English Literature
theories by eloping with his daughter Mary. It is a sad story, and the
details were perhaps better forgotten. We should remember that in Shelley
we are dealing with a tragic blend of high-mindedness and light-headedness.
Byron wrote of him, "The most gentle, the most amiable, and the least
worldly-minded person I ever met!"
Led partly by the general hostility against him, and partly by his own
delicate health, Shelley went to Italy in 1818, and never returned to
England. After wandering over Italy he finally settled in Pisa, beloved of
so many English poets,--beautiful, sleepy Pisa, where one looks out of his
window on the main street at the busiest hour of the day, and the only
living thing in sight is a donkey, dozing lazily, with his head in the
shade and his body in the sunshine. Here his best poetry was written, and
here he found comfort in the friendship of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawney, who
are forever associated with Shelley's Italian life. He still remained
hostile to English social institutions; but life is a good teacher, and
that Shelley dimly recognized the error of his rebellion is shown in the
increasing sadness of his later poems:
O world, O life, O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more--oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--oh, never more!
In 1822, when only thirty years of age, Shelley was drowned while sailing
in a small boat off the Italian coast. His body was washed ashore several
days later, and was cremated, near Viareggio, by his friends, Byron, Hunt,
and Trelawney. His ashes might, with all reverence, have been given to the
winds that he loved and that were a symbol of his restless spirit; instead,
they found a resting place near the grave of Keats, in the English cemetery
at Rome. One rarely visits the spot now without finding English and
American visitors standing in silence before the significant inscription,
_Cor Cordium_.
WORKS OF SHELLEY. As a lyric poet, Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses
of our literature; and the reader will do well to begin with the poems
which show him at his very best. "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the
West Wind," "To Night,"--poems like these must surely set the reader to
searching among Shelley's miscellaneous works, to find for himself the
things "worthy to be remembered."
In reading Shelley's longer poems one must remember that there are in this
poet two distinct men: one, the wanderer, seeking ideal beauty and forever
unsatisfied; the other, the unbalanced reformer, seeking the overthrow of
present institutions and the establishment of universal happiness.
_Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_ (1816) is by far the best expression
of Shelley's greater mood. Here we see him wandering restlessly through the
vast silences of nature, in search of a loved dream-maiden who shall
satisfy his love of beauty. Here Shelley is the poet of the moonrise, and
of the tender exquisite fancies that can never be expressed. The charm of
the poem lies in its succession of dreamlike pictures; but it gives
absolutely no impressions of reality. It was written when Shelley, after
his long struggle, had begun to realize that the world was too strong for
him. _Alastor_ is therefore the poet's confession, not simply of failure,
but of undying hope in some better thing that is to come.
_Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-1820), a lyrical drama, is the best work of
Shelley's revolutionary enthusiasm, and the most characteristic of all his
poems. Shelley's philosophy (if one may dignify a hopeless dream by such a
name) was a curious aftergrowth of the French Revolution, namely, that it
is only the existing tyranny of State, Church, and society which keeps man
from growth into perfect happiness. Naturally Shelley forgot, like many
other enthusiasts, that Church and State and social laws were not imposed
upon man from without, but were created by himself to minister to his
necessities. In Shelley's poem the hero, Prometheus, represents mankind
itself,--a just and noble humanity, chained and tortured by Jove, who is
here the personification of human institutions.[228] In due time Demogorgon
(which is Shelley's name for Necessity) overthrows the tyrant Jove and
releases Prometheus (Mankind), who is presently united to Asia, the spirit
of love and goodness in nature, while the earth and the moon join in a
wedding song, and everything gives promise that they shall live together
happy ever afterwards.
Shelley here looks forward, not back, to the Golden Age, and is the prophet
of science and evolution. If we compare his Titan with similar characters
in _Faust_ and _Cain_, we shall find this interesting difference,--that
while Goethe's Titan is cultured and self-reliant, and Byron's stoic and
hopeless, Shelley's hero is patient under torture, seeing help and hope
beyond his suffering. And he marries Love that the earth may be peopled
with superior beings who shall substitute brotherly love for the present
laws and conventions of society. Such is his philosophy; but the beginner
will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful
enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal
music. Perhaps we should add here that _Prometheus_ is, and probably always
will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar
spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it
suggests, by contrast, Milton's Christian philosophy in _Paradise
Regained_.
Shelley's revolutionary works, _Queen Mab_ (1813), _The Revolt of Islam_
(1818), _Hellas_ (1821), and _The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), are to be judged
in much the same way as is _Prometheus Unbound_. They are largely
invectives against religion, marriage, kingcraft, and priestcraft, most
impractical when considered as schemes for reform, but abounding in
passages of exquisite beauty, for which alone they are worth reading. In
the drama called _The Cenci_ (1819), which is founded upon a morbid Italian
story, Shelley for the first and only time descends to reality. The
heroine, Beatrice, driven to desperation by the monstrous wickedness of her
father, kills him and suffers the death penalty in consequence. She is the
only one of Shelley's characters who seems to us entirely human.
Far different in character is _Epipsychidion_ (1821), a rhapsody
celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most
characteristic, of all Shelley's works. It was inspired by a beautiful
Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will,
and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood.
With this should be read _Adonais_ (1821), the best known of all Shelley's
longer poems. _Adonais_ is a wonderful threnody, or a song of grief, over
the death of the poet Keats. Even in his grief Shelley still preserves a
sense of unreality, and calls in many shadowy allegorical figures,--Sad
Spring, Weeping Hours, Glooms, Splendors, Destinies,--all uniting in
bewailing the loss of a loved one. The whole poem is a succession of dream
pictures, exquisitely beautiful, such as only Shelley could imagine; and it
holds its place with Milton's _Lycidas_ and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ as one
of the three greatest elegies in our language.
In his interpretation of nature Shelley suggests Wordsworth, both by
resemblance and by contrast. To both poets all natural objects are symbols
of truth; both regard nature as permeated by the great spiritual life which
animates all things; but while Wordsworth finds a spirit of thought, and so
of communion between nature and the soul of man, Shelley finds a spirit of
love, which exists chiefly for its own delight; and so "The Cloud," "The
Skylark," and "The West Wind," three of the most beautiful poems in our
language, have no definite message for humanity. In his "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty" Shelley is most like Wordsworth; but in his "Sensitive
Plant," with its fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world
but himself. Comparison is sometimes an excellent thing; and if we compare
Shelley's exquisite "Lament," beginning "O world, O life, O time," with
Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," we shall perhaps understand both
poets better. Both poems recall many happy memories of youth; both express
a very real mood of a moment; but while the beauty of one merely saddens
and disheartens us, the beauty of the other inspires us with something of
the poet's own faith and hopefulness. In a word, Wordsworth found and
Shelley lost himself in nature.
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists.
While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or
upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and
Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times,
Keats lived apart from men and from all political measures, worshiping
beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own
heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or
dreamed it to be. He had, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for
its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics
or, indeed, to any cause, however great or small. As he says in "Lamia":
... Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
Partly because of this high ideal of poetry, partly because he studied and
unconsciously imitated the Greek classics and the best works of the
Elizabethans, Keats's last little volume of poetry is unequaled by the work
of any of his contemporaries. When we remember that all his work was
published in three short years, from 1817 to 1820, and that he died when
only twenty-five years old, we must judge him to be the most promising
figure of the early nineteenth century, and one of the most remarkable in
the history of literature.
LIFE. Keats's life of devotion to beauty and to poetry is all the more
remarkable in view of his lowly origin. He was the son of a hostler and
stable keeper, and was born in the stable of the Swan and Hoop Inn, London,
in 1795. One has only to read the rough stable scenes from our first
novelists, or even from Dickens, to understand how little there was in such
an atmosphere to develop poetic gifts. Before Keats was fifteen years old
both parents died, and he was placed with his brothers and sisters in
charge of guardians. Their first act seems to have been to take Keats from
school at Enfield, and to bind him as an apprentice to a surgeon at
Edmonton. For five years he served his apprenticeship, and for two years
more he was surgeon's helper in the hospitals; but though skillful enough
to win approval, he disliked his work, and his thoughts were on other
things. "The other day, during a lecture," he said to a friend, "there came
a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in
the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." A copy of
Spenser's _Faery Queen_, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark,
was the prime cause of his abstraction. He abandoned his profession in
1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of _Poems_. It