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By
(colophon)
Of this Book Twenty-five Copies have been printed.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey we find the aspects of the
visible universe personified in a thousand and one shapes of plastic beauty. The vivifying power
and splendour of the sun radiates through the limbs of Apollo; shaggy-breasted Pan is the
expression of lush-teeming forest life, and the fatal allurement of lapping waters murmurs
for ever in the sweet-voiced sirens. The manifestations of the inorganic world are
regarded, by Homer for example, as synonymous with human nature; and the gods,
demi-gods, titans, nereids, dryads, and fauns, which represent sky, clouds, ocean, rivers,
and forests,
are neither better nor worse than the men and women that people the earth.
With the Christian conception of the world this feeling towards Nature underwent a complete
transformation. She was now regarded as something opposed to the divine, something inherently
bad given over to the flesh and the devil. There is a stanza in Milton's
Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity which aptly expresses this
view:--
"Only with speeches fair
She woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow:
And on her naked shame,
Pollute with sinful blame,
The saintly veil of maiden white to throw;
Confounded that her Maker's eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities."
Indeed all through the Middle Ages there was a distinct recoil from the material universe,
which may be traced more or less clearly in all mediæval poets. They liked snugly
hedged-in gardens and sunny closes surrounded by venerable cloisters and "the
waste and solitary places," which Shelley loved, appalled them with thoughts of bogies and
hobgoblins. For in their day the vapour-shrouded mountain-top, the wild and
desolate moorland, the tumbling stream, were the haunts of the Evil One--as is still
attested, indeed, by a thousand significant appellations of bridge and pass; while to their
superstitious fancies the exiled gods of Greece and Rome, now changed into demons, were
supposed to hold their ungodly revels in moonlit woods and valleys. In fact, the poetic feeling of
mediæval times toward the more remote and unfamiliar scenes of Nature, seems to find
expression in that weird German ballad where the witch Lorelei warns the belated
traveller:--
"'Es is schon spät, es ist schon kalt,
Kommst nimmermehr aus diesem Wald.'
Full late it is, and chill the eve,
This wood thou nevermore shalt leave."
But as men shook off the gloomy and cruel superstitions engendered by the oldest and most
oppressive
form of the Christian religion, the idea that Nature was accursed passed away along with the belief in witches, spells, dæmoniacal possessions, and other hideous fancies begotten of ignorance and credulity. The human heart turning thirstily towards a rehabilitated nature, saw that she was fair, and felt a thrill of delight at the beauty of moonlight on still waters, at the radiance of snow-crowned Alps, at the sublimity of seas in storm or calm. This new sensation of wonder and admiration in the splendour of the material Universe found its apostle in Jean Jacques Rousseau. He became the High Priest of this modern Nature-worship. In his eyes Nature was entirely good, sinless, and beneficent. Man alone, by introducing an artificial kind of civilisation, with its kings and priests, its class distinctions, its arbitrary division of property, its irresponsible power and abject poverty, had brought injustice into the world and all the evils that oppress society. Let him but return to a state of nature, and it would be as well with him as with the fish disporting themselves in the water, or with the birds in the air. Considering these violent transitions from one mode of thought to its opposite, one can't help owning that Luther was not so far out when, with his sledge-hammer wit, he likened mankind to a tipsy boor who has no sooner been lifted into the saddle on one side that he tumbles down on the other. And we must own that the leap from the mental state of St. Bernhardt, who, passing along the shore of the lake of Geneva, was so absorbed in his pious meditations as to be quite oblivious of the scenery around him, to that of Jean Jacques, whose whole soul went out in adoration to the beauty of this identical landscape, is quite as a whimsical a performance as the boor's toppling from one side of the saddle to the other. But be that as it may, there can be little doubt that Rousseau and the French Encyclopédists, with their rose-coloured view of Nature, powerfully influenced that group of English poets to which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Keats, and Shelley may be said to belong. For widely as they differ from each other, they yet have one thing in common--that passionate, that all-absorbing love of Nature which sustained them in all disappointments they were
doomed to meet in regard to their social aspirations. Shelley, above all, was profoundly and permanently swayed by this fervid feeling. In his youth, as is testified by Queen Mab, and the notes appended to it, he had been vitally influenced by the study of Rousseau's writings, and those of the other philosophical precursors of the French Revolution. From them he had to a great extent imbibed the firm conviction that if you could only rid society of kings and priests we should immediately enter on the Golden Age, and instead of discord, war, and wretchedness, the earth would become the abode of love and harmony. This is the keynote of Shelley's most important poems--of The Revolt of Islam, of Prometheus Unbound, of Hellas. The same ideas, packed in a narrow compass, are expressed in The Ode to Liberty--that noble and inspired poem which is a kind of epitome of the development of man from the beginnings of life to its culmination in the loftiest intellectual achievement. Shelley here seems to us nearly to approach the threshold of the new era, and almost to apprehend that revolution in our conception of Nature which was to take place not so very long afterwards, when the Darwinian theory of the evolution of life gave a new aspect to man's relation to the world around him. Had Shelley only lived longer, he might have succeeded in harmonising his views of Nature with those so luminously developed by Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and other scientific thinkers, and by doing so there can be little doubt that the body of his poetic work would have gained in backbone and solidity. It is just because Shelley was a philosophic poet, because he aimed at grasping the world as a whole, and at embodying sound ideas in his loftiest flights of imagination, that we must regret that his conception of Nature is rather the off-spring of the eighteenth century than of the nineteenth. Two evils, or more properly speaking, one evil with two heads, like the Austrian eagle, is ever present to Shelley's mind--the double yoke of superstition and tyranny. Let but triumphant liberty abolish this, and it seems to him that all the rest must inevitably follow. From hard-hearted oppressors men will become kind, sympathetic, and gentle, while women, no longer required
to be hypocrites by Mrs. Grundy, will naturally turn into brave, generous, and sincere human
beings. There will be a return to a primitive state of innocence, and man, no longer divorced from
Nature, will be guided by her benign influences. This idea is enunciated in
many of Shelley's works, but perhaps the clearest expression of it is in
Queen Mab, where he says:--
"Look on yonder earth:
The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun
Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,
Arise in due succession; all things speak
Peace, harmony, and love. The universe
In nature's silent eloquence, declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,--
All but the outcast man. He fabricates
The sword, which stabs his peace; he cherisheth
The snakes that gnaw his heart: he raiseth up
The tyrant, whose delight is in his woe,
Whose sport is in his agony."
Mark here that man the outcast is contrasted with the peace,
harmony, and love which otherwise prevail on the earth. I should like
to quote still another passage to the same effect:--
"Hath Nature's soul
That form'd this world so beautiful, that spread
Earth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chord
Strung to unchanging unison, that gave
The happy birds their dwelling in the grove,
That yielded to the wanderers of the deep
The lovely silence of the unfathom'd main,
And fill'd the meanest worm that crawls in dust
With spirit, thought, and love; on Man alone,
Partial in causeless malice, wantonly
Heap'd ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul
Blasted with withering curses; placed afar
The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,
But serving on the frightful gulf to glare,
Rent wide beneath his footsteps?
Nature!--no!
Kings, priests and statesmen, blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society. The child
Ere he can lisp his mother's sacred name,
Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts
His baby-sword even in a hero's mood."
We see here that, according to Shelley, all living creatures,
"from the meanest worm that crawls" to the
happy birds in the grove, enjoy peace and happiness, all excepting poor miserable man, who, by some fatality of his constitution, has ever been the prey of some few among his own kind who, by superior force or cunning, have befooled him, despoiled him, enslaved him, and generally rendered his state one of abject fear and wretchedness. If such were the case, society would certainly have to be regarded as an unmixed evil, and the sooner human beings followed Rousseau's advice and returned to the state of primitive nature the better!
But is it true that all things in Nature, where man is not, speak
"peace, harmony, and love"? Why, if we open our Darwin, the very opposite fact
meets us at every turn. Yes, in the very vegetable kingdom, amid the gentle race of flowers so
dear to Shelley, precisely the same forces are at work, the same incessant strife is
raging, the same desires and appetites prevail, which he so abominated in the world of man. For
gnawing at the root of life itself seems this power of evil from which the poet's sensitive
soul shrank with such horror--lust, hunger, rapine, cruelty. So far from peace being the
law of Nature, we learn on the contrary, from our great naturalist, that from the lowest semi-vital
organism to the highest and most complex forms of life battle is being waged within battle for the
right to breath, to eat, and to multiply on the earth. Look, for example, at the flower-like
sea-anemones, with their exquisite forms and delicate rainbow-tints. What a
shock it is to one's moral being to see them suddenly close like a tightly-drawn
sack on a lot of little living creatures that one sees madly struggling through the
semi-diaphanous substance till they are stifled in their living tomb. And this law which
bids animal prey upon animal, however revolting to the human conscience, is a necessity of that
Nature, which, if not as terribly unjust as the God of Calvinistic theology, seems, at least to our
human apprehension, to be callous to the sanguine strife and destruction which is going on in
every nook and corner of the earth. Darwin, like Shelley, admits that we see the face of Nature
bright with gladness: but he adds, "we do not see, or we forget, that the birds
which are idly singing around us
mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey."
Inch by inch every available space of air, of earth, and of water is
contested, fought for, finally conquered by some living creature or
other, the stronger ever devouring the weaker, or at least beating him
out of the field and leaving him to perish. So that the reckless
competition, the selfishness, the cruelty which to Shelley appeared as
essentially the result of bad government, nay, as almost an accident of
human society, might have been traced by him feature by feature
throughout the animal kingdom, from the slave-making ant to the thievish sparrow. For
Dr. Watt's admonition to the children that "birds in their little nests agree,"
is, unfortunately, one of those amiable delusions which, on closer examination, turn out anything
but true. On the contrary, not only does active jealousy exist between the different species of
birds, but they are the most omnivorous of creatures, and one is sorry to think that, in spite
"of the spirit, thought, and love which fill the meanest worm that crawls," they
swallow the poor innocent with no more compunction than the human biped does his lamb and
mint sauce. And then what unchronicled tragedies happen in those leaf-embowered
nests, whose form and structure look indeed as if they were presided over by the spirit of love and
peace. What, for one thing, should we see if we were to peep into some of them? Perhaps a
cuckoo, uninvited, laying her egg in the nest of another kind of bird, whose own brood, when she
has hatched the intruder, will be ruthlessly ejected by him. For, according to Darwin, the young
cuckoo has not only the instinct, but a back actually adapted for getting rid of his
foster-brothers, who thus, poor things, unceremoniously thrown on the ground, perish of
cold and hunger.
Then again, if we take the hive-bees, we shall see in that
wonderfully-regulated community something not unlike an
old-fashioned monarchy with a ruler "by the grace of God." For the
queen-bee is so absolute in
her own domains that she will suffer no second near her, and promptly destroys the young queens her daughters, as soon as they are born, or perishes herself in the combat. Shelley would have had to own here that even "those royal murderers, whose mean thrones are bought by crimes and treachery and gore," could hardly match the savage instinctive hatred of this little insect fresh from Nature's hand. There is perhaps something even more appalling in the fact that the slave-making instinct should exist among animals. But it seems that certain species of ants are in the habit of carrying off the pupæ of another species to their nests and there rearing them as slaves. These slaves are black and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is striking. With some kinds of ants, the Formica rufescens, the tyrants, by never doing any work, have actually lost the power of helping themselves, and are so dependent, that when a migration takes place the slaves have to carry their masters in their jaws!
These, alas! are but a few examples taken at random of the
oppression, strife, and cruelty, which seem to pervade all organic
beings according to that dread law formulated by Darwin:
"Let the strongest live and the weakest die."
The fact is, that Shelley, when flying to Nature away from the hard-hearted ways of
men, was really leaping from the frying-pan into the fire. For the very thing he abhorred
most in human society--the implacable struggle for supremacy of one individual with
another--was raging with tenfold force in the world around him, because less tempered by
the mitigating influences of conscience and sympathy. It is true that the sensitive organisation of
Shelley, shrinking from the rough contact with reality, never quite looked Nature in the face; and
in west wind and sunset cloud, in running stream and fragrant flower, he recognised a more
benignant manifestation of power than that which he saw in the Social State of Man, because
what he saw reflected by these passive phenomena was in reality the shade of his own soul. And
his own soul, being one of the loveliest as well as loftiest that ever passed
across the stage of the world, transmuted the visible Universe to something after its own likeness.
In Prometheus Unbound Shelley grapples with the problem of good and
evil, and with the moral regeneration of man; but, as I remarked before, it is to be regretted that in
the working out of this magnificent idea the poet was not able to profit by those great
generalisations of Darwin which have revolutionised the modern conception of life. I am inclined
to call this poem the Passion-Play of Humanity. Instead of the Crucifixion of Christ we
have here Man himself, or perhaps, rather the Human Mind, enduring an agony of thousands of
years through being held captive by Jupiter. Now Jupiter is in a certain sense the creation of
Prometheus, and primarily holds his sway in heaven through him. So that all the misery endured
by the Titan, and by the world of men and women for whom he suffers, and by the earth herself in
sympathetic pity for her offspring, is due in reality to the phantasm of a celestial tyrant whose
shadow clouds the universe. But surely the existence of evil is more deeply entwined with the
roots of life than seems here admitted; and though the abolition of irresponsible tyrannic power in
heaven and on earth would no doubt do much to lessen the ills of life, it can certainly not be
regarded as a universal panacea for them. I do not know whether I shall be ignominiously
expelled from the Shelley Society, or perhaps even stoned, if I confess that there has always
seemed to me to be something crude and undigested in the manner in which the poet tries to solve
the problem of good and evil in Prometheus Unbound. His leading motive is
apparently the same as that which constitutes the vital teaching of all great
religions--namely, the redemption of Man. The Titan, by the endurance of woes which
hope thinks infinite, by the forgiveness of wrongs darker than death or night, by the defiance of
power which seems omnipotent, has wrought out this deliverance. But it is curious how vaguely
this great triumph is described. The principle of evil incarnated in Jupiter simply topples down or
is hurled down, one hardly knows how, by Demogorgon, his son, and the
change which straightway transforms the earth from a scene of toil, famine, war and tyranny, to
one of boundless love and harmony, is equally shadowy. The spirit of the hour thus describes the
change which has come over things on his proclaiming the glad tidings of the liberation of
Prometheus:--
Nature, but, on the contrary, as emerging from a semi-brutal,
barbarous condition, and continually progressing to higher stages of
moral and mental development. For the true conflict consists in man's struggle with the
irresponsible forces of Nature, and the victory in his conquest over them, both as regards the
subjection of his own lower animal instincts and in his continually growing power through
knowledge of turning these elemental forces, that filled his savage progenitors with fear and
terror, into the nimblest of servants. This, I take it, would have been a conclusion more in
harmony with the Darwinian conception of the universe, and also more consoling on the
whole. For I suppose most of us would agree with Strauss's view
that, just as it is more honourable in a citizen to have raised himself
from a lower to a higher station in the social scale instead of having
lapsed into degradation from some former proud estate, so Man himself gains
in moral value, when one reflects that with infinite pain and struggle he has slowly risen above the
thraldom of physical nature, and eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge has learned, at
whatever cost of mere sensuous enjoyment, to distinguish good from evil. Shelley, on the
contrary, bitten by the nature worship of Rousseau, was too much inclined to glorify not only the
future but also the remote past, at the expense of the present. As, for example, when he says
"that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and
happiness of his being to unnatural appetites, and that ALL VICE arose from
the ruin of healthful innocence." Here is hardly the place, or it would be easy to prove,
from Darwin's Descent of Man, that every kind of unnatural appetite and
vice has prevailed among men in a state of nature. Thus the murder of infants was practised on
the largest scale throughout the world, the robbery of strangers was considered as honourable,
women were commonly like slaves, among some savage tribes it was custom to kill their old and
decrepit parents, while intemperance, licentiousness, and unnatural crimes were the common
practice. Considering that such was the original bias of humanity, we may perhaps apply to it the
remark of an American humorist on being
told that some one was a self-made man, to wit, that it relieved
his Maker of a great responsibility.
also above fierce competition, the corroding jealousy, and malignant
rivalries from which intellectual workers are so rarely exempt:
failing, where he did fail, because he could not help investing the
imperfect natures of transitory individuals with an ideal beauty which,
fading on a closer view, induced in him a shuddering recoil of dismay
and disillusion. Outsoaring the limits of the actual world, Shelley's mind foreshadowed
loftier types than any yet in existence, his purpose being, as he says, "to familiarise the
highly-refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful
idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and
hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life,
which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his
happiness." In the noble-hearted Laon, the liberator of his country, who only
suffers defeat because he is fain to overcome his enemies by generosity; in Cythna, the
high-souled woman, who rouses her sex in harem and seraglio from the inanition of a
weak dependence to an ardent participation in the noble war of liberation; and, above all, in
Prometheus himself, the heroic martyr who vanquishes hell by pitying his torturers, the
Furies: in these and similar types Shelley has incorporated nearly all of goodness, love, and
wisdom that it is at present possible to conceive. But his creations have been accused of being
vague and unsubstantial shadows that take no more hold of us than the visionary shapes seen in a
sunset sky. And we cannot deny that the accusation contains more truth. For poets have
unfortunately always been more successful in depicting scenes of passion, crime, and agony than
in their descriptions of divine love and beatitude. Take only as an example the
Inferno of Dante as compared to his Paradiso, or
Milton's Satan contrasted with the angelic hosts; and to come to more mundane subjects,
the most tragic themes have always taken the strongest hold of men, as witness the murder of
Agamemnon, the doom of Œdipus, the madness of King Lear, the ambition of Macbeth, the
imprisonment of Margaret, the ordeal of Fantine.
(back)
"But soon I look'd,
And behold thrones were kingless, and men walk'd
One with the other even as spirits do,
None fawn'd, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,
Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows
No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell,
'All hope abandon ye who enter here,'
None frown'd, none trembled, none with eager fear
Gazed on another's eye of cold command,
Until the subject of a tyrant's will
Became, worse fate, the object of his own,
Which spurr'd him, like an outspent horse to death...
Thrones, altars, judgment-seats, and prisons; wherein,
And beside which, by wretched men were borne
Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reason'd wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghost of a no more remember'd fame,
Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth
In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs
Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round
Those imaged to the pride of kings and priests,
A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
As is the world it wasted, and are now
But an astonishment; even so the tools
And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,
Stand not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
This ultimate triumph of the human mind over the forces of evil by
which it is encompassed, and the consequent advent of a Golden Age, has been mystically
foreshadowed by all great religious and ethical teachers, and Shelley could not have chosen a finer
or more stupendous subject for a great dramatic poem. But I venture to think that if he had
worked out this theme with more historic realism--if he had not unfortunately been
debarred from casting into a poetic mould the modern scientific conception of evolution and the
struggle for existence--that he would have shown the human race as typified in
Prometheus, not as physically and morally depraved, owing to its gradual alienation from
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In concluding these few remarks, I can only trust that I have not
been tiresome by dwelling too exclusively on Shelley's philosophy of Nature, and scarcely
at all on the simply artistic value of his work. But as we meet to help each other in a fuller
comprehension of his poetry, I hope I shall be forgiven if I have ventured to point out certain
imperfections in the work of our beloved poet. "Swear by no master's
words" is a saying of Goethe's that would have been heartily endorsed by Shelley,
the iconoclast of authority. But if he failed comparatively in his attempt "at solving the
universe," if I may be permitted to use a favourite expression of my friend, the late W.K.
Clifford, Shelley succeeded, perhaps more completely than any other poet, in marrying the most
sublime or evanescent appearances of the material universe to human emotion. Indeed, the
essence of Shelley's being seems to have become one with the impetuous west wind, his
heaven-aspiring song thrills us in the notes of the skylark, and the rapture of his words
has added a new radiance to the beauty of flowers.
And though I have hitherto only dwelt on the contrast between the
views of Nature held by Shelley and Darwin, I should like before
concluding to say a few words as regards the final junction of their
views in the glorious vistas they disclose of ever higher types of life
replacing those that had gone before. For, judging by analogy, better,
wiser, and more beautiful beings will inhabit this planet in the ages
to come, according to the laws of evolution, than we can now have any
conception of. And I hope that we are all agreed that in Shelley
himself we have already a certain foreshadowing of something
better--for with his exquisitely sensitive organisation, of which he might well say, "I
am but as a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the earth,"
with his scorn for vulgar aims ending in self-aggrandisement, with his impatience of the
conventional, continually hampering standards of morality, and with his passion for reforming the
world, he seems lifted, not only above the needs and greeds of sensual desires, but
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And it must be confessed that though, as a rule, we know very little of heaven, our experience
of hell is pretty considerable. Now, as the substance of all poetry has to be extracted mostly from
experience, Shelley, when he tried to embody his beautiful idealisms of moral
excellence, and found that reality yielded him a rather meagre crop of
impressions, had to weave his aërial webs too much from his own
inner consciousness. But his glowing anticipation of a better future
in store for humanity is, in a certain sense, the warrant of its own
fulfilment, and his poetry will become a factor in helping to bring it
about; for in the continual process of selection there is no reason why
the moral ideals of one generation should not become the
stepping-stones toward their realisation in another. And in this process of evolution the
final triumph of the human mind over the brute forces of nature may be achieved, and
Shelley's magnificent prophecy at the close of the fourth act of the
Prometheus turn to simple truth, the prophecy that
"The man remains,--
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man:
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man.
Passionless? no:--yet free from guilt or pain,--
Which were, for his will made or suffered them;
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,--
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
Printed by Richard Clay &
Sons,
Bread Street Hill,
December,
1886.