R520221D. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Examiner, 21 February 1852, pp. 117–118.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 390–392.
The names of two poets on the title-page give promise of an interest which this brief volume is not altogether calculated to produce. Yet in the few letters of Shelley which Mr Moxon has obtained, and here for the first time published, there is close and constant reference to those earnest and painful struggles with society into which the poet had been led by the very truth of his nature, although carried astray into a path which earned for him in his own day the bitter censure of the hasty and misjudging. Most truly does Mr Browning tell us in his preface, when speaking of the biographic value of Shelley’s correspondence:
This value I take to consist in a most truthful conformity of the Correspondence, in its limited degree, with the moral and intellectual character of the writer as displayed in the highest manifestations of his genius. Letters and poems are obviously an act of the same mind, produced by the same law, only differing in the application to the individual or collective understanding. Letters and poems may be used indifferently as the basement of our opinion upon the writer’s character; the finished expression of a sentiment in the poems, giving light and significance to the rudiments of the same in the letters, and these again in their incipiency and unripeness, authenticating the exalted mood and reattaching it to the personality of the writer. The musician speaks on the note he sings with; there is no change in the scale, as he diminishes the volume into familiar intercourse. There is nothing of that jarring between the man and the author, which has been found so amusing or so melancholy; no dropping of the tragic mask, as the crowd melts away; no mean discovery of the real motives of a life’s achievement, often, in other lives, laid bare as pitifully as when, at the close of a holiday, we catch sight of the internal lead-pipes and wood-valves, to which, and not to the ostensible conch and dominant Triton of the fountain, we have owed our admired water-work. No breaking out, in household privacy, of hatred, anger, and scorn, incongruous with the higher mood and suppressed artistically in the book: no brutal return to self-delighting, when the audience of philanthropic schemes is out of hearing: no indecent stripping off the grander feeling and rule of life as too costly and cumbrous for every-day wear. Whatever Shelley was, he was with an admirable sincerity. It was not always truth that he thought and spoke; but in the purity of truth he spoke and thought always.
This is truth well expressed; and now that the heat of the young poet’s strife is over, his claim to the love of our hearts and to the reverence of our intellects is perfectly acknowledged.
For this reason we are half disposed to question the propriety of publishing a few letters, some of them written in very early youth, which repeat in new words well-known impressions, raising higher the pile over the name of Shelley, but not adding width to its base. To the biographer who is to come, for a worthy biography of Shelley has not yet been written, these letters will give some assistance; but, in the multitude of well-disposed but not wide-minded readers, they will in the meantime be very likely to renew erroneous impressions, because the most extreme opinions, resulting from the struggle in the poet’s mind, are to be found expressed in them.
To error there is, however, antidote provided in the Essay by which the letters are introduced. The author of Christmas Eve and Easter day is not wanting in orthodoxy, any more than the author of Paracelsus and Pippa Passes is wanting in large-minded sympathy with what is genuine in man and nature. Taking the point of view selected by the narrowest of censors, Mr Browning can yet see in Shelley a man “true, simple-hearted, and brave; and because what he acted corresponded to what he knew, so I call him a man of religious mind, because every audacious negative cast up by him against the Divine was interpenetrated with a mood of reverence and adoration.”
Mr Browning’s introduction is perhaps more characteristic than might be desired. The feeling and the language of a poet prevail through its whole texture, and there are passages written with peculiar force, clearness, and beauty. But when Mr Browning lays a landscape down in words, it would appear that he can never think it perfect without mists in plenty; mists that conceal what is really worth seeing, and for that reason we particularly object to them. Mr Browning is a man whose thoughts we do not wish to lose, but in this busy world there is not always time to study for them. It is not that he is always dark because his thoughts lie too deep for expression; his mists often arise from the simpler cause, that he fails to put his words clearly together. Let us justify this remark by an example.
Here is a passage over which our head swam, and it was not until after a second reading that we found our difficulty to be caused by want of stops. The whole of the succeeding extract is a single sentence, occupying just two pages in the book.
The “Remains”—produced within a period of ten years, and at a season of life when other men of at all comparable genius have hardly done more than prepare the eye for future sight and the tongue for speech—present us with the complete enginery of a poet, as signal in the excellence of its several adaptitudes as transcendent in the combination of effects,—examples, in fact, of the whole poet’s function of beholding with an understanding keenness the universe, nature and man, in their actual state of perfection in imperfection,—of the whole poet’s virtue of being untempted by the manifold partial developments of beauty and good on every side, into leaving them the ultimates he found them,—induced by the facility of the gratification of his own sense of those qualities, or by the pleasure of acquiescence in the short-comings of his predecessors in art, and the pain of disturbing their conventi[on]alisms,—the whole poet’s virtue, I repeat, of looking higher than any manifestation yet made of both beauty and good, in order to suggest from the utmost actual realisation of the one a corresponding capability in the other, and out of the calm, purity, and energy of nature, to reconstitute and store up for the forthcoming stage of man’s being, a gift in repayment of that former gift, in which man’s own thought and passion had been lavished by the poet on the else-incompleted magnificence of the sunrise, the else-uninterpreted mystery of the lake,—so drawing out, lifting up, and assimilating this ideal of a future man, thus descried as possible, to the present reality of the poet’s soul already arrived at the higher state of development, and still aspirant to elevate and extend itself in conformity with its still-improving perceptions of, no longer the eventual Human, but the actual Divine.
This is by no means to be taken singly as a specimen of Mr Browning’s portion of the present volume. No man can write more lucid sentences than Mr Browning can write when he pleases, and does write abundantly in this Essay. We give one more extract from it. [p. 118→]
He died before his youth ended. In taking the measure of him as a man, he must be considered on the whole and at his ultimate spiritual stature, and not be judged of at the immaturity and by the mistakes of ten years before: that, indeed, would be to judge of the author of “Julian and Maddalo” by “Zastrozzi.” Let the whole truth be told of his worst mistake. I believe, for my own part, that if anything could now shame or grieve Shelley, it would be an attempt to vindicate him at the expense of another.
In forming a judgment, I would, however, press on the reader the simple justice of considering tenderly his constitution of body as well as mind, and how unfavourable it was to the steady symmetries of conventional life; the body, in the torture of incurable disease, refusing to give repose to the bewildered soul, tossing in its hot fever of the fancy,—and the laudanum-bottle making but a perilous and pitiful truce between these two. He was constantly subject to “that state of mind” (I quote his own note to “Hellas”) “in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensation, through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and excess of passion animating the creations of the imagination:” in other words, he was liable to remarkable delusions and hallucinations. The nocturnal attack in Wales, for instance, was assuredly a delusion; and I venture to express my own conviction, derived from a little attention to the circumstances of either story, that the idea of the enamoured lady following him to Naples, and of the “man in the cloak” who struck him at the Pisan post-office, were equally illusory,—the mere projection, in fact, from himself, of the image of his own love and hate.
To thirst and find no fill—to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps—to pause and ponder—
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
When busy thought and blind sensation mingle,—
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow—
of unfelt caresses,—and of unfelt blows as well: to such conditions was his genius subject. It was not at Rome only (where he heard a mystic voice exclaiming, “Cenci, Cenci,” in reference to the tragic theme which occupied him at the time),—it was not at Rome only that he mistook the cry of “old rags.” The habit of somnambulism is said to have extended to the very last days of his life.
[The balance of this review pertains to Shelley’s letters.]
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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