Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

A DEFENCE OF POETRY.

PROSE. VOL. III.

H

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

In a

[A Defence of Poetry is the first part of an essay meant as an answer to one by Thomas Love Peacock, which appeared in 1820 in Ollier's Literary Miscellany, where also Shelley's Defence was to have appeared bad the magazine been continued. Mrs. Shelley, when first giving the Defence of Poetry to the world in the Essays &c. (1840), characterized it in her Preface (page vii) as "the only entirely finished prose work Shelley left." The Defence was written shortly after Epipsychidion. Writing to Mr. Ollier on the 20th of January, 1821, Shelley says (Shelley Memorials, where the letter is given at pages 135-6, but dated 1820), "the moment I get rid of my ophthalmia, I mean to see about an answer to The Four Ages of Poetry: he adds "It is very clever, but, I think, very false." Writing again on the 22nd of February, 1821, he says (Shelley Memorials, page 154), "Peacock's essay is at Florence at present,-I have sent for it and will transmit to you my paper as soon as it is written which will be in a very few days. Nevertheless, I should be sorry that you delayed your Magazine through any dependence on me.-I will not accept anything for this paper, as I had determined to write it, and promised it you, before, I heard of your liberal arrangements letter dated the 20th or 22nd of March, 1821, he says, "I send you the Defence of Poetry, Part I.-It is transcribed, I hope, legibly"; and he gives Mr. Ollier leave to omit, but not to "alter or add." In a postscript he requests that a copy of the Magazine containing the Defence may be sent to Peacock as from him. In a letter to Peacock dated the 21st of March, 1821 (Fraser's Magazine, March, 1860, page 315), he says "I dispatch by this post the first part of an essay, intended to consist of three parts, which I design for an antidote to your Four Ages of Poetry"; and Peacock says in a note that, as Shelley wrote it, "it contained many allusions to the article and its author, such as 'If I know the knight by the device of his shield, I have only to inscribe Cassandra, Antigone, or Alcestis on mine to blunt the point of his spear;' taking one instance of a favourite character from each of the three great Greek tragedians. All these allusions were struck out by Mr. John Hunt when he prepared the paper for publication in the Liberal. The demise of that periodical prevented the publication, and Mrs. Shelley subsequently printed it from Mr. Hunt's rifacciamento, as she received it. The paper as it now stands is a defence without an attack. Shelley intended this paper to be in three parts, but the other two were not written." I am not aware how the paper passed from Mr. Ollier to Mr. Hunt. In a letter to Mr. Ollier dated the 25th of September, 1821 (Shelley Memorials, page 159), Shelley says, Pray give me notice against what time you want the second part of my Defence of Poetry-I give you this Defence, and you may do what you will with it." Mr. Garnett (Relics, page 48) mentions as existing among Shelley's MSS. a fair copy of this essay, prepared for the printer, but damaged by sea-water,-so much so, Mr. Garnett tells me, that only a word here and there can be deciphered. The publication in the Relics of some passages from the " original exordium" seems to indicate the existence of some of Shelley's notes, or parts of the draft. I have a complete MS. of it in the handwriting of Miss Clairmont; but, though it presents some variations from the printed text, it would seem to be copied, not from the original, but from the rifacciamento. In the MS. Note-book, however, containing the Notes on Sculpture, &c., is a fragment of the original Defence, including one of the cancelled references to The Four Ages. For the following text I have collated the editions of 1840 and 1852, and Miss Clairmont's transcript, all three representing the same original, and have as a rule silently adopted the best reading in each case. The variations are usually of too slight and accidental a character to record. Peacock's Essay has a real interest independent of the help it gives in appreciating Shelley's mental attitude. It is therefore reprinted in the Appendix.-H. B. F.]

[ocr errors]

A DEFENCE OF POETRY.'

PART I.

ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.

The one is the rò rov, or the principle of

66

The following fragments are from the Relics of Shelley. Mr. Garnett, in first giving them to the public, pointed out (p. 89) that they seem to have formed part of the original exordium of the Defence of Poetry, the composition of which was interrupted by an attack of ophthalmia."

"In one mode of considering those two classes of action of the human mind which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind employed upon the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and imagination as mind combining the elements of thought itself. It has been termed the power of association; and on an accurate anatomy of the functions of mind, it would be difficult to assign any other origin to the mass of what we perceive and know than this power. Association is, however, rather a law according

synthesis, and has for its object those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the rò λoyile, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the imagination:" and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which

a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Eolian lyre, which move it by their motion to everchanging melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings,

to which this power is exerted than the power itself; in the same manner as gravitation is a passive expression of the reciprocal tendency of heavy bodies towards their respective centres. Were these bodies conscious of such a tendency, the name which they would assign to that consciousness would express the cause of gravitation; and it were a vain inquiry as to what might be the cause of that cause. Association bears the same relation to imagination as a mode to a source of action: when we look upon shapes in the fire or the clouds, and image to ourselves the resemblance of familiar objects, we do no more than seize the relation of certain points of visible objects, and fill up, blend together,

...

"The imagination is a faculty not less imperial and essential to the happiness and dignity of the human being, than the reason.

"It is by no means indisputable that what is true, or rather that which the disciples of a certain mechanical and superficial philosophy call true, is more excellent than the beautiful."

[ocr errors]

which acts otherwise than in a lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expression ; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the

« AnteriorContinuar »