GRAD
828
B885ess
1903

University of
Michigan
Libraries
AL. 1817
ARTES
SCIENTIA VERITAS
!
BROWNING'S ESSAY
ON SHELLEY
13.9

BROWNING'S ESSAY
ON SHELLEY
BEING HIS INTRODUCTION TO
THE SPURIOUS SHELLEY LETTERS
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,
BY RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.
LONDON
ALEXANDER MORING
THE DE LA MORE PRESS
298 REGENT STREET, W.
1903
000
225 717
828
B885ess
1903
5-10-55 MFP
INTRODUCTION
IN one of the dramatic fragments of
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, perhaps the
modern English poet who has best
succeeded in clothing striking imagery in
pregnant phrase, we read-
"His thoughts are so much higher than his state,
That, like a mountain hanging o'er a hut,
They chill and darken it.”
The simile not inaptly describes Brown-
ing's relation to the spurious Shelley
letters edited by him. His conception of
the editorial function far transcended that
of the commonplace individual who would
have deemed it before all things incum-
bent upon him to inform the reader what
the letters were and how they were
authenticated, and to give some account of
the circumstances under which they were
6
INTRODUCTION
probably written, and of the persons to
whom they were addressed. These con-
siderations were altogether too sublunary
for Browning, part of whose intro-
duction is occupied by a disquisition,
interesting in itself but devoid of special
reference to Shelley, upon the objective and
subjective aspects of poetical genius; the
other with remarks upon Shelley, highly
just and rational, but which might with
almost equal propriety have been prefixed
to any other of his writings.
In one point of view this lax
construction of editorial obligations was
fortunate for Browning, since, the letters
being fabrications, any special pains he
might have bestowed upon them would
have been thrown away, and any elaborate
comment would have subjected him to
ridicule. On the other hand, had he
made any investigation of them in their
relation to Shelley's authentic letters, a
man of his acuteness could hardly have
failed to discover their spuriousness,
INTRODUCTION
7
and he would thus have obviated a
painful literary scandal. In this case,
however, we should have lost his
introduction-a document of much in-
terest as an exposition of his views on the
objective and subjective elements in poetry,
as a testimony of his appreciation of
Shelley, and as his sole important com-
position in prose. We design to offer a few
remarks upon it in each of these aspects.
Distinguishing between two leading
classes of poets, the objective, or those who
sing of what is external to themselves; and
the subjective, who, though frequently
under transparent disguises, reveal them-
selves to the world, Browning justly main-
tains that the biography, including the
correspondence, of the latter class is the
more important, inasmuch as it is the
more essential to the comprehension of the
man and his work. After admitting that
the details of the life of an objective poet
may be "fraught with instruction and
interest," he adds-
8
INTRODUCTION
"Still, we can, if needs be, dispense with
them. The man passes, the work remains.
The work speaks for itself, as we say;
and the biography of the worker is no
more necessary to the understanding or
enjoyment of it than is a model or ana-
tomy of some tropical tree to the right tast-
ing of the fruit we are familiar with on
the market stall, or a geologist's map and
stratification to the prompt recognition of
the hill-top, our land-mark of every day."
The man, that is to say, is in this in-
stance externalised in his work, which be-
comes almost independent of the man. In
the case of the subjective poet, man and
work are deeply interknit, and one is
scarcely intelligible without the other.
Here, therefore, the revelation of character
through biography or correspondence be-
comes highly important. The conclusion
is just. It is hardly likely that the fullest
acquaintance with the sayings and doings
of Homer would contribute much to the
elucidation of the Iliad and Odyssey; and
the interest with which we follow the his-
INTRODUCTION
9
tories of less purely objective poets like
Dante and Goethe is rather from sympathy
with the men than from the expectation of
additional light upon their works. But
almost every additional scrap of inform-
ation upon subjective writers like Byron
and Shelley has profited the study of the
poet no less than of the man.
It would be interesting to ascertain
whether Browning considered himself in
the light of an objective or a subjective
poet. His evident preference for the
latter type implies that he would have
wished to belong to it, and he certainly
would have been so classed if he had
written nothing but his Paracelsus. Such
a view, however, would hardly be tenable
in the face of his dramas, and still less.
of his dramatic monologues and lyrics,
where he has represented a vast variety of
personages differing in all respects from
each other and widely remote from his
own type of character. He may have had
an idea that he was destined to exemplify
i
Uor M
IO
INTRODUCTION
Maou
in his own person the feasibility in modern
times of a perfect union of the contrasted
types. "Nor is there," he says, "any
reason why these two modes of poetic
faculty may not issue hereafter from the
same poet in successive perfect works,
examples of which, according to what are
now considered the exigences of art, we
have hitherto possessed in distinct in-
dividuals only." There is nothing un-
reasonable in this anticipation. The great
development of introspection in modern
times increases the probability of its being
found in union with a genius for object-
ive treatment. In few poets since Shake-
speare have the power of external represent-
ation and the capacity for psychological
analysis approximated more markedly than
in Browning and it might hardly be too
much to claim as applicable to himself his
own metaphor of "the perfect shield,
with the gold and the silver side set up for
all comers to challenge."
It has been said that every man is either
a Platonist
INTRODUCTION
or an
I I
Aristotelian-mainly
swayed, that is, by ideas, or else by facts.
This distinction corresponds to that between
the subjective and objective poet traced by
Browning in this essay.
this essay. Ideas are SO
ethereal in comparison to hard prosaic fact
that one naturally expects to find poets,
generally speaking, among the Platonists,
and perceives with surprise that those whom
the world has agreed to place in the very
highest rank-Homer, the Greek drama-
tists, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe-have without exception been
objective poets, inspired by abstract ideas,
no doubt, but delighting in the description
of externalities and in concrete imagery,
and, with the exception of the last three
among them in their early writings, uncom-
municative respecting themselves. Com-
pare them with Petrarch and Wordsworth,
whose poems are seldom devoid of some
personal reference, disguised as this
frequently may be, and unless one is
prepared to put Petrarch and Wordsworth


12
INTRODUCTION
in the front rank, it will be needful to admit
that the power of moulding the external
world into poetry is greater than that of
interpreting it; and that although the
minute analysis of emotion, now so greatly in
fashion, may prove the proficient a virtuoso,
it is the power of calling up the lively image
of another being that authenticates the poet.
It is a further point in favour of the
objective poet that in his highest develop-
ment he possesses the gift of analysis
equally with the subjective minstrel, while
the latter at his best is rarely a creator. The
fact that Hamlet and King John proceeded
from the same hand is conclusive of the co-
existence of these powers in Shakespeare,
while the former of these plays is perhaps
the only one among his works in which the
subjective element can be said to predom-
inate. As we have remarked, however, the
circumstances of later ages are favourable
to the development of a mixed type. Our
enterprises of great pith and moment are
accompanied by far more introspection than
(C
INTRODUCTION
13
those of our ancestors were: we think and
talk more about them, even after they have
gained instead of lost "the name of action."
Posterity, contemplating the magnificent
series of portraits of great men of the
present day with which Mr. Watts has
adorned the National Portrait Gallery, will
opine them to be one and all pondering the
riddle of the painful earth and although
much is no doubt due to the idiosyncrasy
of the painter, the idiosyncrasy of the sitter
counts also. It is not then surprising that
the two chief poets of the period should
combine the power of delineating moods
with that of delineating action to a degree
unknown in former ages.
:
This is especially the case with Browning,
"a subtle-souled psychologist" if any man
ever was, but whose works are at the
same time a gallery of figures extraneous
to the actual experience and the mental
constitution of the author himself. As an
editor and preface-writer he must be
censured as neither sufficiently subjective
14
INTRODUCTION
nor sufficiently objective. His psycho-
logical faculty seems comparatively in
abeyance; and he does not lay hold of the
little points of contact with the actual
Shelley which the letters, however erro-
neously, were believed by him to afford.
His own remonstrance might be turned
against himself—
"Ah! did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he stop and speak to you ?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
But you were living before that,
And you are living after:
And the memory that I started at-
My starting moves your laughter.
I crossed a moor with a name of its own,
And a use in the world, no doubt;
Yet a handsbreadth of it shines alone.
Mid the blank miles round about.
For there I picked up on the heather,
Picked up, and put into my breast,
A moulted feather, an eagle's feather:
-Well, I forget the rest."
It is true that the spurious letters have
INTRODUCTION
15
more affinity to the blank miles than to
the feather of the bird of Jove; but, as we
shall have occasion to show, Browning might
have made them a link of connection with
something infinitely more valuable.
Passing from general considerations to
the more restricted subject of Shelley as
revealed in his correspondence, Browning
does not conceal his opinion that the letters
by themselves hardly deserved an elaborate
preface. He speaks of "arranging these
few supplementary letters" (which he can-
not have done, as the order is the obvious
one of chronology)" with a recognition of
the value of the whole collection," that is,
of the inestimable collection published by
Mrs. Shelley in 1840. A full recognition
from Browning's pen of the unparalleled
splendour and beauty of these letters would
indeed have been precious, but it would
have made his preface longer than his
text, and we may be satisfied with his treat-
ment of the only point considered by him.
He renders emphatic testimony to the
16
INTRODUCTION
transparent sincerity of Shelley's letters,
regarded as an expression of the writer's
inner nature, and justly infers a like
sincerity in the poems. "The musician
speaks on the note he sings with; there is
no change in the scale, as he diminishes the
volume into familiar intercourse." In a
previous part of the essay, he had indicated
this wholeness of soul as the true criterion
of the really great subjective poet, and had
gone so far as to declare, not less rightly
than boldly, that "the unmistakeable
quality of the verse would be evidence
enough, under ordinary circumstances" (he
seems to make an exception in Shelley's
case on account of the special virulence of
his calumniators), "not only of the kind
and degree of the intellectual, but of the
moral constitution of Shelley." Unfor-
tunately he seems to have shifted his ground
at a later period, and to have tested the
poetry by the man instead of the man by
the poetry. Mrs. Sutherland Orr, at all
events, informs us that, having subse-
INTRODUCTION
17
quently come to think less favourably of
Shelley's mortal part, Browning simul-
taneously brought down the immortal
Shelley from the rank of a poet to that of
a poetical artist. The manifest error of
such a conclusion should have warned him
that he was on a wrong track, and that
the high poetical character of Shelley's
writings is much better authenticated than
any gossip about his actions. If he found
the two sets of facts irreconcilable, the per-
ception that Shelley's poetry at any rate
was unassailable should have compelled him
to renounce the doctrine of this essay, and
to deny the necessary correspondence of
the natures of poetry and poet; but such
a recantation would have been a moral
impossibility for him.
Perhaps the truest moral to be deduced
from Browning's abortive preface is that
the poet who possesses Shelley's genuine
letters (and what poet does not?) should
always carry them about with him. We
vehemently suspect that Browning had
B
18
INTRODUCTION
omitted this precaution, otherwise his
references would have been less general.
He will no more pin himself down to a
direct quotation than the fabricator will
compromise himself by mention of a
circumstance which he might be proved
to have misapprehended. It is true that
occurrences incapable of being brought into
connection with the things of the spirit
had little interest for Browning, but he
might, without protracting his essay to a
disproportionate length, have demonstrated,
instead of merely asserted, the degree in
which Shelley's spiritual progress is
mirrored in his correspondence. It is
indeed the case that his resources in this
department were inferior to ours, for
Jefferson Hogg had not yet revealed the
extravagant folly of Shelley's boyish letters.
But even in those published by Mrs.
Shelley the path is ever one of pro-
gress-
"Ascending ever, leaving far away
Avernian vales and Stygian lakes below."
INTRODUCTION
19
This is partly obscured by the splen-
dour of the descriptive letters to Peacock
coming about the middle of the series,
which are naturally regarded as Shelley's
highest efforts in the epistolary style. So
they are as regards mere beauty of
language, but in later examples, treating of
more familiar themes and consequently
less elaborate and ambitious, there prevails
a purity, a clarity, a transparency more dis-
tinctly expressive of the mind within, and
bringing to the mind Poe's description of
Helen with the lamp-
'There, in that brilliant window-niche,
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land !”
We have spoken of Browning's essay as
abortive, and so, promptly recalled from
circulation, for a time it was. But it was
a soul independent of the inanimate body
into which, as in the Indian legend, it had
fortuitously entered. Not only does it
20
INTRODUCTION
treat of Shelley with justice and insight, if
less fully than might have been desired, but
It has a special interest as by far the most
important specimen we possess of the prose
of the author: for the apparently more
elaborate Life of Strafford which Browning
wrote for his friend Forster is little but
collection of excerpts from indigestible
State papers.
It is also an exemplification of his
method as a literary workman. Appar-
ently he wrote prose very much as he
wrote poetry, with great labour as regarded
the evocation of his thought, and little or
none as regarded its display to the best
advantage. He dives deep for pearls, but
too often leaves them in the shell.) He
has no idea of balance and proportion, but
goes on heaping thought upon thought as
a child piles toy bricks one upon another,
until the entire edifice is in danger of
collapse. Yet, involved and unwieldy as
his sentences commonly are, the bulky
mass frequently enshrines miniature master-

INTRODUCTION
21
""
pieces of phraseology, felicitous brevities,
full of pith and moment, and sudden flashes
of epigram. The subjective poet "is
rather a seer than a fashioner, and what he
produces will be less a work than an efflu-
ence." He "selects that silence of the
earth and sea in which he can best hear the
beating of his individual heart." In the
sincere poet "there is no dropping of the
tragic mask, as the crowd melts away.
Passages like these exemplify an interesting
predisposition of the poetical temperament,
whether endowed or unendowed with the
accomplishment of verse, the tendency to
translate the abstract into the concrete, and
make reasoning as it were visible and
tangible by sensuous imagery. The
following passage, but for its inferiority in
rhythmical charm, might have come from
the pen of James Martineau--
"Did the personality of such an one stand
like an open watch-tower in the midst of
the territory it is erected to gaze on, and
were the storms and calms, the stars and
22
INTRODUCTION
meteors, its watchman was wont to report
of, the habitual variegation of his every-day
life, as they glanced across its open roof or
lay reflected on its four-square parapet?"
It will be proper to give some account of
the forgeries which Browning was misled
into accrediting as editor. They, as well as
some deceptive transcripts, all but facsimiles,
purchased by Sir Percy Shelley, who after-
wards discovered that he had the originals,
and a still greater amount of fabricated
matter relating
relating to Byron, fortunately
exposed in time to prevent publication,
were manufactured by a person who
assumed Byron's name, and, perhaps with
warrant, claimed to be his natural son.
They were between 1848 and 1850 gradu-
ally disposed of to Mr. White, bookseller
in Pall Mall, by this man's wife or mistress,
who represented them to be the property
of an invalid sister. Mr. White was no
doubt at first an innocent victim, but had
evidently come to entertain suspicions which
it was his duty to have confirmed or cleared
INTRODUCTION
23
up. Instead of this he sent the letters to
be sold by auction, where those with which
we are concerned were purchased by
Edward Moxon, "the publisher of poets
and the poet of publishers," which certainly
would not have happened if he had known,
as Mr. White knew, that they came from
the so-called Byron, who was already in the
black books of the Tradesmen's Protection
Society. There was nothing in the external
appearance of the letters to excite suspicion;
the paper was old, or made to appear so;
some trifling but damning errors in post-
marks required a Post-office expert to detect
them; the handwriting could only be proved
a counterfeit by careful comparison with a
mass of genuine correspondence. Some of
the letters, indeed, though none of those
purchased by Moxon, were all but facsimiles
of the genuine documents, from which they
had been laboriously copied. It is no
wonder that, so long as the letters were
in the auction room, Moxon should think
that he was making a good speculation by
24
INTRODUCTION
acquiring them, and doing Browning a good
turn by entrusting him with the editorship.
Browning was in England in the summer of
1851, when the proposal may have been
made to him. In the autumn he proceeded
to Paris, where his introduction was written
in the first days of December, amid the
excitement of the Bonapartist coup d'état,
no doubt from proofs sent out to him. It
is not certain that he had ever seen the
manuscripts, but if he had there was no-
thing in their appearance to awake suspicion.
The book was published at the beginning
of 1852, and was duly reviewed by
the critical journals, with some expres-
sions of disappointment at its poverty of
interest, but without a word of scepticism.
It was comfortably taking its place as a
minor classic, when lo! the dramatic dis-
covery of Francis Turner Palgrave of
Golden Treasury fame, who, taking up a
copy from Tennyson's table, was con-
founded to encounter an extract from a
memorable article in the Quarterly Review
INTRODUCTION
25
by his own father, in the shape of a letter
from Shelley to Godwin, dated twenty-one
years previously.
a stubborn thing.
A fact like this is indeed
Ere long Sara Coleridge
recognised in another epistle the clumsy
would-be humour of "Janus Weather-
cock," and others, not demonstrably appro-
priations, proved to be vulnerable in the
postmark. Two, however, were copies of
genuine letters, though not made directly
from the originals that to Laurence on
his Empire of the Nairs (August 17,
1812), and that to Keats (July 27, 1820),
inviting him to Italy, which had been
published by Lewes in the Westminster
Review for 1841, and was still in his
possession when he reviewed the fabricated
letters there in 1852. The forgers ap-
pear to have proceeded about this time to
the United States, a fact to be borne in
mind by American collectors of Byron-
Shelley- and Keatsiana.
The supposititious letters, after abstract-
ing the two copies of genuine letters,
26
INTRODUCTION
amount to twenty-three. They extend
from Shelley's residence at Oxford in 1811
to his residence at Pisa in 1821. Their
general agreement with the facts of Shelley's
life justifies the conclusion that they were
fabricated after these had become known
from Mrs. Shelley's biographical notes in
her edition of Shelley's works in 1839.
It might be difficult to adduce positive
internal evidence of forgery, beyond those
instanced above, except the certainly suffi-
cient one that the seven letters to Edward
Graham are addressed throughout in a
wrong Christian name. It might be added
that the two dated from Bath at the end of
January and beginning of February 1817,
are supposed to be written when Shelley
was no longer there: he had, however,
departed so recently that the forger must
have been fairly well acquainted with his
movements. The damning circumstance
is not so much the frequency of erroneous
particulars as the dearth of any particulars.
at all. Scarcely one of Shelley's genuine
INTRODUCTION
27
letters is so devoted to the things of the
spirit as not to impart some tangible piece
of information. The forger is so careful to
avoid getting out of his depth that he never
enters the water, and would have us believe
that Shelley wrote twenty-three letters with-
out revealing a single fact respecting himself
-an impossible supposition. No explana-
tion is vouchsafed of the manner in which
so many letters, written to such various
persons at such different periods, came into
one hand. Upon this Moxon and Brown-
ing certainly ought to have insisted. It is
to be remarked, however, that many of the
letters sold at the auction, though not
purchased by Moxon, were really pregnant
with information, being copies of genuine
letters which had for a
while gone
astray, but had in the interim been re-
covered by Mrs. or by Sir Percy Shelley.
The history of the loss is known, but how
the forger obtained an opportunity of
counterfeiting the documents remains.
matter of conjecture. They had been left.
*
28
INTRODUCTION
in Peacock's charge when the Shelleys
quitted Marlow, and he, upon his own
removal to London, thoughtlessly left them
in the custody of Shelley's landlord, Mad-
docks, who pretended that they were
collateral security for a debt, and in some
way disposed of them. These afforded the
copies purchased at the auction by Sir
Percy Shelley, who afterwards found that
he or Mrs. Shelley had already recovered
the originals. They formed, however,
but a small part of the mass of Marlow
documents. The present writer, some
thirty years ago, had the satisfaction of
redeeming and restoring to the family a
number of MSS., entirely literary, which
are now in the Bodleian.
Browning suffered for his inattention to
the ordinary duties of an editor. If, as
already remarked, he had investigated the
letters in connection with the correspond-
ence already published, he could hardly have
helped conceiving suspicions. Some cir-
cumstances, indeed, would not have im-
INTRODUCTION
29
He could
pressed him as they impress us.
not have realised, as we do, the moral im-
possibility of Shelley's writing to Godwin
from the Continent without some allusion to
the subject of money. He could hardly
have been aware that Shelley's corre-
spondence with Hookham ceased after his
elopement with Mary Godwin. If he did
not know, and probably he did not, that
Longdill was Shelley's attorney, he would
be less amazed at the Poet's rhapsodical
effusiveness towards the Philistine. If, not-
withstanding, he had made the comparison
with the authentic letters which he ought to
have done, he must have noticed one of
the most certain signs of fabrication in the
frequent engrafting of phrases from the
latter, in order to impart a Shelleian flavour
to the novelties, an achievement of which
the forger, a master in the mechanical part
of his profession, was otherwise incapable.
Thus, in a letter professedly addressed to
Godwin from Geneva, occurs a striking
phrase from a letter really written at the
30
INTRODUCTION
same time and place by Mary Shelley, and
printed as hers years before. The curious
expression, "I have contrived to get my
musical coals at Newcastle itself" is bor-
rowed from a letter to Horace Smith to
impart vraisemblance to one addressed to an
entirely imaginary "Marlow." The extra-
ordinary abruptness with which the letters
in general begin might also have aroused
suspicion, as well as the evasion of reference
to those matters of fact which might have
given the literary detective a handle. They
are commonly mere harangues. On the
whole, the publication must be said to have
done little honour to the critical acumen of
Moxon or Browning, and still less to that of
Chorley and the other reviewers, who had
more time for investigation, and a more
ample critical supellex. As we have intim-
ated, Browning, writing in Paris, had prob-
ably no access to Shelley's authentic letters ;
his own copy would be at Florence, and it is
dubious whether the Bibliothèque Nation-
ale, which thirty years afterwards had still to
INTRODUCTION
31
acquire Jefferson Hogg's Life of Shelley,
could have provided him with another.
Nor does he seem to have taken his work
too seriously.
"You will not be sorry,"
says Mrs. Browning, writing to John
Kenyon, "to have Robert's preface thrown
in, though he makes very light of it
himself." He thought enough of it,
however, to forward copies to Mrs. Jameson
and Barry Cornwall, but it appears from
Mrs. Browning's letter, stating the circum-
stance, that in so doing he exhausted the
exiguous store of copies allotted him by
Moxon, and apparently he did not care to
procure another.
It may be added, since the circumstance
has not hitherto been made public, that
Moxon, hardly able to credit the spurious-
ness of the letters even after Mr. Pal-
grave's exposure, and the Post-office verdict
on the postmarks, laid them before Pea-
cock for his opinion. Peacock says, in a
memorandum on the subject, "Mr.
Moxon, having brought to me the letters.
32
INTRODUCTION
i
which he had purchased as letters of
Shelley, requested my opinion of their
genuineness. Comparing them with
others in my possession, I had no doubt
of their being forgeries. They were well
enough executed to impose on recollection,
but not on comparison.
"Mr. Moxon having expressed a wish to
publish the few inedited letters in my
possession in the place of those which had
been proved to be forgeries, I have placed
them in his hands for that purpose. They
are of the same character as those published
by Mrs. Shelley, and serve, as in the
instance of the letter from Naples, to
complete the series of Shelley's local
observations."
For some unknown reason the contem-
plated publication by Moxon did not take
place. The letters appeared in Fraser's
Magazine for March 1860; and have
since been incorporated into the complete
editions of Shelley's works, and into Sir
Henry Cole's edition of Peacock,
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
[DEC. 1851]
AN opportunity having presented itself
for the acquisition of a series of unedited
letters by Shelley, all more or less directly
supplementary to and illustrative of the
collection already published by Mr. Moxon,
that gentleman has decided on securing
them. They will prove an acceptable
addition to a body of correspondence, the
value of which towards a right under-
standing of its author's purpose and work,
may be said to exceed that of any similar
contribution exhibiting the worldly relations
of a poet whose genius has operated by a
different law.
Doubtless we accept gladly the biography
of an objective poet, as the phrase now
goes; one whose endeavour has been to
reproduce things external (whether the
phenomena of the scenic universe, or the
33

C
34
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
2
manifested action of the human heart and
brain) with an immediate reference, in
every case, to the common eye and appre-
hension of his fellow men, assumed capable
of receiving and profiting by this repro-
duction. It has been obtained through
the poet's double faculty of seeing external
objects more clearly, widely, and deeply,
than is possible to the average mind, at
the same time that he is so acquainted and
in sympathy with its narrow comprehension
as to be careful to supply it with no other
materials than it can combine into an
intelligible whole. The auditory of such
a poet will include, not only the intelli-
gences which, save for such assistance.
would have missed the deeper meaning
and enjoyment of the original objects,
but also the spirits of a like endowment
with his own, who, by means of his abstract,
can forthwith pass to the reality it was
made from, and either corroborate their
impressions of things known already, or
supply themselves with new from what-
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
35
ever shows in the inexhaustible variety of
existence may have hitherto escaped their
knowledge. Such a poet is properly the
ποιητής,
ToNTs, the fashioner; and the thing
fashioned, his poetry, will of necessity be
substantive, projected from himself and
distinct. We are ignorant what the in-
ventor of "Othello" conceived of that fact
as he beheld it in completeness, how he
accounted for it, under what known law
he registered its nature, or to what un-
known law he traced its coincidence. We
learn only what he intended we should
learn by that particular exercise of his
power, the fact itself, which, with its
infinite significances, each of us receives
for the first time as a creation, and is here-
after left to deal with, as, in proportion
to his own intelligence, he best may.
are ignorant, and would fain be otherwise.
We
Doubtless, with respect to such a poet,
we covet his biography. We desire to
look back upon the process of gathering
together in a lifetime, the materials of the
36
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
work we behold entire; of elaborating, per-
haps under difficulty and with hindrance,
all that is familiar to our admiration in the
apparent facility of success. And the inner
impulse of this effort and operation, what
induced it? Did a soul's delight in its
own extended sphere of vision set it, for
the gratification of an insuppressible power,
on labour, as other men are set on rest?
Or did a sense of duty or of love lead it
to communicate its own sensations to man-
kind? Did an irresistible sympathy with
men compel it to bring down and suit its
own provision of knowledge and beauty to
their narrow scope? Did the personality
of such an one stand like an open watch-
tower in the midst of the territory it is
erected to gaze on, and were the storms
and calms, the stars and meteors, its
watchman was wont to report of, the
habitual variegation of his everyday life, as
they glanced across its open roof or lay
reflected on its four-square parapet? Or
did some sunken and darkened chamber
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
37
of imagery witness, in the artificial illumin-
ation of every storied compartment we are
permitted to contemplate, how rare and
precious were the outlooks through here
and there an embrasure upon a world
beyond, and how blankly would have
pressed on the artificer the boundary of
his daily life, except for the amorous dili-
gence with which he had rendered per-
manent by art whatever came to diversify
the gloom? Still, fraught with instruction
and interest as such details undoubtedly
are, we can, if needs be, dispense with
them. The man passes, the work remains.
The work speaks for itself, as we say and
the biography of the worker is no more
necessary to an understanding or enjoy-
ment of it, than is a model or anatomy
of some tropical tree, to the right tasting
of the fruit we are familiar with on the
market-stall, or a geologist's map and
stratification, to the prompt recognition
of the hill-top, our land-mark of every day.
We turn with stronger needs to the
38
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
genius of an opposite tendency-the_sub-
jective poet of modern classification. He,
gifted like the objective poet with the fuller
perception of nature and man, is impelled
to embody the thing he perceives, not so
much with reference to the many below,
as to the One aboye him, the supreme
Intelligence which apprehends all things in
their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever
aspired to, if but partially attained, by the
poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but
what God sees the Ideas of Plato, seeds
of creation lying burningly on the Divine
Hand—it is toward these that he struggles.
Not with the combination of humanity in
action, but with the primal elements of
humanity he has to do; and he digs where
he stands, preferring to seek them in his
own soul as the nearest reflex of that
absolute Mind, according to the intuitions
of which he desires to perceive and speak.
Such a poet does not deal habitually with
the picturesque groupings and tempestuous
tossings of the forest-trees, but with their



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
39
roots and fibres naked to the chalk and
stone. He does not paint pictures and
hang them on the walls, but rather carries
them on the retina of his own eyes we
must look deep into his human eyes, to
see those pictures on them. He is rather
a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and
what he produces will be less a work than
an effluence. That effluence cannot be
easily considered in abstraction from his
personality, being indeed the very radiance
and aroma of his personality, projected
from it but not separated. Therefore, in
our approach to the poetry, we necessarily
approach the personality of the poet; in
apprehending it we apprehend him, and
certainly we cannot love it without loving
him. Both for love's and for understand-
ing's sake we desire to know him, and as
readers of his poetry must be readers of
his biography also.
I shall observe, in passing, that it seems
not so much from any essential distinc-
tion in the faculty of the two poets or in
40
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
辱
​h
the nature of the objects contemplated by
either, as in the more immediate adapt-
ability of these objects to the distinct pur-
pose of each, that the objective poet, in
his appeal to the aggregate human mind;
chooses to deal with the doings of men
(the result of which dealing, in its pure
form, when even description, as suggesting
a describer, is dispensed with, is what
we call dramatic poetry), while the sub-
jective poet, whose study has been himself,
appealing through himself to the absolute
Divine mind, prefers to dwell upon those
external scenic appearances which strike
out most abundantly and uninterruptedly
his inner light and power, selects that
silence of the earth and sea in which he
can best hear the beating of his individ-
ual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex,
yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the
manifold experience of man around him,
which serve only to distract and suppress
the working of his brain. These opposite
tendencies of genius will be more readily

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
41
descried in their artistic effect than in
their moral spring and cause. Pushed to
an extreme and manifested as a deformity,
they will be seen plainest of all in the fault
of either artist, when subsidiarily to the
human interest of his work his occasional
illustrations from scenic nature are intro-
duced as in the earlier works of the origin-
ative painters-men and women filling the
foreground with consummate mastery,
while mountain, grove and rivulet show
like an anticipatory revenge on that
succeeding race of landscape-painters
whose "figures" disturb the perfection
of their earth and sky. It would be idle
to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic
faculty in operation, which is the higher
or even rarer endowment. If the subject-
ive might seem to be the ultimate require-
ment of every age, the objective, in the
strictest state, must still retain its original
value. For it is with this world, as start-
ing point and basis alike, that we shall
always have to concern ourselves: the
42
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
world is not to be learned and thrown
aside, but reverted to and relearned. The
spiritual comprehension may be infinitely
subtilised, but the raw material it oper-
ates upon, must remain. There may be
no end of the poets who communicate
to us what they see in an object with
reference to their own individuality ;
what it was before they saw it, in reference
to the aggregate human mind, will be as
desirable to know as ever. Nor is there
any reason why these two modes of poetic
faculty may not issue hereafter from the
same poët in successive perfect works,
examples of which, according to what are
now considered the exigences of art, we
have hitherto possessed in distinct indivi-
duals only. A mere running-in of the
one faculty upon the other, is, of course,
the ordinary circumstance. Far more
rarely it happens that either is found so
decidedly prominent and superior, as to
be pronounced comparatively pure: while
of the perfect shield, with the gold and
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
43
the silver side set up for all comers to
challenge, there has yet been no instance.
Either faculty in its eminent state is
doubtless conceded by Providence as a
best gift to men, according to their
especial want. There is a time when the
general eye has, so to speak, absorbed its
fill of the phenomena around it, whether
spiritual or material, and desires rather
to learn the exacter significance of what
it possesses, than to receive any augmenta-
tion of what is possessed. Then is the
opportunity for the poet of loftier vision,
to lift his fellows, with their half-apprehen-
sions, up to his own sphere, by intensi-
fying the import of details and rounding
the universal meaning. The influence of
such an achievement will not soon die
out. A tribe of successors (Homerides)
working more or less in the same spirit,
dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his
doctrine; till, at unawares, the world is
found to be subsisting wholly on the
shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted
44
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
from passions, on the tradition of a fact,
the convention of a moral, the straw of
last year's harvest. Then is the impera-
tive call for the appearance of another sort
of poet, who shall at once replace this
intellectual rumination of food swallowed
long ago, by a supply of the fresh and
living swathe; getting a new substance by
breaking up the assumed wholes into parts
of independent and unclassed value, care-
less of the unknown laws for recombin-
ing them (it will be the business of yet
another poet to suggest those hereafter),
prodigal of objects for men's outer and not
inner sight, shaping for their uses a new
and different creation from the last, which
it displaces by the right of life over
death,-to endure until, in the inevitable.
process, its very sufficiency to itself shall
require, at length, an exposition of its
affinity to something higher, when the
positive yet conflicting facts shall again
precipitate themselves under a harmonising
law, and one more degree will be apparent
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
45
for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder,
of which, however cloud-involved and un-
defined may glimmer the topmost step,
the world dares no longer doubt that its
gradations ascend.
Such being the two kinds of artists, it
is naturally, as I have shown, with the
biography of the subjective poet that we
have the deeper concern. Apart from his
recorded life altogether, we might fail to
determine with satisfactory precision to
what class his productions belong, and
what amount of praise is assignable to the
producer. Certainly, in the face of any
conspicuous achievement of genius, philo-
sophy, no less than sympathetic instinct,
warrants our belief in a great moral pur-
pose having mainly inspired even where it
does not visibly look out of the same.
Greatness in a work suggests an adequate
instrumentality; and none of the lower
incitements, however they may avail to
initiate or even effect many considerable
displays of power, simulating the nobler
46
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
inspiration to which they are mistakenly
referred, have been found able, under the
ordinary conditions of humanity, to task
themselves to the end of so exacting a
performance as a poet's complete work.
As soon will the galvanism, that provokes
to violent action the muscles of a corpse,
induce it to cross the chamber steadily:
sooner. The love of displaying power for
the display's sake, the love of riches, of
distinction, of notoriety, the desire of a
triumph over rivals, and the vanity in the
applause of friends,-each and all of such
whetted appetites grow intenser by exercise
and increasingly sagacious as to the best
and readiest means of self-appeasement,-
while for any of their ends, whether the
money or the pointed finger of the crowd,
or the flattery and hate to heart's content,
there are cheaper prices to pay, they will
all find soon enough, than the bestowment
of a life upon a labour, hard, slow, and not
Also, assuming the proper moral.
aim to have produced a work, there are
sure.
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
47
many and various states of an aim it may
be more intense than clear-sighted, or too
easily satisfied with a lower field of activity
than a steadier aspiration would reach.
All the bad poetry in the world (accounted
poetry, that is, by its affinities) will be
found to result from some one of the
infinite degrees of discrepancy between the
attributes of the poet's soul, occasioning a
want of correspondency between his work
and the verities of nature,-issuing in
poetry, false under whatever form, which
shows a thing not as it is to mankind
generally, nor as it is to the particular
describer, but as it is supposed to be for
some unreal neutral mood, midway between
both and of value to neither, and living its
brief minute simply through the indolence
of whoever accepts it, or his incapacity
to denounce a cheat. Although of such
depths of failure there can be no question
here, we must in every case betake our-
selves to the review of a poet's life ere we
determine some of the nicer questions
48
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
concerning his poetry,-more especially if
the performance we seek to estimate aright,
has been obstructed and cut short of com-
pletion by circumstances, a disastrous
youth or a premature death. We may
learn from the biography whether his spirit
invariably saw and spoke from the last
height to which it had attained. An
absolute vision is not for this world, but
we are permitted a continual approximation
to it, every degree of which in the in-
dividual, provided it exceed the attainment
of the masses, must procure him a clear
advantage. Did the poet ever attain to a
higher platform than where he rested and
exhibited a result? Did he know more
than he spoke of?
I concede however, in respect to the
subject of our study as well as some few
other illustrious examples, that the unmis-
takeable quality of the verse would be
evidence enough, under usual circum-
stances, not only of the kind and degree of
the intellectual but of the moral constitution
恳
​INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
49
of Shelley: the whole personality of the
poet shining forward from the poems,
without much need of going further to
seek it. The "Remains"-produced
within a period of ten years, and at a
season of life when other men of at all
comparable genius have hardly done more
than prepare the eye for future sight and
the tongue for speech-present us with
the complete enginery of a poet, as signal
in the excellence of its several adaptitudes
as transcendent in the combination of
effects,-examples, in fact, of the whole
poet's function of beholding with an under-
standing keenness the universe, nature and
man, in their actual state of perfection in
imperfection,—of the whole poet's virtue
of being untempted by the manifold partial
developments of beauty and good on every
side, into leaving them the ultimates he
found them,-induced by the facility of
the gratification of his own sense of those
qualities, or by the pleasure of acquiescence
in the short-comings of his predecessors in
Ꭰ
50
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Maou
art, and the pain of disturbing their con-
ventionalisms, the whole poet's virtue, I
repeat, of looking higher than any mani-
festation yet made of both beauty and
good, in order to suggest from the utmost
actual realisation of the one a corresponding
capability in the other, and out of the
calm, purity and energy of nature, to
reconstitute and store up for the forth-
coming stage of man's being, a gift in
repayment of that former gift, in which
man's own thought and passion had been
lavished by the poet on the else-incompleted
magnificence of the sunrise, the else-unin-
terpreted mystery of the lake,-so drawing
out, lifting up, and assimilating this ideal
of a future man, thus descried as possible,
to the present reality of the poet's soul
already arrived at the higher state of
development, and still aspirant to elevate
and extend itself in conformity with its
still-improving perceptions of, no longer
the eventual Human, but the actual Divine.
In conjunction with which noble and rare
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
51
of
powers, came the subordinate power
delivering these attained results to the
world in an embodiment of verse more
closely answering to and indicative of the
process of the informing spirit (failing as
it occasionally does, in art, only to succeed
in highest art),—with a diction more
adequate to the task in its natural and
acquired richness, its material colour and
spiritual transparency,-the whole being
moved by and suffused with a music at
once of the soul and the sense, expressive
both of an external might of sincere passion
and an internal fitness and consonancy,-
than can be attributed to any other writer
whose record is among us. Such was the
spheric poetical faculty of Shelley, as its own
self-sufficing central light, radiating equally
through immaturity and accomplishment,
through many fragments and occasional
completion, reveals it to a competent
judgment.
But the acceptance of this truth by the
public, has been retarded by certain
52
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
objections which cast us back on the evi-
dence of biography, even with Shelley's
poetry in our hands. Except for the
particular character of these objections,
indeed, the non-appreciation of his contem-
poraries would simply class, now that it is
over, with a series of experiences which
have necessarily happened and needlessly
been wondered at, ever since the world
began, and concerning which any present
anger may well be moderated, no less in
justice to our forerunners than in policy to
ourselves. For the misapprehensiveness
of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to
remedy; and the interval between his
operation and the generally perceptible
effect of it, is no greater, less indeed, than
in many other departments of the great
human effort. The "E pur si muove of
the astronomer was as bitter a word as any
uttered before or since by a poet over his
rejected living work, in that depth of
conviction which is so like despair.
""
But in this respect was the experience
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
53
of Shelley peculiarly unfortunate—that the
disbelief in him as a man, even preceded
the disbelief in him as a writer; the mis-
construction of his moral nature preparing
the way for the misappreciation of his
intellectual labours. There existed from
the beginning, simultaneous with, indeed
anterior to his earliest noticeable works,
and not brought forward to counteract any
impression they had succeeded in making,
-certain charges against his private char-
acter and life, which, if substantiated to
their whole breadth, would materially dis-
turb, I do not attempt to deny, our recep-
tion and enjoyment of his works, however
wonderful the artistic qualities of these.
For we are not sufficiently supplied with
instances of genius of his order, to be able
to pronounce certainly how many of its
constituent parts have been tasked and
strained to the production of a given lie,
and how high and pure a mood of the
creative mind may be dramatically simulated
as the poet's habitual and exclusive one.
54
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
The doubts, therefore, arising from such a
question, required to be set at rest, as they
were effectually, by those early authentic.
notices of Shelley's career and the corrobo-
rative accompaniment of his letters, in
which not only the main tenor and prin-
cipal result of his life, but the purity and
beauty of many of the processes which had
conduced to them, were made apparent
enough for the general reader's purpose,—
whoever lightly condemned Shelley first,
on the evidence of reviews and gossip, as
lightly acquitting him now, on that of
memoirs and correspondence. Still, it is ad-
visable to lose no opportunity of strength-
ening and completing the chain of bio-
graphical testimony; much more, of course,
for the sake of the poet's original lovers,
whose volunteered sacrifice of particular
principle in favour of absorbing sympathy
we might desire to dispense with, than for
the sake of his foolish haters, who have
long since diverted upon other objects their
obtuseness or malignancy. A full life of
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
55
Shelley should be written at once, while
the materials for it continue in reach; not
to minister to the curiosity of the public,
but to obliterate the last stain of that false
life which was forced on the public's at-
tention before it had any curiosity on the
matter,-a biography, composed in harmony
with the present general disposition to have
faith in him, yet not shrinking from a
candid statement of all ambiguous passages,
through a reasonable confidence that the
most doubtful of them will be found con-
sistent with a belief in the eventual per-
fection of his character, according to the
poor limits of our humanity. Nor will
men persist in confounding, any more than
God confounds, with genuine infidelity and
an atheism of the heart, those passionate,
impatient struggles of a boy towards distant
truth and love, made in the dark, and
ended by one sweep of the natural seas
before the full moral sunrise could shine
out on him. Crude convictions of boy-
hood, conveyed in imperfect and inapt
56 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
forms of speech, for such things all boys
have been pardoned. There are growing-
pains, accompanied by temporary distortion,
of the soul also. And it would be hard
indeed upon this young Titan of genius,
murmuring in divine music his human
ignorances, through his very thirst for
knowledge, and his rebellion, in mere
aspiration to law, if the melody itself sub-
stantiated the error, and the tragic cutting
short of life perpetuated into sins, such
faults as, under happier circumstances,
would have been left behind by the consent
of the most arrogant moralist, forgotten
on the lowest steps of youth.
The responsibility of presenting to the
public a biography of Shelley, does not,
however, lie with me: I have only to make
it a little easier by arranging these few
supplementary letters, with a recognition
of the value of the whole collection. This
value I take to consist in a most truthful
conformity of the Correspondence, in its
limited degree, with the moral and intel-

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
or
57

lectual character of the writer as displayed
in the highest manifestations of his genius.
Letters and poems are obviously an act of
the same mind, produced by the same law,
only differing in the application to the
individual collective understanding.
Letters and poems may be used indiffer-
ently as the basement of our opinion upon
the writer's character; the finished expres-
sion of a sentiment in the poems, giving
light and significance to the rudiments of
the same in the letters, and these, again, in
their incipiency and unripeness, authen-
ticating the exalted mood and reattaching
it to the personality of the writer. The
musician speaks on the note he sings with;
there is no change in the scale, as he
diminishes the volume into familiar inter-
course. There is nothing of that jarring
between the man and the author, which has
been found so amusing or so melancholy;
no dropping of the tragic mask, as the
crowd melts away; no mean discovery of ›
the real motives of a life's achievement,
58
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
often, in other lives, laid bare as pitifully
as when, at the close of a holiday, we catch
sight of the internal lead-pipes and wood-
valves, to which, and not to the ostensible
conch and dominant Triton of the fountain,
we have owed our admired waterwork.
No breaking out, in household privacy, of
hatred, anger and scorn, incongruous with
the higher mood and suppressed artistically
in the book : no brutal return to self-de-
lighting, when the audience of philanthropic
schemes is out of hearing: no indecent
stripping off the grander feeling and rule
of life as too costly and cumbrous for
every-day wear. Whatever Shelley was,
he was with an admirable sincerity. It
was not always truth that he thought and
spoke; but in the purity of truth he spoke
and thought always. Everywhere is ap-
parent his belief in the existence of Good,
to which Evil is an accident; his faithful
holding by what he assumed to be the
former, going everywhere in company with
the tenderest pity for those acting or suffer-
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
59
ing on the opposite hypothesis. For he
was tender, though tenderness is not
sincere
very
always the characteristic of
natures; he was eminently both tender and
sincere. And not only do the same affec-
tion and yearning after the well-being of
his kind, appear in the letters as in the
poems, but they express themselves by the
same theories and plans, however crude
and unsound. There is no reservation of
a subtler, less costly, more serviceable
remedy for his own ill, than he has pro-
posed for the general one; nor does he
ever contemplate an object on his own
account, from a less elevation than he uses
in exhibiting it to the world. How shall
we help believing Shelley to have been, in
his ultimate attainment, the splendid spirit
of his own best poetry, when we find even
his carnal speech to agree faithfully, at
faintest as at strongest, with the tone and
rhythm of his most oracular utterances?
For the rest, these new letters are not
offered as presenting any new feature of

60
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
the poet's character. Regarded in them-
selves, and as the substantive productions
of a man, their importance would be slight.
But they possess interest beyond their
limits, in confirming the evidence just
dwelt on, of the poetical mood of Shelley
being only the intensification of his habitual
mood; the same tongue only speaking,
for want of the special excitement to sing.
The very first letter, as one instance for all,
strikes the key-note of the predominating
sentiment of Shelley throughout his whole
life-his sympathy with the oppressed.
And when we see him at so early an age,
casting out, under the influence of such a
sympathy, letters and pamphlets on every
side, we accept it as the simple exemplifi-
cation of the sincerity, with which, at the
close of his life, he spoke of himself, as-
"One whose heart a stranger's tear might wear
As water-drops the sandy fountain stone;
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan
For woes which others hear not, and could see
The absent with the glass of phantasy,
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY 61
And near the poor and trampled sit and weep,
Following the captive to his dungeon deep-
One who was as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else-unfelt oppressions of this earth."
Such sympathy with his kind was
evidently developed in him to an extra-
ordinary and even morbid degree, at a
period when the general intellectual powers
it was impatient to put in motion, were
immature or deficient.
I conjecture, from a review of the
various publications of Shelley's youth, that
one of the causes of his failure at the out-
set, was the peculiar practicalness of his
mind, which was not without a determinate
effect on his progress in theorising. An
ordinary youth, who turns his attention to
similar subjects, discovers falsities, incon-
gruities, and various points for amendment,
and, in the natural advance of the purely
critical spirit unchecked by considerations.
of remedy, keeps up before his young eyes
so many instances of the same error and
wrong, that he finds himself unawares
62
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
arrived at the startling conclusion, that all
must be changed-or nothing: in the face
of which plainly impossible achievement,
he is apt (looking perhaps a little more
serious by the time he touches at the
decisive issue) to feel, either carelessly or
considerately, that his own attempting a
single piece of service would be worse than
useless even, and to refer the whole task
to another age and person-safe in propor-
tion to his incapacity. Wanting words to
speak, he has never made a fool of himself
by speaking. But, in Shelley's case, the
early fervour and power to see, was accom-
panied by as precocious a fertility to con-
trive: he endeavoured to realise as he
went on idealising; every wrong had
simultaneously its remedy, and, out of the
strength of his hatred for the former, he
took the strength of his confidence in the
latter till suddenly he stood pledged to
the defence of a set of miserable little ex-
pedients, just as if they represented great
principles, and to an attack upon various
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY 63
great principles, really so, without leaving
himself time to examine whether, because
they were antagonistical to the remedy he
had suggested, they must therefore be
identical or even essentially connected with
the wrong he sought to cure,-playing
with blind passion into the hands of his
enemies, and dashing at whatever red cloak
was held forth to him, as the cause of the
fireball he had last been stung with-
mistaking Churchdom for Christianity, and
for marriage, "the sale of love" and the
law of sexual oppression.
Gradually, however, he was leaving
behind him this low practical dexterity,
unable to keep up with his widening intel-
lectual perception; and, in exact proportion
as he did so, his true power strengthened
and proved itself. Gradually he was raised
above the contemplation of spots and the
attempt at effacing them, to the great
Abstract Light, and, through the discrepancy
of the creation, to the sufficiency of the
First Cause. Gradually he was learning
64
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
that the best way of
removing abuses is to
stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as they
are manifold; and innumerable negative
effects are produced by the upholding of
one positive principle. I shall say what I
think,—had Shelley lived he would have
finally ranged himself with the Christians ;
his very instinct for helping the weaker
side (if numbers make strength), his very
"hate of hate," which at first mistranslated
itself into delirious Queen Mab notes and
the like, would have got clearer-sighted by
exercise. The preliminary step to following
Christ, is the leaving the dead to bury
their dead-not clamouring on his doctrine
for an especial solution of difficulties which
are referable to the general problem of the
universe. Already he had attained to a
profession of "a worship to the Spirit of
good within, which requires (before it sends
that inspiration forth, which impresses its
likeness upon all it creates) devoted and
disinterested homage, as Coleridge says,'
and Paul likewise. And we find in one of
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
65
his last exquisite fragments, avowedly a
record of one of his own mornings and its
experience, as it dawned on him at his soul
and body's best in his boat on the Serchio
—that as surely as
"The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
And the thin white moon lay withering there-
Day had kindled the dewy woods,
And the rocks above, and the stream below,
And the vapours in their multitudes,
And the Apennine's shroud of summer snow—
Day had awakened all things that be;
""
just so surely, he tells us (stepping forward
from this delicious dance-music, choragus-
like, into the grander measure befitting the
final enunciation),
"All rose to do the task He set to each,
Who shaped us to his ends and not our own;
The million rose to learn, and One to teach
What none yet ever knew or can be known."
No more difference than this, from
David's pregnant conclusion so long ago !
Meantime, as I call Shelley a moral man,
because he was true, simple-hearted, and
E
66
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
brave, and because what he acted corre-
sponded to what he knew, so I call him
a man of religious mind, because every
audacious negative cast up by him against
the Divine, was interpenetrated with a
mood of reverence and adoration,-and
because I find him everywhere taking for
granted some of the capital dogmas of
Christianity, while most vehemently deny-
ing their historical basement. There is
such a thing as an efficacious knowledge of
and belief in the politics of Junius, or the
poetry of Rowley, though a man should at
the same time dispute the title of Chatterton
to the one, and consider the author of the
other, as Byron wittily did, "really, truly,
nobody at all." 1
There is even such a
1 Or, to take our illustrations from the writings of
Shelley himself, there is such a thing as admirably
appreciating a work by Andrea Verocchio,-and fanci-
fully characterising the Pisan Torre Guelfa by the
Ponte a Mare, black against the sunsets,—and consum-
mately painting the islet of San Clemente with its
penitentiary for rebellious priests, to the west between
Venice and the Lido-while you believe the first to
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
67
thing, we come to learn wonderingly in
these very letters, as a profound sensibility
and adaptitude for art, while the science of
the percipient is so little advanced as to
admit of his stronger admiration for Guido
(and Carlo Dolce !) than for Michael
Angelo. A Divine Being has Himself
said, that "a word against the Son of man
shall be forgiven to a man," while "a word
against the Spirit of God" (implying a
general deliberate preference of perceived
evil to perceived good) "shall not be
forgiven to a man.” Also, in religion,
one earnest and unextorted assertion of
belief should outweigh, as a matter of
testimony, many assertions of unbelief.
The fact that there is a gold-region is
be a fragment of an antique sarcophagus,-the second,
Ugolino's Tower of Famine (the vestiges of which
should be sought for in the Piazza de' Cavalieri)—
and the third (as I convinced myself last summer at
Venice), San Servolo with its madhouse-which, far
from being "windowless," is as full of windows as a
barrack.
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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
established by the finding of one lump,
though you miss the vein never so often.
Shelley died before his youth ended.
In taking the measure of him as a man,
he must be considered on the whole and at
his ultimate spiritual stature, and not be
judged of at the immaturity and by the
mistakes of ten years before: that, indeed,
would be to judge of the author of "Julian
and Maddalo" by "Zastrozzi." Let the
whole truth be told of his worst mistake.
I believe, for my own part, that if anything
could now shame or grieve Shelley, it would
be an attempt to vindicate him at the
expense of another.
In forming a judgment, I would, how-
ever, press on the reader the simple justice
of considering tenderly his constitution of
body as well as mind, and how unfavour-
able it was to the steady symmetries of
conventional life; the body, in the torture
of incurable disease, refusing to give repose
to the bewildered soul, tossing in its hot
fever of the fancy, and the laudanum-
fancy,—and
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
69
bottle making but a perilous and pitiful
truce between these two. He was con-
stantly subject to "that state of mind" (I
quote his own note to "Hellas ") "in
which ideas may be supposed to assume
the force of sensation, through the con-
fusion of thought with the objects of
thought, and excess of passion animating
the creations of the imagination :" in other
words, he was liable to remarkable de-
lusions and hallucinations. The nocturnal
attack in Wales, for instance, was assuredly
a delusion; and I venture to express my
own conviction, derived from a little
attention to the circumstances of either
story, that the idea of the enamoured lady
following him to Naples, and of the "man
in the cloak" who struck him at the Pisan
post-office, were equally illusory,-the mere
projection, in fact, from himself, of the
image of his own love and hate.
"To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps-to pause and ponder-
常
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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
What busy thought and blind sensation mingle,—
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow ""
of unfelt caresses, and of unfelt blows as
well to such conditions was his genius
subject. It was not at Rome only (where
he heard a mystic voice exclaiming, "Cenci,
Cenci," in reference to the tragic theme
which occupied him at the time),—it was
not at Rome only that he mistook the cry
of "old rags." The habit of somnam-
bulism is said to have extended to the very
last days of his life.
Let me conclude with a thought of
Shelley as a poet. In the hierarchy of
creative minds, it is the presence of the
highest faculty that gives first rank, in
virtue of its kind, not degree; no pre-
tension of a lower nature, whatever the
completeness of development or variety of
effect, impeding the precedency of the
rarer endowment though only in the germ.
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71
The contrary is sometimes maintained; it
is attempted to make the lower gifts (which
are potentially included in the higher
faculty) of independent value, and equal
to some exercise of the special function.
For instance, should not a poet possess
common sense? Then the possession of
abundant common sense implies a step
towards becoming a poet. Yes; such a
step as the lapidary's, when, strong in the
fact of carbon entering largely into the
composition of the diamond, he heaps
up a sack of charcoal in order to com-
pete with the Koh-i-noor.
I
pass at
once, therefore, from Shelley's minor excel-
lences to his noblest and predominating
characteristic.
This I call his simultaneous perception
of Power and Love in the absolute, and of
Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he
throws, from his poet's station between
both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous
films for the connexion of each with each,
than have been thrown by any modern
•
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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
artificer of whom I have knowledge;
proving how, as he says,
"The spirit of the worm within the sod,
In love and worship blends itself with God."
I would rather consider Shelley's poetry
as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a
presentment of the correspondency of the
universe to Deity, of the natural to the
spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal,
than I would isolate and separately appraise
the worth of many detachable portions
which might be acknowledged as utterly
perfect in a lower moral point of view,
under the mere conditions of art. It
would be easy to take my stand on suc-
cessful instances of objectivity in Shelley:
there is the unrivalled "Cenci ;" there is
the "Julian and Maddalo" too; there is
the magnificent "Ode to Naples: " why
not regard, it may be said, the less
organised matter as the radiant elemental
foam and solution, out of which would
have been evolved, eventually, creations as

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
73
perfect even as those? But I prefer to
look for the highest attainment, not simply
the high,—and, seeing it, I hold by it.
There is surely enough of the work
"Shelley" to be known enduringly among
men, and, I believe, to be accepted of God,
as human work may; and around the
imperfect proportions of such, the most
elaborated productions of ordinary art must
arrange themselves as inferior illustrations.
It is because I have long held these
opinions in assurance and gratitude, that
I catch at the opportunity offered to me of
expressing them here; knowing that the
alacrity to fulfil an humble office conveys
more love than the acceptance of the
honour of a higher one, and that better,
therefore, than the signal service it was the
dream of my boyhood to render to his
fame and memory, may be the saying of a
few, inadequate words upon these scarcely
more important supplementary letters of
SHELLEY.
PARIS, Dec. 4th, 1851.
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.

BOUND
AON
1953
UNIV.
LIB
SEP
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 00022 5717
1985
JAN
- 1983
SEP
1988