SHELLEY AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS.*
IF Shelley, as Carlyle said he did, "filled the earth with inarticu- late wail, like the infinite, inarticulate grief and weeping of for- saken infants," the admirers of Shelley are filling the world with inarticulate cries of a very different kind. Shelley was a curious compound of the poet, the lover, and the lunatic, and the freaks which his imagination played him in his threefold character were nothing less than astounding. Of course these freaks were intermittent, and when be was not in his hums, when the maggot in his brain which Ilazlitt speaks of was still, and when the fever in his blood was cool, Shelley often wrote with remark- able keenness and insight, as well as with marvellous genius. It is true that his disregard of facts was so incorrigible, that where they are concerned he must always be mistrusted. In the "Defence of Poetry," for instance, he says that "the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men ;" and in his " Hellas " he describes as the " renovated nurslings" of Greece, the identical "shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and gambling savages" who "realised," as he admitted, "his idea of Hell." Still, and we return now to the point from which we have digressed too far, Shelley's intellect was keen and bright when his morbid imagination gave it fair-play. He professed to be indifferent to criticism, with about the same amount of truth that his brother poets have used before and after him, but few poets have shown themselves more capable of judging criticiam at its real worth, and he would judge a great deal that he now gets at a very low rate.
But it is not here or now that we can say what we think about Shelley's wonderful genius. It is, however, with Shelley's bio- graphers qua biographers, that we have very briefly to deal. Of all these, in our opinion, Hogg is facile prineeps, and a far clearer notion of Shelley's idiosyncrasy can be gained from his " trwa- cated " biography than from all the others put together. Next • The Poetical Worhs r:t P. It. Shelley: wit/' Notes,aud a Alcuwir. By W. M. Rossetti. London: Moxon and Co. 1578. Shelley: a Critica! Biography. By G. B. Smith. Edinburgh: D. Douala.. in value to Hogg's Life of Shelley we should place Trelawny's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, which have lately been republished, with important alterations and additions.
We quote with real pleasure the generous praise which Mr.
Rossetti gives to the latter book, though he is by no means niggard in his approval of lIogg's "masterly though eccentric sample of biography :"—" This excellent volume gives (so far as Shelley is concerned) simply what fell under Trelawny's personal observa- tion, or was related thereto, in the last half-year or so of Shelley's life. For that brief period it is incomparably good, and shows a
most affectionate, as well as vigorous and manly, appreciation of the poet's character and powers." Would that we could say the same, or anything like the same, of Mr. Rossetti's own Memoir of S'hellty. But we cannot. The key-note is struck in the first page, and when once heard, the reader, Shelley-bitten or not, will at once see why. In justice to Mr. Rossetti, we prefer to quote,
instead of criticising, but it may be doubted if we could claim to be thought merciful for doing so :—
"To write the life of Shelley is (if I may trust my own belief) to write the life of the greatest English poet since Milton, or possibly since Shakespeare ; and as the greatest poet must equal, at least, the greatest man of any other order, it must also be to write the life of one of the most illustrious personages, of whatsoever sort, known to these latter ages. And this is peculiarly the case with Shelley, in whom a truly glorious poetic genius was united with, or was one manifestation of, the most transcendent beauty of character,—flecked, indeed, hero and there by semi-endearing perversities, or by some manifest practical aberration. However this may be, he commands into love and homage every emotion of the soul, and every perception of the mind. To be a Shelley enthusiast—" But we have probably quoted enough, and as we have determined not to criticise the views of a "Shelley enthusiast," we will merely remark of Mr. .Rossetti's " condensed memoir" that it seems to us not half " condensed " enough. Mr. Rossetti has evidently spared neither time nor trouble in collecting his facts, and his memoir, we take it, will always remain the quarry from which future biographers of the poet will draw their materials. But Mr. Rossetti does not seem to have given a proportionate amount of attention to his arrangement of those facts, and the impression which his memoir leaves upon us as a whole is that of a hasty and huddled explication of matter obtained by hard and honest
work. This is very unfortunate, and we may be doing Mr. Rossetti bitter injustice, by attributing to haste what is due to
an entirely different cause. For a biographer, like a poet, nascitur, non fit, and of the two is the rarer, though, of course, not the richer, literary jewel. It would, however, be the height of in- justice and ingratitude not to say that Mr. Rossetti by his Memoir of Shelley has deserved well of the Republic of Letters ; of the Shelley School, if we may so call them, he has deserved much more than well.
Of Mr. G. Barnett Smith's Critical Biography, we can only say that the title appears to us to be a misnomer. Mr. Rossetti drily says of it that it "affords little information on matters of fact " ; and the criticisms which it contains lack precision. On the whole, we should say that the literary standard of excellence which it reaches is that of an abnormally good prize essay. Mr. Smith is by no means so orthodox a Shelleyite as he might be, but the common-sense of his heterodoxy is marred by a certain utterance, larger, perhaps, than that of Keats's "early gods," which is altogether too sonorous for our ears. Nor are the ideas which this utterance sends forth always, or perhaps even often, commensurate with the thunder of its eloquence. In fairness to Mr. Smith, we subjoin the peroration of his work, and as it is really a fair sample of his style, readers who like it will certainly be charmed with the rest of this little volume, which, by the way, is beautifully printed and tastefully bound :— " Shelley was inspired, and has since been the source of inspiration in others. It is little to say that his melody is superior to that of any other modern poet. He divides the lyric crown with Burns. The latter is a poet of universal sympathies, and in that respect takes precedence of Shelley, but the author of the Cenci transcends even the poet-king of the North in simple music. His lyric endowment was also accom- panied by passion and earnestness. His sincerity cannot be denied, nor his rigid adherence to what, in his seer's vision, he deemed to be the truth. He sang of things old and new, and justified his title to the appellation of bard by the new fire which he struck out of the expiring ashes of the past. Nothing in nature appeared ugly or discordant to him, and had his faith in humanity equalled his reverence for the spirit that breathes through all things, he would, by an extension of his brief span of life, have taken rank with the greatest of our poets. The day for which he longed with all the ardour of his passionate nature was as yet unborn,—sleeping in the womb of Time,—a day when men should be knit together by the sacred ties of benevolence and love. His pro- phetic eyes shone with a glorified light from other sans than ours. Im- perfect as the rest of humanity, and yet waging ceaselessly the conflict with evil, the Eternal Voice which speaks to all—but to many fruit- lessly and in vain—thrilled him to the very springs of his being. His soul was one with all things ; it embraced the outcasts of the world and the children of light, the grandeur and minuthe of the material universe, the majestic creations of mythology, and the human Prometheus struggling with woo and wrong. Ho was the sweet singer of his age, destined to live in the reverent affection of all succeeding ages ; for out of the loving depths of his soul sprang immortal music in praise of love, beauty, and virtue."
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