R520221A. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Athenæum, 21 February 1852, p. 214.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 390.
There is not much in these new Letters of Shelley:—there is too much in the prefatory pages by Mr. Browning. With him, thought is apt to engender thought, and illustration illustration, nor rapidly in his prose no less than in his verse that his ideas and emblems jostle each other, thereby producing an effect of confusion and obscurity. Here, however, is a passage which will speak home to many readers.—
“A full life of Shelley should be written at once, while the materials for it continue in reach; not to minister to the curiosity of the public, but to obliterate the last stain of that false life which was forced on the public’s attention before it had any curiosity on the matter,—a biography, composed in harmony with the present general disposition to have faith in him, yet not shrinking from a candid statement of all ambiguous passages, through a reasonable confidence that the most doubtful of them will be found consistent with a belief in the eventual perfection of his character, according to the poor limits of our humanity. Nor will men persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and an atheism of the heart, those passionate, impatient struggles of a boy towards distant truth and love, made in the dark, and ended by one sweep of the natural seas before the full moral sunrise could shine out on him. Crude convictions of boyhood, conveyed in imperfect and inapt forms of speech,—for such things all boys have been pardoned. There are growing pains, accompanied by temporary distortion, of the soul also. And it would be hard indeed upon this young Titan of genius, murmuring in divine music his human ignorances, through his very thirst for knowledge, and his rebellion, in mere aspiration to law, if the melody itself substantiated the error, and the tragic cutting short of life perpetuated into sins, such faults as, under happier circumstances, would have been left behind by the consent of the most arrogant moralist, forgotten on the lowest steps of youth.”
It is but the other day that we were expressing some such wish. But where is the hand to perform the task?—to sift the truths and harmonize the traits presented by the memorials of Mr. Jefferson Hogg, Mr. Leigh Hunt, Captain Medwin, and the Poet’s widow,—the last too dainty, vague, and chary in her speech, owing to fondness and over-reverence? Shelley’s biographer should be on the level of his subject, but breathing a different air, moving in a different orbit;—otherwise, as we remarked when adverting to the quick poetical sympathies of certain modern poets for the author of “The Bride’s Tragedy” (Ath. No. 1200), there is a danger of such super-subtlety and mysticism, resulting from love and intimate sympathy, as would remove both the work of art and its subject beyond the comprehension of persons less exquisitely poetical. For those who already delight in and accept Shelley, there is little need of an apologetic and explanatory life;—for those who do not, the writer should be some compound of reason and of passion, of philosophy and of fantasy, of high judicial acuteness and indulgent tenderness, such as it must be rare indeed to find.
[The balance of this review pertains to Shelley’s letters.]
[Henry Fothergill Chorley]
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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