disputes with certain men of letters (Swinburne, for example), was notorious; but personally he was kindness itself, and I have most pleasant recollections of the many visits which I paid him in his house near Primrose Hill, where, sitting in a big arm-chair, he would talk eagerly, as he took tea, over the men he had known or the Societies he had founded. His tea-tray used to be placed on a sort of small bridge which rested on the arms of the chair, and in his excitement over a thrilling anecdote, I have seen him forget that he was thus restricted, and springing forward send tray and tea flying together across the room. He once told me that, for hygienic reasons, he had been a vegetarian for twenty years, and had done the hardest work of his life without flesh-food: then, happening to be confined to the house with sprained ankles, he got out of health by neglecting to reduce his daily diet. Just at that moment a friend sent him a turkey, and he said to himself: “Now, why should this fine bird be wasted, owing to a mere whim of mine?” Thus had he relapsed into cannibalism as lightly as he relinquished it.

There was an innocence and naÏvetÉ about Furnivall which at times was almost boyish; his impetuosity and total lack of discretion made him insensible to other persons’ feelings, so that he gave direful offence, and trod on the toes of many good people, without being in the least conscious of it. He ruined the Browning Society, of which he was both founder and confounder, by an ill-advised speech about Jesus Christ, in a discussion on “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”; and in like manner, though with less serious results, he startled his Shelleyan friends, when Prometheus was the subject of debate, by asking in tones of impatience: “Why did the fellow allow himself to be chained to the rock? Why didn’t he show fight, as I should have done?” And certainly, when one thinks of it, there would have been trouble in the Caucasus, if Dr. Furnivall had been bidden to play the martyr’s part.

Knowing of my connection with Eton, Dr. Furnivall once came to me, in high spirits, with the news that in some researches at the British Museum he had by chance unearthed the fact that Nicholas Udall, a headmaster of Eton in the sixteenth century, and one of the recognized “worthies” of the school, had been convicted of a criminal offence—its nature I must leave my readers to surmise. I had heard this before, but I could not spoil the old man’s glee by saying so; I therefore congratulated him warmly, and asked him, in jest, whether he would not write to Dr. Warre and tell him of so interesting a discovery. “I have written to him,” he cried; and then, with a shade of real surprise and disappointment on his face: “But he’s not answered me!”

During the latter part of the Shelley Society’s career, when its fortunes were dimmed, and many of its fashionable members had dropped off, we still continued to hold our monthly meetings at University College, Gower Street, and very quaint little gatherings some of them were. The audience at times numbered no more than five or six, and the “proceedings” might have altogether failed had it not been for two or three devoted enthusiasts who never slackened in their attendance. One of these was Mrs. Simpson, an old lady who became to the Shelley Society what Miss Flite was to the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, an ever-present spectator and ally. We all liked and respected her—she was humanitarian as well as Shelleyan—but we were a little embarrassed when her filial piety prompted her to give us copies of her father’s writings, a bulky volume entitled The Works of Henry Heavisides. It was a sobering experience to become possessed of that book, the title of which conveyed a true indication of the contents.

The Shelley Centenary (August 4, 1892) marked the climax of the cult which had had so great a vogue in the previous decade. The local meeting held at Horsham in the afternoon, when Sussex squires and literary gentlemen from London united in an attempt to whitewash Shelley’s character—those “shining garments” of his, “so little specked with mire,” as one speaker expressed it—was a very hollow affair which contrasted sharply with the London celebration held in the evening at the Hall of Science, when Mr. G. W. Foote presided, and Mr. Bernard Shaw convulsed the audience by his description of the Horsham apologetics. An account of both these meetings was written by “G.B.S.” in his best vein, and printed in the Albemarle Review: it was in this article that he made the suggestion that Shelley should be represented, at Horsham, on a bas-relief, “in a tall hat, Bible in hand, leading his children on Sunday morning to the church of his native parish.”

That piece of sculpture has never been executed; but it would hardly have been more inappropriate than the two chief monuments that have been erected, the one in Christchurch Priory, Hants, the other at University College, Oxford; for what could be less in keeping with the impression left by Shelley’s ethereal genius than to figure him, as is done in both these works, as a dead body, stretched limp and pitiful like some suicide’s corpse at the Morgue? Let us rid our thoughts of all such ghastly and funereal notions of Shelley, and think of him as what he is, the poet not of death but of life,[22] that nobler life to which mankind shall yet attain, when they have learnt, in his own words:

The most human portrait of Shelley, to my thinking, is the one painted by a young American artist, William West, who met him at Byron’s villa near Leghorn, in 1822, and being greatly struck by his personality, made a rough sketch which he afterwards finished and took back to America. There it was preserved after West’s death, and reproduced for the first time in the Century Magazine in October, 1905, with an explanatory article by its present owner, Mrs. John Dunn. By the courtesy of Mrs. Dunn, I was able to use this portrait as a frontispiece to a revised edition of my study of Shelley, published in 1913. Mr. Buxton Forman told me that he did not believe in the genuineness of the picture; but readers of Letters about Shelley (1917) will see that Dr. Richard Garnett held a contrary opinion, and so, as I know, did Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Some account of West’s meeting with Shelley, and of his recollections of Byron, may be found in Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists. His portrait of Byron is well known; and there seems to be no inherent improbability in the account given of the origin and preservation of the other picture, which certainly impresses one as being more in agreement with the verbal descriptions of Shelley in his later years than the almost boyish countenance so familiar in engravings.

Shelley is the greatest of the poet-pioneers of civilization, and his influence is still very far from having reached its zenith: he is “the poet of the young” in the sense that future generations will be better and better able to understand him.