BOOKS.
PROFESSOR DOWDEN'S LIFE OF SHELLEY.* [FIRST NOTICE.] As it is tolerably certain that this Life of Shelley will supersede all others, since it both sifts and appraises the valuable materials hitherto accumulated for a Life of Shelley, and embodies the greater part of these materials, as well as adds largely to them from the only authentic sources, we cannot help regretting that the form in which this Life now appears is not somewhat more convenient. The volumes are so heavy that they are fatiguing to hold, the page is too large, and the type somewhat too close.
• The Life of Percy Byeshe Shelley. By Edward Dowden, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the 'University of Dublin. 2 rola. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.
If republished in four smaller volumes, the- book would be far more readable. It is a pity, too, that there are no portraits of Mary Shelley and Jane Clairmont. Of Harriet Shelley (Shelley's first wife) we conclude that no portrait exists. We wish, too, that Professor Dowden had given us Clint's portrait of Shelley, and told us what evidence there is for the lifelikeness of this, far the most attractive of the portraits, and what was the origin of the Due de Montpensier's sketch. Further, we should like to know which of the portraits Shelley's personal friends preferred, —we trust not Miss Curran's. These are trifling matters, but changes or additions such as we have suggested would add greatly to the value of the one biography of Shelley which is likely to take its place as the standard Life of the poet.
On Professor Dowden's work the universal verdict will un- doubtedly be favourable. It is in the highest degree interesting, though we think that there are perhaps too many extracts from those dry diaries which note purely external events. It is generally graphic, and often in the best sense vivid. And it is always perfectly candid. Professor Dowden has a right to say, as he does in the closing sentence of his preface :—" If I have erred in matters of opinion, I have tried to set before my reader materials, as abundant as it was in my power to exhibit, by which to correct my errors." No doubt it is true that where Professor Dowden condemns Shelley's conduct, he condemnset with great reluctance, and is disposed to believe that Shelley's own conscience thoroughly acquitted him of wrong-doing ; while where he sustains him, he sustains him with the utmost warmth ; but if that be a fault in a biographer, it is probably a fault on the right side. Indeed, Shelley's natural disposition was so exceptional, so far beyond the range of ordinary experience, that even those who feel most confident that Shelley wandered very far indeed from the right track, may well feel utterly incompetent to determine with the smallest confidence how far it was a twist of nature inborn, and how far voluntary wilfulness, which led to that wandering. Hence, in his case even more certainly than in that of less extraordinary men, it is safer not to assume that the judgment which we pass from our own point of view on the man's conduct, is a fair judg- ment on a man in whose moral position it is simply impossible to place ourselves adequately at all.
Perhaps there never was a more singular nature or character than that of which Professor Dowden here gives us the story. Even in physical qualities Shelley was a strange mixture of paradoxical contrasts. His voice, when it was low, was singularly sweet; but when it rose, it became so discordant as to be quite repulsive. "With his grace of bearing," says Professor Dowden, "was strangely united a certain awkwardness." Quoting, we imagine, from Hogg, he states that Shelley would "stumble in stepping across the floor of a drawing-room; he would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well-carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to tread upon his hands, and even occasionally to disturb the composure of a well-bred footman ; on the con- trary, be would often glide without collision through a crowded assembly, thread with unerring dexterity a most intricate path, or surely and rapidly tread the most arduous and uncertain ways." It was the same with his intellectual and moral quali- ties. Sometimes he would seem wholly incompetent to deal with matters of business at all, so that Hogg would speak of him with supreme contempt, while Professor Dowden likens him to the captive albatross, which seamen sometimes make walk the deck, with his great white wings drooping piteously at his side and impeding every movement that he makes among the jeering crew. At other times Shelley drew forth the admiration of the most practical minds by the lucidity with which he would gather up, as, for instance, in the paper which he submitted to the Court of Chancery, the substance of a case intended to impress practical men. Again, a more singu- lar mixture of moral dignity and incapacity for anything like self-control, than Shelley's character, was probably never seen in English society. In expostulating with Lord Byron, in rebuking Godwin, in stating his case as a father to Lord Eldon, Shelley displays a large and tranquil self-control such as few men could surpass. Bat, again, we find him almost foaming at the mouth with helpless rage in cases where one would have expected that his self-respect and pity, his sympathies and his affections, would have strengthened his self-control ;—as when he turns upon the idol be had set up in his imagination, poor Miss Elizabeth
Ilitchener, and dubbing her "a brown demon," speaks of her as "a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undeviating revenge," which she certainly was not ; or when he opens the sluices of his rage against his sister-in-law, and speaks of the "disgust and horror" with which he sees her caress his daughter Ianthe, and of his difficulty in checking "the overfiowings " of his "unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch." But most strange of all is the mixture of that purity of feeling which everybody seems to have discerned in Shelley, with that concentration of his imagination on the most revolting and unnatural subjects visible in so much of his poetry, especially in The Cenei,in laon and Cythna, and even in a few of his minor poems,—poems in which the thrill of lyrical rapture and the thrill of delight in defying and confounding the natural instincts of human nature seem to blend in inextricable con- fusion. No wonder that Shelley was by some of his friends
called "the snake," a creature for which he felt the warmest regard, if we may judge from the frequent references to it in
his poems. There was mingled with all his beauty of mind, which was certainly unearthly, a vein of unearthly and ghastly delight in violating natural instincts, as illustrated, for instance, to take a very mild example, in the ghoulish prescription which he wrote out under a household recipe of Mary Godwin's,—a prescription in which he drew on his imagination for medicaments of horror. So, again, Shelley's reverence for the higher disinterestedness and courage of human heroism, and his awe before the beauty and splendour of the in- tellectual and moral universe, are as marvellously contrasted with the boastful irreverence that led to his expulsion from Oxford, to the tenor of his notes in Queen Mab, and to the vulgar caprice of his publication of atheism in the travellers' book at Montanvert, as if he had combined in his own person the spirit of a loving child and the spirit of a tricksy fiend. Sometimes his heart seems to be bowed in awe and love, some- times his irritable dislike of the traditions of ages seems to burst forth in the shrill revolt of petulant defiance.
It is Professor Dowden's great merit that he not only does not conceal from us these strange paradoxes of Shelley's nature, but that he frankly reveals them. He shows us plainly the grisly thread which is intertwined with all the beauty of his singular character, and gives us even fuller materials than ever for our conviction that Shelley, who was the first to originate the phrase which has since become so famous, "the enthusiasm of humanity," combined with this enthusiasm (which was most genuine and deep), a habit of shallow bravado in the presence of all those warning instincts in man which our race has inherited from the teaching of an unanalysed but cumulative experience. His second wife called Shelley at one time her " elfin knight," or her "airy elf." And really it often seems as if the elvish element in him were at least as strong as the human element, and much stronger in him than that reverence and shame out of which the higher conventions of human society have grown, and by which the deeper modesties of human nature have been preserved. There is in Shelley at once a singu- larly ethereal nature, and a singularly unshrinking defiance of everything in human emotion which does not at once explain itself. His poetry is as thin and clear as those "horns of elfland faintly blowing," of which Tennyson has told us, and as shrill and defiant too. None of these characteristics does Professor Dowden in any way veil from us ; but, of course, he dwells most, and quite rightly, on the higher side of Shelley's intellect and character. Nor can we conceive a much finer sketch of his thin ethereal poetic genius than Professor Dowden gives us in the study of Shelley's mind at the time that he composed Alas tor, his first really great poem :—
" With calm and health and freedom from disintegrating cares, Shelley's higher and truer self expanded. The poet within him wakened from the oppression and the trance, and, when he now stood erect, his stature was that of manhood. The voice in which his spirit uttered itself was no longer a boyish treble or the broken voice of a youth ; it bad the fullness and purity of early adult years, with some of the violin's lyric intensity. The happiness and calm bad, however, followed hard upon a season of pain, and disappointment, and melancholy foreboding. Already at twenty-three Shelley was disillusioned of some eager and exorbitant hopes ; the firat great ex- periment of his heart had proved a failure ; his boyish ardour for the enfranchisement of a people had been without result ; his literary efforts had met with little sympathy or recognition; and, daring the early months of the year, be had felt how frail was his hold on life, and had almost confronted that mystery which lies behind the veil of mortal existence. Therefore if now he sang, there must needs be something of exalted pain and melancholy wisdom mingled with the rapture of his song. In the midst of his vigorous rowing-enjoyment and the abounding animal spirits, of which Peacock tells us, he had
mused on death, while the stars came out above the lessening spire and the dim graves of Lechlade Churchyard.
'Thus solemnised and softened, death is mild And terrorless as this serenest night Here could I hope, like some inquiring child Sporting on graves. that death did hide from human sight Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.'
And later, as he wandered alone in the glades of Windsor Great Park,. now when in still autumnal mornings the foliage was brightening to. decay, or when the autumnal winds drove to east or west the leaves of chestnut and elm and oak, his thoughts had in them some of the- breadth and solemnity of the season of the year. Alastor is an imaginative rendering of the mood which came upon him on his return to Bishopagate, an interpretation of his past experiences and of the lore that he had gathered from life, and a record, marvelously exalted and enhanced, of all the impressions derived from external nature- during the past year—from snowy mountain and valley of Switzer- land, from the arrowy Reuss and rock-guarded passes of the Rhine, from the gentler loveliness of our English river, and the solemn wood- land glories of Windsor. In its inmost sense the poem is a pleading- on behalf of human love. This, which had now been found by Shelley, he might have sought for ever and in vain, and then his fate would have been that of the solitary dreamer in Alastor ; bat when he returned from lonely musings under the Windsor oaks to his home,. it was to look into Mary's 'redeeming eyes,' and to find a place of' rest in Mary's faithful heart. Three years after Alastor was con- ceived, Shelley, when in Italy, wrote of his wife as the dear friend. with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any other One to complain that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness.' In 1815, though he had not yet esti- mated to the fall the preciousness of her love, its nearness quickened' his conception of the wasting pain of one who, having long neglected' or scorned the natural sympathies of the heart, is suddenly over- mastered by a tyrannous need of love, and at the same time is dis- qualified for ever finding satisfaction for his ideal aspiration and desire. Shelley in dictator would rebuke the seeker for beauty and, seeker for truth, however high-minded, who attempts to exist with- out human sympathy, and he would rebuke the ever-unsatisfied idealist in his own heart. Yet, at the same time, he would exhibit the advantage possessed by such an one over the worldling, blind and' torpid ; for the very fact that he is punished by an avenging fate, and. thirsts for love, and dies because he cannot find it, constitutes his purification and redemption ; and as he rests with languid bead upon the ivied stone, gazing westwards at the great moon, and about to- resign his being to the universal frame of things,
'Hope and despair, The torturers, slept ; no mortal pain or fear Marred his repose ;'
and he lies breathing there at peace and faintly smiling.' Better this, Shelley would say, than to fatten in a loveless lethargy, deluded' by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on the earth and cherishing no hopes beyond.' Such are, indeed, already morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender- hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes, who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world.' Alastor has been described as hectic and unhealthy in sentiment ; in truth, it was the product of calm and happy hours, and the mood which it expresses is one of high, sad. sanity. It influencings upon us are like those of the autumnal wind,. —not joyous, but pure and spiritual, enlarging the horizons and revealing to us the boundaries of hope and joy."
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