THAT a principle of profound significance for the welfare of our own species in particular, and for the peaceful harmony of the world in general—that a true spiritualism, of which some of the most admirable of the poets of the pre-Christian ages proved themselves not unconscious, has been, for the most part, altogether overlooked or ignored by modern aspirants to poetic fame is matter for our gravest lament. Thomson, Pope, Shelley, Lamartine—to whom Milton, perhaps, may be added—these form the small band who almost alone represent, and have developed the earlier inspiration of a Hesiod, Ovid, or Virgil, the prophet-poets who, faithful to their proper calling,[232] have sought to unbarbarise and elevate human life by arousing, in various degree, feelings of horror and aversion from the prevailing materialism of living.

Of this illustrious band, and, indeed, of all the great intellectual and moral luminaries who have shed a humanising influence upon our planet—who have left behind them “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”—none can claim more reverence from humanitarians than the poet of poets—the influence of whose life and writings, considerable even now, and gradually increasing, doubtless in a not remote future is destined to be equal to that of the very foremost of the world’s teachers, and of whom our sketch, necessarily limited though it is, will be extended beyond the usual allotted space.

Percy Bysshe Shelley descended from an old and wealthy family long settled in Sussex. At the age of 13 he was sent to Eton, where (such was the spirit of the public and other schools at that time, and, indeed, of long afterwards) he was subjected to severe trials of endurance by the rough and rude manners of the ordinary schoolboy, and the harsh and unequal violence of the schoolmaster. Of an exceptionally refined and sensitive temperament, he was none the less determined in resistance to injustice and oppression, and his refusal to submit tamely to their petty tyrannies seems to have brought upon him more than the common amount of harsh treatment. It penetrated into his inmost soul, and inspired the opening stanzas of “The Revolt of Islam,” in intensity of feeling seldom equalled. Some alleviation of these sufferings of childhood he found in his own mental resources. For his amusement he translated, we are assured, several books of the Natural History of Pliny. Of Greek writers he even then (in an English version) read Plato, who afterwards, in his own language, always remained one of his chief literary companions, and he applied himself also to the study of French and of German. In natural science, Chemistry seems to have been his especial pursuit.

In 1810, at the age of seventeen, he entered University College, Oxford. There he studied and wrote unceasingly. With a strong predilection for metaphysics, he devoted himself in particular to the great masters of dialectics, Locke and Hume, and to their chief representatives in French philosophy. Ardent and enthusiastic in the pursuit of truth, he sought to enlarge his knowledge and ideas from every possible quarter, and he engaged in correspondence with distinguished persons, suggested to him by choice or chance, with whom he discussed the most interesting philosophical questions. Like all truly fruitful minds, the youthful inquirer was not satisfied with the dicta of mere authority, or with the consensus, however general, of past ages, and he hesitated not, in matters of opinion in which every well-instructed intelligence is capable of judging for itself, to bring to the test of right reason the most widely-received dogmas of Antiquity. Actuated by this spirit, rather than by any matured convictions, and wishing to elicit sincere as well as exhaustive argument on the deepest of all metaphysical inquiries, in an unfortunate moment for himself, he caused to be printed an abstract of anti-theistic speculations, drawn from David Hume and other authorities, presented in a series of mathematically-expressed propositions. Copies of this modest thesis of two pages were sent either by the author, or by some other hand, to the heads of his College. The clerical dignitaries, listening to the dictates of outraged authority, rather than influenced by calm reflection, which would have, perhaps, shewn them the useless injustice of so extreme a measure, proceeded at once to expel him from the University.[233]

That in spite of this impetuous attack upon the stereotyped presentations of Theism, Shelley had an eminently religious temperament has been well insisted upon by a recent biographer:—

So thorough was his contempt for mere received and routine thought, that even Aristotle, the great idol of the mediÆval schoolmen, and still an object of extraordinary veneration in the elder University, became for him a kind of synonym for despotic authority—

and was, accordingly, treated with undue neglect. As for politics, as represented in the parliament and public Press of his day, he was indignantly impatient of the too usual trifling and unreality of public life. He seldom read the newspapers; nor could he ever bring himself to mix with the “rabble of the House.”

Thus, forced into antipathy to the ordinary and orthodox business of life around him, the poet withdrew himself more and more from it into his own thoughts, and hopes, and aspirations, which he communicated to his familiar friends. Some of those, however, into whose society he chanced to be thrown, were not of a sort of mind most congenial to his own. Yet they all bear witness to his surpassing moral no less than mental, constitution. “In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley,” says one of his most intimate acquaintances; “in no being was the perception of right and 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 have had the happiness to associate with some of the best specimens of gentleness; but (may my candour and 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.” This is the voluntary testimony of a friend who was not inclined to excess of praise.[235]

The sudden end of his career at Oxford had estranged him from his father, who was of a temperament the very opposite to that of the enthusiastic reformer—harsh, intolerant, and bigoted in his prejudices; and the young Shelley’s marriage, shortly afterwards, to Harriet Westbrook, a young girl of much beauty, but of little cultivation of mind, and in a position of life different from his own, incensed him still further. The marriage, happy enough in the beginning, proved to be an ill-assorted one, and various causes contributed to the inevitable dÉnouement. After a union of some three years, the marriage, by mutual consent, was dissolved. Two years later—not, it seems, in consequence of the divorce, as sometimes has been suggested—the young wife put an end to her existence—a terrible and tragic termination of an ill-considered attachment, which must have caused him the deepest pangs of grief, and which seems always, and justly, to have cast a gloomy shadow upon his future life.

Brief as his career was, we can refer only to the most interesting events in it. Of these, his enthusiastic effort to arouse a bloodless revolution in Ireland, such as, if effected, might have prevented the continued miseries of that especially neglected portion of the three kingdoms, is not the least noteworthy. With his lately-married wife and her sister he was living at Keswick, when, by a sudden inspiration, he resolved to cross the Channel, and engage in the work of propagating his principles of political and social reform. This was in the early part of 1812. In Dublin, where they established their head-quarters, he printed an Address to the Irish People, which, by his own hands, as well as by other agency, was distributed far and wide. In this wonderfully well-considered and reasonable manifesto, the principles laid down as necessary to success in attempting deliverance from ages of bad laws and misgovernment, are as sound as the ardour and sincerity of his hopeless undertaking are unmistakeable. The cosmopolitan scope of the Address appears in such passages as these:—

Truer in his perception of the radical causes and cure of national evils than most party politicians, he urged the essential need of ethical and social change, without which mere political change of parties, or increase in material wealth of some sections in the community, must be valueless in any true estimate of a nation’s prosperity. Shelley also issued, in pamphlet form, Proposals for an Association—a plan for the formation of a vast society of Irish Catholics, to enforce their “emancipation”—a measure which was not brought about until twenty years later after long and vehement opposition.

Two months were devoted to this generous but futile work; the people of Ireland did not move, and the young reformer returned to England, but without abandoning his propaganda of the principles of liberty and justice. While residing in Somersetshire he published a paper entitled a Declaration of Rights, to circulate which recourse was had to ingenious methods. Four years later, in 1817, he published A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom. “He saw that the House of Commons did not represent the country; and acting upon his principle that Government is the servant of the Governed, he sought means for ascertaining the real will of the nation with regard to its Parliament, and for bringing the collective opinions of the population to bear upon its rulers. The plan proposed was that a large network of committees should be formed, and that by their means every individual man should be canvassed. We find here the same method of advancing reform by peaceable associations as in Ireland.” At the same time, in presence of the incalculable amount of ignorance, destitution, and consequent venality of the great mass of the community—the necessary outcome of long ages of bad and selfish legislation—Universal Suffrage for the present appeared to him to be not a safe experiment. Evidence of controversial power, is his “grave and lofty” Letter to Lord Ellenborough, who had recently sentenced to imprisonment the printers of the Age of Reason, “an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and the freedom of the intellect, carrying the matter beyond the instance of legal tyranny, which occasioned its composition, and treating it with philosophical if impassioned, seriousness.”[236] Before his visit to Ireland, he had been engaged (as he tells his correspondent, William Godwin) in writing An Inquiry into the Causes of the Failure of the French Revolution to Benefit Mankind. We have to lament that this Essay seems never to have been completed, since it is hardly doubtful that it would have been of unusual interest. Such was the force and activity of Shelley’s intellect, as displayed in the regions of practical philosophy, at the age of twenty, and before he had given to the world his first productions in poetry.

Queen Mab, written in part two years before, was finished and printed in 1813. Although it may have some of the defects of immaturity of genius, it has the charm of a genuine poetic inspiration. Intense hatred of selfish injustice and untruth in all their shapes, equally intense sympathy with all suffering, sublime faith in the ultimate triumph of Good, clothed in the language of entrancing eloquence and sublimity, are the characteristics of this unique poem. The author’s depreciation of his earliest poetic attempt in after years, in a letter addressed to the Examiner, only a month before his death, strikes us as scarcely sincere, and as having been a sort of necessary sacrifice on the altar of Expediency.

In this exquisitely beautiful prophecy of a “Golden Age” to be, the fairy Queen Mab, the unembodied being who acts as his instructress and guide through the Universe, displays to his affrighted vision, in one vast panorama, the horrors of the Past and the Present. She afterwards, in a glorious apocalypse, relieves his despair by revealing to him the “new heavens and the new earth,” which eventually will displace the present evil constitution of things on our planet. On the redeemed and regenerated Globe:—

In rapt vision the prophet-poet apostrophises the “New Earth”:

From the Essay, in the form of a note, which he subjoined to the passage we have quoted, we extract the principal arguments:—

Shelley next insists on the incalculable benefits of a reformed diet economically, socially, and politically:—

He concludes this philosophic discourse with an earnest appeal to the various classes of society:—

Some time after the melancholy death of his first wife, Shelley married Mary Wolstoncroft, the daughter of William Godwin, author of Political Justice—perhaps the most revolutionary of all pleas for a change in the constitution of society that has ever proceeded from a prosaic tradesman, such as, in the ordinary intercourse of life and interchange of ideas, his biography and correspondence (lately published) prove him to have been. Her mother was the celebrated and earliest advocate of the rights of women. Previously, the lovers had travelled through France and part of Germany, and an account of their six weeks’ tour was afterwards printed by Mrs. Shelley.

In 1815 appeared his Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude. In 1817 he again left England for Geneva. While in Switzerland he made the acquaintance of Byron, which was renewed during his stay in Italy. In the same year he returned to this country and, after a short sojourn with Leigh Hunt, he settled at Great Marlow, one of the most picturesque parts of the Thames. There, in spite of his own ill-health, he showed the active benevolence of his character, not only in the easier form of alms-giving but also in frequent visits to the sick and destitute, at the risk of aggravating symptoms of consumption now alarmingly apparent. There, too, he composed the Revolt of Islam, or, as it was originally more fitly entitled, Laon and Cythna. In this poem, by the mouth of Laone, he again expresses his humanitarian convictions and sympathies. She calls upon the enfranchised nations:—

While he was yet residing in Marlow, the Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.,) died; and, since her character had been in strong contrast with her father’s and with royal persons’ in general, her early death seems to have caused, not only ceremonial mourning, but also genuine regret amongst all in the community having any knowledge of her exceptional amiability. The poet seized the opportunity of so public an event, and published An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. By the Hermit of Marlow, in which he inscribed the motto—“We pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.” In this pamphlet, while paying due tribute of regret for the death of an amiable girl, and fully appreciating the sorrow caused by death as well among the destitute and obscure (with whom, indeed, the too usual absence of the care and sympathy of friends intensifies the sorrow) as among the rich and powerful, he invited, in studiously moderate language, attention to the many just reasons for national mourning in the interests of the poor no less than of princes; and, in particular, invited the nation to express its indignant grief for the fate of the Lancashire mechanics who, missing the happier fate of their brethren slaughtered at Peterloo, were subjected to an ignominious death by a government which had, by its neglect, encouraged the growth of a just discontent.

In 1818 Shelley left England never to return. At this time was composed the principal part of his masterpiece—Prometheus Unbound, the most finished and carefully executed of all his poems. While in Rome (1819) he published The Cenci, which had been suggested to him by the famous picture of Guido, until lately supposed to be that of Beatrice Cenci, and by the traditions, current even in the poet’s time, of the cruel fate of his heroine. Shakspere’s four great dramas excepted, The Cenci must take rank as the finest tragic drama since the days of the Greek masters. It is worked up to a degree of pathos unsurpassed by anything of the kind in literature. “The Fifth Act,” remarks Mrs. Shelley, his editor and commentator, “is a masterpiece. Every character has a voice that echoes truth in its tones.” The Cenci was followed in quick succession by the Witch of Atlas, Adonais (an elegy on the death of Keats), the most exquisite “In Memoriam”—not excepting Milton’s or Tennyson’s—ever written; and Hellas, which was inspired by his strong sympathy with the Greeks, who were then engaged in the war of independence.

Of his lesser productions, the Ode to the Skylark is of an inspiration seldom equalled in its kind. With the “blythe spirit,” whom he apostrophises, the poet rises in rapt ecstasy “higher still and higher.” For the rest of his productions (the Letters from Italy and criticisms or rather eulogies on Greek art have an especial interest) and for the other events in his brief remaining existence we must refer our readers to the complete edition of his works.[241] The last work upon which he was engaged was his Triumph of Life, a poem in the terza rima of the Divine Comedy. It breaks off abruptly—it is peculiarly interesting to note—with the significant words, “Then what is Life, I cried?”

The manner of his death is well known. While engaged in his usual recreation of boating he was drowned in the bay of Spezia. His body was washed on to the shore and, according to regulations then in force by the Italian governments of the day, in guarding against possible infection from the plague, it was burned where it lay, in presence of his friends Byron and Trelawney, and the ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery in Rome—a not unfitting disposal of the remains of one the most spiritualised of human beings.

The following just estimate of the character of his genius and writings, by a thoughtful critic, is worth reproduction here:—“No man was more essentially a poet—‘glancing from earth to heaven.’ He was, indeed, ‘of imagination all compact.’ ... In all his poems he uniformly denounces vice and immorality in every form; and his descriptions of love, which are numerous, are always refined and delicate, with even less of sensuousness than in many of our most admired writers. It is true that he decried marriage, but not in favour of libertinism; and the evils he depicts, or laments, are those arising from the indissolubility of the bond, or from the opinions of society as to its necessity—opinions to which he himself submitted by marrying the woman to whom he was attached.... His reputation as a poet has gradually widened since his death, and has not yet reached its culminating point. He was the poet of the future—of an ideal futurity—and hence it was that his own age could not entirely sympathise with him. He has been called the ‘poet of poets,’ a proud title, and, in some respects, deserved.”[242]

Of his creed, the article which he most firmly held, and which, perhaps, most distinguishes him from ordinary thinkers, was the Perfectibility of his species, and his firm faith in the ultimate triumph of Good. “He believed,” says the one authority who had the best means of knowing his thought and feeling, “that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these notes to criticise the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to mention the fact that he entertained it, and was, indeed, attached to it with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel Evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the world, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he liked best to dwell upon was the image of One warring with an evil principle, oppressed not only by it but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity—a victim full of gratitude and of hope and of the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good.” Such was the conviction which inspired his greatest poem The Prometheus Unbound.

A principal charm of his poetry is that which repels the common class of readers: “He loved to idealise reality, and this is a task shared by few. We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity. But few of us understand or sympathise with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty and adoration of abstract Good with sympathies with our own kind.”[243] Of so rare a spirit it is peculiarly interesting to know something of the outward form:—

As to his voice, impressions varied:—

If the physical characteristics of a great Teacher or of a sublime Genius excite a natural curiosity, it is the principal moral characteristics which most reasonably and profoundly interest us. To the supremely amiable disposition of the creator of The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound brief reference has been made; and we shall fitly supplement this imperfect sketch of his humanitarian career with the vivid impressions left on the mind of the friend who best knew him. Love of truth and hatred of falsehood and injustice were not, in his case, limited to the pages of a book, and forgotten in the too often deadening influence of intercourse with the world—they permeated his whole life and conversation.

“The qualities that struck any one newly introduced to Shelley were, first, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his discourse with warm affection and helpful sympathy; the other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement, and the fervent eloquence with which he discussed such subjects. His conversation was marked by its happy abundance, and the beautiful language in which he clothed his poetic ideas and philosophical notions. To defecate life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion of his soul; he dedicated to it every power of his mind, every pulsation of his heart. He looked on political freedom as the direct agent to effect the happiness of mankind; and thus any new-sprung hope of liberty inspired a joy and even exultation more intense and wild than he could have felt for any personal advantage. Those who have never experienced the workings of passion on general and unselfish subjects cannot understand this; and it must be difficult of comprehension to the younger generation rising around, since they cannot remember the scorn and hatred with which the partisans of reform were regarded some few years ago, nor the persecution to which they were exposed.

“Many advantages attended his birth; he spurned them all when balanced with what he considered his duties. He was generous to imprudence—devoted to heroism. These characteristics breathe throughout his poetry. The struggle for human weal; the resolution firm to martyrdom; the impetuous pursuit; the glad triumph in good; the determination not to despair.... Perfectly gentle and forbearing in manner, he suffered a great deal of internal irritability, or rather excitement, and his fortitude to bear was almost always on the stretch; and thus, during a short life, he had gone through more experience of sensation than many whose existence is protracted. ‘If I die to-morrow,’ he said, on the eve of unanticipated death, ‘I have lived to be older than my father.’ The weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily. You read his sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he held over them in his animated countenance and brilliant eyes.

“He died, and the world showed no outward sigh; but his influence over mankind, though slow in growth, is fast augmenting; and in the ameliorations that have taken place in the political state of his country we may trace, in part, the operation of his arduous struggles.... He died, and his place among those who knew him intimately has never been filled up. He walked beside them like a spirit of good to comfort and benefit—to enlighten the darkness of life with irradiations of genius, to cheer with his sympathy and love.”[245]