PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

"The best and least selfish man I ever knew."-Byron.

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Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."-Matthew Arnold.

BORN August 2, 1792, Shelley was descended from an ancient and honorable family. He entered Eton 1804 and Oxford 1810. Next year he was expelled because of the publication of an anonymous pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism," an action which certainly was not justifiable on the ground of its damage to religion but perhaps pardonable on the score of its badness as a composition. He was twice married, in 1811 and 1816. His first wife, a silly girl, committed suicide; his second, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797– 1851), was a woman of genius.

In 1817 the Shelleys met Byron in Geneva, where they amused themselves by reading German ghost stories and imitating them. In consequence Mrs. Shelley wrote her romance of " Frankenstein," in which she tells, with a power akin to Poe's or Stevenson's, how a German student, after dabbling in magic and chemistry, constructs a monster eight feet high, which, being given the breath of life after revolting experiments, becomes the bane of his life and finally drives him to the Arctic regions and suicide.

During the remainder of his life Shelley lived in Italy, writing exquisite letters, composing immortal poetry, and reading until he became so stooped that he could not swim. In spite of the latter fact, on July 4, 1822, he went out in the Mediterranean in a yacht which, against the advice of his friend Trelawney, had been built on a defective model. On July 19, the poet's body was found on the beach. Morally, Shelley was one of the best of men. Poetically, he belongs in the same class with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. The delicacy of his nature led Arnold to describe him with felicity as "Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." The truth of this characterization at once becomes

apparent to anybody who studies his longer poems. The first of these, Queen Mab," is a work of impassioned reasoning and passionate rhetoric. The second, "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," reveals him as a master artist. The third, "The Revolt of Islam," says Swin

burne, shows how Spenserian stanzas should be written as surely as "Childe Harold" shows how they should not. " Julian and Maddalo " contains the finest portrait of Lord Byron and the finest picture of Venice in existence. The song of the delivered earth and the final

chant of Demogorgon in " Prometheus Unbound " can hardly be compared with anything outside of Shakespeare or the Bible. "The Cenci " is as terrible, as noble, and as simple as any of Marlowe's tragedies. "Adonaïs," an elegy on Keats, is one of the four greatest poems of its class in English, the others being Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

It is by his shorter poems, however, that Shelley is best known. Swinburne calls them scraps of heaven and shreds of paradise. The "Ode to the West Wind" is one of the supreme poems of all time, beyond and outside and above all criticism, all praise, and all thanksgiving. The "Letter to Maria Gisborne," the " Hymn to Hermes," and the "Witch of Atlas " are joyous and high-spirited little masterpieces. The" Ode to Liberty" and the " Ode to Naples " are noble expressions of the hatred of tyranny and the faith in republican government which from first to last characterized their author. "Arethusa," "The Cloud," and "The Sensitive Plant" are fascinating fancies. But the " Ode to a Skylark" is perhaps the best, as it is certainly the best known, of Shelley's poems.

Coleridge, whose disciple Shelley was, lived twice as long as his pupil but did not do a twentieth part of Shelley's good work. How good that work was may be guessed from the following extracts and quotations:

"The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams."

The Spirit of Solitude.

'Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours."

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence stricken multitudes: O thou,

Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought."

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
"That orbed maiden

With white fire laden,

Ozymandias.

The Cloud.

Whom mortals call the moon." Macaulay, whose judgment of poets and poetry is usually sound, says of Shelley: "The strong imagination of Shelley made him an idolater in his own despite. Out of the most indefinite terms of a hard, cold, dark metaphysical system he made a gorgeous Pantheon, full of beautiful, majestic, and godlike forms. He turned atheism itself into a mythology rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias or the virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas of Murillo. The Spirit of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the Principle of Evil, when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and color. They were no longer mere words, but 'intelligible forms '; 'fair humanities'; objects of love, of adoration, or of fear. As there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than that tendency which was so common among the writers of the French school to turn images into abstraction-Venus, for example, into Love; Minerva into Wisdom; Mars into War; Bacchus into Festivity-so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process and to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical and ethical theories of Shelley were certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. His poetry seems not to have been an art but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man he might not improbably have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution."

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Read Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy." What effect do you believe it had upon the conservative England of one hundred years ago?

2. Who wrote "Frankenstein"?

3. How large a gap in form, in thought, in subject-matter, is there between the poetry of Pope and that of Shelley?