SHELBURNE ESSAYS

SEVENTH SERIES

SHELLEY

IN confessing that he wrote his life of elley1 as a middle-aged man for others of his class, Mr. Clutton-Brock forgot to reckon with the wit of his youthful reviewers; and yet, if by middleage he means the experience of life, what right, after all, has Shelley or any other darling of the Muses to be exempt from that censure? The biographer's real fault is rather an amazing ingenuousness in trying to ride at once the horses of both youth and maturity. On one page he analyses Prometheus Unbound as a drama of a single event, and that causeless, acted by characters who drift about aimlessly and know not who they are or what relation they bear

to

one another: that is the critical attitude

1 Shelley: The Man and the Poet. By A. Clutton-Brock. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909.

of mature common-sense. It is the audacious enthusiasm of youth when in a later passage he insists that the author of this drama proves himself an "intellectual poet." The same doubledealing appears when in one place he asserts that Shelley's ideas and emotions underwent little change; and then, a few pages after, with a covert allusion to Matthew Arnold, declares that the poet "was not a vapid angel singing silly hymns; but a man who only learnt to live well and write well by sharp experience." Now, Shelley is "a being prophetic of some higher state to which mankind shall attain, and unfit for this life only because he was fit for a better"; elsewhere, his Paradise is pronounced "a mere impossibility, an incongruous mixture of present pleasure of the flesh with imagined delights of the spirit."

I do not quote these acrobatic feats of criticism because I wish to ridicule Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, which is as a whole a fairly illuminating piece of work; but because they are so characteristic of our modern way of dealing with facts and tendencies. Look, for instance, into Miss Vida Scudder's school edition of the Prometheus, with its long Introduction-not a very wise production, perhaps, but significant as a woman's conception of a peculiarly feminine genius and as a specimen of what commonly, no doubt, passes in courses of literature. You will there

find that the drama "has a noble and organic unity," although, while the second act is the most wonderful thing "in the whole cycle of English song," the third "drops into bathos" and is "weak, sentimental, empty." The poem as a whole is "a work of resplendent insight," yet its interpretation of evil-that is, the very heart of its theme-is "hopelessly superficial," and man is depicted in it as "a creature of no personality, scarcely higher, except for his æsthetic instincts, than an amiable brute."

After all, these knights and ladies of the romantic pen seem to discover in Shelley traits pretty much like those which they so magnificently disdain Matthew Arnold for dilating

upon.

Nor is Arnold's criticism the only field of their inconsistent attack. Mr. Clutton-Brock cites for reprobation along passage from Hazlitt's Table Talk; yet most of what the old bludgeoner says can, with some change of emphasis, be matched in the modern biographer's own pages. In like manner Miss Scudder puts the ancient reviewers in the stocks to show by comparison how wise we since have grown. She quotes from Blackwood's of September, 1820, and from the Quarterly Review of October, 1821:

In short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain

of this poem [Prometheus], which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties of the highest order. (Blackwood's.)

In Mr. Shelley's poetry, all is brilliance, vacuity, and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words which sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid: fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by, and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory. The mind, fatigued and perplexed, is mortified by the consciousness that its labour has not been rewarded by the acquisition of a single distinct conception. (Quarterly.)

Really, with the best will in the world, I cannot see that Miss Scudder differs so much from the reviled reviewer of Blackwood's, except that she seems to feel no indignation against an author whose sense of evil is "hopelessly superficial." Nor does Mr. Clutton-Brock stand very far from the Quarterly when he says that "in a story there should be some relation of cause and effect, otherwise it will not hold together; in The Revolt of Islam there is none"; and admits that "in its very absurdity it shows the character of Shelley's mind." The chief difference is that Mr. Clutton-Brock apparently thinks it quite a small matter if a long and professedly philosophical poem leaves the reader perplexed and without any distinct conception of what it is all about.

Now these names represent no isolated para