One of the reasons why we find it hard to read the great poets is that they sadden us with their troubling beauty. Sadden us--and put us to shame! They compel us to remember the days of our youth; and that is more than most of us are able to bear! What memories! Ye gods, what memories!
And this is true, above all, of Shelley. His verses, when we return to them again, seem to have the very "perfume and suppliance" of the Spring; of the Spring of our frost-bitten age. Their sweetness has a poignancy and a pang; the sweetness of things too dear; of things whose beauty brings aching and a sense of bitter loss. It is the sudden uncovering of dead violets, with the memory of the soil they were plucked from. It is the strain of music over wide waters--and over wider years.
These verses always had something about them that went further than their actual meaning. They were always a little like planetary melodies, to which earthly words had been fitted. And now they carry us, not only beyond words, but beyond thought,--"as doth Eternity." There is, indeed, a sadness such as one cannot bear long "and live" about Shelley's poetry.
It troubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the outer darkness. The other poets can
describe these things, but he
becomes what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens, that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their secret?
Not to "describe," but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of the thing you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours" of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth from among the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of their description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble us with a fatality we have to share. The passing from its "caverns of rain" of the newborn cloud--we do not only follow it, obedient to the spell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its "cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels all this and more under Shelley's influence--but alas! as soon as one has felt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy as frost," and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals, caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; and we awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"
With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example, there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying the heroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity. With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty--like a great, self-conscious speckled thrush upon a prominent bough.
But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the divine madness; and we pass out of ourselves, and "suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange." Into something "strange," perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of Shelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmy white light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed how all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, as mists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilection for
white things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers, white ghosts, white daisies and white moons thrill us, as we read, with an almost unearthly awe. White Death, too; the shadow of white Corruption, has her place there, and the appalling whiteness of lepers and corpses. The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the White Mass, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence.
Weird and fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is more than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it. His passionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism," his sublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation of war, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order," his indictment of conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Institutions, his invectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any means the blind Utopian rhetoric that some have called them. That crafty slur upon brave new thought which we know so well--that "how-can-you-take-him-seriously" attitude of the "status-quo" rascals--must not mislead us with regard to Shelley's philosophy.
He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we say he is the only kind of philosopher who
must be taken seriously--the philosopher who creates the dreams of the young?
Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid incarnation.
Strange though it may seem, there are not very many poets who have the particular kind of
ice-cold intellect necessary if one is to detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil alienum" attitude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made this inevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly and "unhomely," something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, which alienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thing that makes so many objects poetical--I mean their
traditional association with normal human life--is the thing that
has to be destroyed if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity of mind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase, "human, too human," is a mood essential, if the world is to cast off its "weeds outworn." Change and growth, when they are living and organic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talk smoothly about natural "evolution." What Nature herself does, as we are beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds. One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for us to follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is
that which has to be left behind! We thus begin to see what I must be allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. The false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"--his crying, "hands off! enough!"
It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were wanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness and daring which we find in him.
And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modern literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony, and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousness of the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus of their challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelists rather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy and subtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given to really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence of the importance of what might be called
cruel positivity in human thinking. Shelley has, however, an advantage over Nietzsche in his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect, iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ than with the modern antinomians.
His
mania for "love"--one can call it nothing else--frees his revolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation, that savage subjectivity, which one notes in many philosophical anarchists. His Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de Gourmont.
Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical, pessimistic sense of "eating and drinking" before we die, which one is so familiar with just now.
It is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Shelley's "immorality" should remember. With him "love" was truly a mystical initiation, a religious sacrament, a means of getting into touch with the cosmic secret, a path--and perhaps the only path--to the Beatific Vision.
It is not wise to turn away from Shelley because of his lack of "humour," of his lack of a "sense of proportion." The mystery of the world, whatever it may be, shows itself sometimes quite as indifferent as Shelley to these little nuances. We hear it crying aloud in the night with no humorous cry; and it is too often to stop our ears to what we hear, that we jest so lightly! It is doubtful whether Nature cares greatly for our "sense of proportion."
To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing about Shelley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical and psychic temperament has passed into it. This is so in a measure with all poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face, his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read his lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of the Mona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who has really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. How else could those indescribable pearly shimmerings, those opal tints and rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The very purity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill into the heart of "normal humanity," lends a magic, like the reflection of moonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same ethereal transparency of passion which excites, by reason of its sublime "immorality," the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of our night," to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean "music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the
silence that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Shelley from the turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to bathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our hands in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us underlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births and forgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where the Eternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the "muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in." What separates Shelley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramount concern, and, after "art," morality.
With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of any material "teaching;" one is simply transported into the high, cold regions where the creative gods build, like children, domes of "many-coloured glass," wherewith to "stain the white radiance of eternity." And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life, we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter with the old too-human zest, and let the "ineffectual" madman pass and be forgotten!
I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Shelley's verse is precisely what dreams of the transmutation of "man" into "beyond-man." That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food of the immortals.
And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something, sometimes, that responds to such strains as "When the lamp is shattered" and "One word is too often profaned." Perhaps only those who have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hope with the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can enter completely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful, sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made.
And the artless simplicity of Shelley's technique--much more really simple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, of a Blake or Verlaine--lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are so naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when they seem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot help happening upon, as they soothe their "love-laden souls" in "secret hour."
The infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recall emotions that we ourselves have had, with the very form and circumstance of their passion. And who can read the verses of Shelley without recalling such? That peculiar poignancy of memory, like a sharp spear, which arrests us at the smell of certain plants or mosses, or nameless earth-mould, or "growths by the margins of pond-waters;" that poignancy which brings back the indescribable balm of Spring and the bitter-sweetness of irremediable loss; who can communicate it like Shelley?
There are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems, particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear-cut hill towns of Italy; but for English readers it will always be the rosemary "that is for remembrance" and the pansies that "are for thoughts" that give their perfume to the feelings he excites.
Other poets may be remembered at other times, but it is when the sun-warmed woods smell of the first primroses, and the daffodils, coming "before the swallow dares," lift up their heads above the grass, that the sting of this sweetness, too exquisite to last beyond a moment, brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret.
[The end]
John Cowper Powys's essay: Shelley