SHELLEY'S LETTERS.* INTO the two volumes before us Mr. Ingpen

has collected with pious and indefatigable labour the whole scattered mass of Shelley's extant correspondence; he has arranged it in chronological order and annotated it throughout, giving besides a sketch of the personal history of each correspondent. So that if a man's character, as'Cardinal Newman thought, is best revealed by his familiar letters, every reader now may draw his own portrait of the " real " Shelley. It must be admitted that the first couple of hundred letters do not help us much to a portrait of the " true " Shelley. They are the fluent outpourings of a clever youth, conscious that the world is out of joint, but convinced from a study of Godwin's Political Justice that what is needed to set it right is the abolition of every form of restraint upon liberty. If Shelley bad known more of his Bible, he would have acclaimed as his first principle St. Paul's sentence : " The strength of sin is the law." These earlier letters afford perhaps the most remarkable

• The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Compiled and Edited by Boger Ingpen. 2 vols. London : Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. [25s. net.J example we have of what 'Plato desCribed as the "puppy" stage in the development of a person of genius. The young Shelley must be cutting his argumentative teeth on anything and everybody. By posing as a " good young man" troubled

with doubts he draws into correspondence that eminent evangelical controversialist, the Rev. George Stanley Faber, uncle of the Oratorian, remarking of him meanwhile to his friend Hogg : "Poor fool! his Christian mildness, his consistent for- giveness of injuries amuses me." He attempts to " enlighten " his father, gets him to assent to the utter incredibility of witches, ghosts, and legendary miracles, and then "applies the truth on which they had agreed so harmoniously" to the Christian religion, much to Mr. Timothy Shelley's indignation. He tries to convert his sisters' schoolfellows into "divine little scions of infidelity," at the same time that be takes the Sacrament with them. Altogether, a most unpleasing and uncomfortable inmate of any quiet household. Presently he becomes even dangerous. Having adopted Godwin's views on the tyranny of the marriage bond, he prepared to put them into practice, and was shocked at the " intolerance " of the young ladies of his acquaintance, who paid respect to such bugbears as the universal custom of Christendom and the table of prohibited degrees. It is indeed impossible to read some of Shelley's letters in this first volume without horror ; and without indignation at those of his biographers who have tried to represent him as a more than Christian saint ; and we regret that Mr. Ingpen has, in the case of one notorious letter, unconsciously no doubt, followed Professor Dowden in a misinterpretation, which can be exposed by other letters of the same date. By and by the genuine unselfishness of Shelley's nature yielded to Hogg's argument as to the " dig. proportionate sacrifice which the female ,is called upon to make" in any irregular union ; and when Harriet Westbrook threw herself on his pity, he married her, and after her unhappy death married Mary Godwin.

There is a sentence in an early letter to Hogg which explains what to the ordinary man of the world cannot but be regarded as the comedy, though in one case it turned to tragedy, of Shelley's many passionate and transitory friend. ships with women. " I loved a being, an idea in my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this " (June 2nd, 1811). The most curious example of Shelley's many broken idols was a Sussex schoolmistress, Elizabeth Hitchener. His friendship with her lasted a year, during which time he wrote her about fifty letters. In one of the earliest be apologises to her for his marriage. " Blame me if you will, dearest friend, for dill thou art dearest to me ; yet pity even this error if thou blamest me. If Harriet be not at sixteen all that you are at a more advanced age, assist me to mould a really noble soul into all that can make its nobleness useful and lovely." After a year's solicitation Miss Hitchener gave up her school to join the Shelley household, and from a goddess became at once a demon, whom he at length persuaded by a pension to quit his house. A few more sentences from this impassioned correspondence will show that if Miss Hitchener was foolish in at last yielding to Shelley's importunity, the temptation was a severe one ; for she could hardly be expected to realise that if her letters were all that Shelley said, her conversation would at once prove intolerable :-

" Let the Christian talk of faith, but I am convinced that the wildest bigot who ever carried fury and fanaticism through a country never could so firmly believe his idol as I believe in you. Dearest friend, come to us all, at midsummer, never to part again. Come, for the severe virtue that has guided thee thus far points out now a path on which friendship has scattered flowers. Nothing shall prevent our eternal union in the summer. I ought to count myself a favoured mortal, with such a wife and friend (these human names and distinctions perhaps are necessary in the

present state of society) You do not doubt my friendship, I do not doubt yours. Let us mingle our identities inseparably, and burst upon tyrants with the accumulated impetuosity of our acquirements and resolutions."

It is not until Peacock comes on the scene that Shelley's letters become interesting for their own sake. He corre- sponded with him during the Swiss tour in 1816, and again from Italy two years later. In Peacock for the first time Shelley met with a correspondent of literary tastes akin to his own, who was not always begging for money like Godwin and Leigh Hunt ; with him therefore he could be at his ease ; while his indifference to the eternities and immensities kept Shelley away from ouch topics as fill the letters to Hogg end Miss Hitchener. The development in power between the Swiss and Italian letters is marked. What descriptions the former contain are not beyond the compass of a superior guide-book. If one were to choose a passage for quotation from the Swiss letters, it would not be any glorification of the Alps, but the following sketch of a domestic interior :—

" The shrines of the Penates are good wood fires, or window frames intertwined with creeping plant; their hymns are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles, the long talks over the past and dead, the laugh of children, the warm wind of summer filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance. In talking of the Penates, will you not liken me to Julius Omar dedicating a temple to Liberty?"

Side by side with this we may set another short expression of a sentiment from the later letters, which shows even more clearly how the fluency of youth had been transmuted into the rhythmical ease and grace which are characteristic of Shelley's mature writing both in prose and verse :— " I often revisit Marlow in thought. The curse of this life is that whatever is once known can never be unknown. You inhabit a spot, which, before you inhabit it, is as indifferent to you as any other spot upon earth ; and when persuaded by some necessity you think to leave it, you leave it not ; it clings to you, and with memories of things which in your experience of them gave no such promise, revenges your desertion.'

With what inimitable ease that is said ! We may take two other short passages in each of which Shelley gave a similar perfection of form to the confession, quoted above in its first crude shape, of his repeated disillusionment in love. They are from letters to John Gisborne, written in 1821 and 1822 :—

"You are right about Antigone ; how sublime a picture of a woman ! and what think you of the choruses, and especially the lyrical complaints of the godlike victim ? Some of us have, in a prior existence, been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie."

" The Epipsychiclion I cannot look at ; the person whom it

celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno It is an idealised history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with some thing or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal."

Of Shelley's extraordinary skill in depicting what he saw it will be best to choose an example, not from the magnificent descriptions of Como, or Pompeii, or Naples, where the im- pressiveness of the object acts as a stimulus to the painter, though no small part of the charm of these pictures consists in their transparent sincerity, but from an object the like of which everybody has seen, and so can measure the difficulty of transferring it to paper. It is part of the description of the cataract of the Velino :-

" Stand upon the brink of the platform of cliff which is directly opposite; you see the ever-moving water stream down. It comes in thick and tawny folds, flaking off like solid mow gliding down a mountain. It does not seem hollow within, but without it is unequal, like the folding of linen thrown carelessly down ; your eye follows it, and it is lost below ; not in the black rocks which gird it around, but in its own foam and spray, in the cloudlike vapours boiling up from below, which is not like rain, nor mist, nor spray, nor foam, but water, in a shape wholly unlike anything I ever saw before. It is as white as snow, but thick and im- penetrable to the eye. The very imagination is bewildered in it. A thunder comes up from the abyss wonderful to hear ; for though it ever sounds, it is never the same, but modulated by the changing motion rises and falls intermittingly; we passed half an hour in one spot looking at it, and thought but a few minutes had gone by."

But of course the places one turns to by preference in these letters of travel are those where the beauty of Nature is touched for the poet with some human emotion, as in the few lines about the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, written in 1818 before the death of Keats had given to that " slope of green access, pitched in Heaven's smile," a nearer and more glorious association :—

"The English burying place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb, of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh when we first visited it with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep."