BOOKS.

SHELLEY.*

Tun phrase with which Arnold closed his essay on Shelley, describing him as a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain has long been a stumbling- block of offence, not only to lovers of Shelley, but to lovers, and to at least one biographer, of Arnold himself. The latest critic to attack Arnold's judgment in this matter is Mr. A. Clutton-Brock, in an introduction to Mr. Locock's edition of The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and we do not think he has been more successful than his predecessors. We may remark that those who object to the phrase would not seem to have taken much trouble in their endeavour to appreciate its signi- ficance. Professor Dowden, who recognizes that the words, which are a variation of Joubert's on Plato, may have some allusive value, tells us gravely that " Shelley was no angel, whether of celestial or diabolic race, but moat human in his passions, his errors, his failures, his achievement. Nor was it in the void that he lived and moved: he belonged in an eminent degree to the revolutionary movement of his own day and viewed apart from the teaching of that geometer of the Revolution whom he accepted as his master—William Godwin —the work of Shelley is only half-intelligible." When we con- sider that Arnold's essay dealt almost entirely with Shelley's life, a life, as he very rightly said, which was largely charac- terized by salete and Mises, and upon which "the plastic influence" of Shelley's ideals, if they had any influence at all, was almost wholly disastrous, and when we remember the picture which Arnold drew of "Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the bat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg, the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world," we are at a loss to understand Professor Dowden's line of defence. Mr. Clutton-Brock does not take the same view as Professor Dowden, and he will have nothing to do with "that geometer of the Revolution," William Godwin. To him Arnold's phrase implies contempt ; and here we may express our own admiration for the shafts of Arnold's criticism, which, keen and barbed, not only penetrate their object, but resist effectually all efforts to withdraw them. The phrase seems so clear and simple, and yet every word has its value and contributes to the complexity of the whole. Professor Dowden objects to the • The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by C. D. Locook. With an Introduction by A. Clutton-Brook. 2 vole. London: Ideation and Co. [21.. *Kt.]

" angel " in the " void" ; Mr. Clutton-Brock has a fellow- feeling for that part of the simile, but cannot away with the "ineffectual" which qualifies it. " Arnold's contempt for Shelley," he tells us, "was contempt not for the politician but for the religious enthusiast—for the mind that was occupied with visions of another world, which seemed to him mere idle dreams. Hazlitt, who described Shelley as the type of the fanatic, had the same contempt for him ; and neither of these men, needless to say, had sordid minds." Quite needless, we may remark in passing ; but what in effect is the suggestion contained by Mr. Clutton-Brock's words P They suggest that Arnold was a person devoid of a religious sense; and to any man at all familiar with Arnold's work, with his essays on Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin, or on joubert, with his letters or his poems, the gross injustice of this suggestion will be at once apparent. We need not press the point, for we are only concerned with Arnold as a critic of Shelley ; and we may turn to consider the processes by which Mr. Clutton- Brock arrives at his conception of Shelley as a religious enthusiast.

He begins by asking whether Shelley was possessed by "a passion for reforming the world," or whether he was not mistaken about the nature of his desires ; and then he proceeds to a purely arbitrary distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and to the assumption that "it was only in poetry that Shelley expressed himself completely. In prose he often repeats what he has learned from others, and expresses only the conscious part of his mind." The next step is an illustration by means of The Revolt of Islam, which we may quote in full:

"If we compare the ending of the poem with its prose preface we shall see the difference between Shelley's real desires and the political ideas which he caught from Godwin and other philo- sophers. In the preface he seems to be altogether concerned with the world. He appeals to the desire for a happier condition of moral and political society. He wishes to kindle a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and justice. The tendency of the poem, he says, is to awaken public hope. It is to display the temporary triumph of oppression, that secure earnest of its final and inevitable fall. In fact we are led to expect that political virtue will be proved to be its own reward in this life. But in the poem itself the reward of political virtue here below is the stake, and there is no promise whatever of its future triumph except in another world where there are no politics."

Mr. Clutton-Brock mentions briefly the objections which may be urged against his criticism of The Revolt of Islam and discusses them in order to prove their emptiness. The only objection which seems to us of any importance he does not discuss, though he mentions it. This objection is that Shelley " could not represent the triumph of his political ideas in poetry, because poetry is not fit for such a representation," and we think it unanswerable ; but because it is not a fit subject is no reason for supposing that Shelley

did not attempt its poetic representation. As Keats said, Shelley was "not sufficiently an artist," and one instance of

this insufficiency is the fact that he was never fully conscious of the limitations of his art and seldom asked himself whether

a subject was or was not susceptible of poetic repre- sentation. But this is not our chief objection to

the theory of Mr. Clutton-Brook. It is rather that he has erected a theory which is not only unnecessary but is altogether fallacious. He speaks, for instance, of the conscious and unconscious minds as though they were two mutually exclusive spheres entirely independent of each other, and not merely two circles intersecting each other

with a space common to both, or, what we think may be a better figure, a line in which one is continued into the other. He opposes poetry to prose in a manner so arbitrary and unjustifiable that if we accept his distinction we are driven to think that in no possible circumstances can prose ever be inspired, and all this cumbrous and impossible machinery is erected to prove, what we should have thought was sufficiently obvious, that, in common with the large majority of poets and with all great poets, Shelley's work is informed by a mystical element ; that he views life sub specie aeternitatis. We do not use the words of Mr. Glutton-Brock, because we do not think it quite exact to describe Shelley as " a religions enthusiast," and our reason is probably the same as that which led Arnold to describe him as " ineffectual." For religion is something more than a mere series of mystical Runs ; it is something abiding and steadfast; a secret influence which informs the life governed by it. A curious fact, which ep-, -eader may observe

for himself, is that in Shelley's poems, though there is an extra- ordinary sense of motion, there is never any development. It is all crisis. Or, as in The Skylark, he begins at the very top of his power, drops, recovers, but does not go beyond his first achievement. It is an extraordinary rapture, spent in its own utterance and leaving no trace behind it. He never, in Milton's words, " sails between worlds and worlds on steady wing." The rapture with him is its own object.

There are some lines in the work of all great poets which seem to express them fully : lines like those of Shakespeare where he speaks of " the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come " ; or Dante's lines-

" E ohe la mente nostra peregrina Pill della came, e men da' pensier press Alle sue visions quasi 4 divina "-

or the line of Milton quoted above ; or Wordsworth's lines on Newton :

"A mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone."

Each of these quotations is the expression of a religions sense, of that feeling of awe which comes from the contemplation of infinity, and the very expression of this sense gives to the lines themselves a grave majesty. They move like eagles wheeling in a blue sky. We feel that the souls of those who wrought them moved in the same grave majesty, were filled with the same high purpose, and gazed with the same tranquillity both upon the glories of the sun and the precipitous places of earth.

But can we apply any of these passages as descriptive of Shelley ; or has he lines in his own work of the same solemnity and weight, and differing merely in kind, which we could apply to him P We do not think so. He moves in the same element "like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun."

We think that any appreciation of Shelley must attempt

also to appreciate those qualities in which he is lacking, and it is extremely ill-advised to treat a criticism which tries to

do this as though it expressed hostility or contempt. It is absolutely impossible that any man to whom poetry is as a living thing should speak of the master who wrote Adonis and Prometheus and Epipsychidion with contempt. In his lecture on Shelley's View of Poetry Dr. Bradley—perhaps the sanest and the most clear-sighted critic of our own time—says that "always we get most from the genius in a man of genius, and not from the rest of him." He is the poet of desire, cupitor incredibilium ; it is " the desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow "—desire for the sake of desiring. " He walks upon the winds with lightness" and leaves no trace behind him ; the dreams be expresses float like wreaths of vapour through changing lights, glowing with various colour and flowing from shape to shape so swiftly that they impress no image upon our mind. He seems like one of those bright, fearless spirits whom in the world's youth the country folk imagined, and with whom they populated the woods and waters, seeing them for an instant in the flying lights which moved swiftly among the trees and shone out vividly on smooth beech-stems and still pools; or imagining their passage when the wind rippled the green long grasses

and crowned with white foam the waves of the sea. All that nimble and delicate beauty of Earth, clear and intense, which runs through creation, and is con- tinually escaping from us, he follows ; and when we follow with him we lose something of the heaviness of our clay. He

makes a flame pulse in the blood. When Mr. Clutton-Brock frees himself from the entanglements of his own theories,

when he deals imaginatively with Shelley's imagination, he

says many extremely suggestive things, for which we would not have him think us ungrateful. We are, for all our "vivacity," grateful to him ; and grateful also to Mr. Locook, whose valuable notes and careful editing our space forbids us to praise as they deserve.