R520228B. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Leader, 28 February 1852, pp. 205–206.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 393–395.
The letters we announced some weeks ago are now on our table, prefaced by some remarks by Robert Browning, which, as the utterances of one distinguished poet on a Great Immortal, are of very special interest. After drawing a distinction between the objective and the subjective kinds of poetry, Browning shows how necessary to the proper enjoyment of the subjective poet is a satisfactory knowledge of his life and being; and argues, very justly, that Letters are peculiarly serviceable in opening to us glimpses of the real nature of the writer’s mind:—
“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 waterwork. 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. Everywhere is apparent his belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident; his faithful holding by what he assumed to be the former, going everywhere in company with the tenderest pity for those acting or suffering on the opposite hypothesis. For he was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere. And not only do the same affection and yearning after the well-being of his kind appear in the letters as in the poems, but they express themselves by the same theories and plans, however crude and unsound. There is no reservation of a subtler, less costly, more serviceable remedy for his own ill, than he has proposed for the general one; nor does he ever contemplate an object on his own account, from a less elevation than he uses in exhibiting it to the world. How shall we help believing Shelley to have been, in his ultimate attainment, the splendid spirit of his own best poetry, when we find even his carnal speech to agree faithfully, at faintest as at strongest, with the tone and rhythm of his most oracular utterances?
“For the rest, these new letters are not offered as presenting any new feature of the poet’s character. Regarded in themselves, and as the substantive productions of a man, their importance would be slight. But they possess interest beyond [p. 206→] their limits, in confirming the evidence just dwelt on, of the poetical mood of Shelley being only the intensification of his habitual mood; the same tongue only speaking, for want of the special excitement to sing. The very first letter, as one instance for all, strikes the key-note of the predominating sentiment of Shelley throughout his whole life—his sympathy with the oppressed. And when we see him at so early an age, casting out, under the influence of such a sympathy, letters and pamphlets on every side, we accept it as the simple exemplification of the sincerity with which, at the close of his life, he spoke of himself, as—
One whose heart a strangers tear might wear.
As water-drops the sandy fountain stone;
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan
For woes which others hear not, and could see
The absent with the glass of phantasy,
And near the poor and trampled sit and weep,
Following the captive to his dungeon deep—
One who was as a nerve o’er which do creep
The else-unfelt oppressions of this earth.
“Such sympathy with his kind was evidently developed in him to an extraordinary and even morbid degree, at a period when the general intellectual powers it was impatient to put in motion, were immature or deficient.”
This is both truly and finely said, and, as applied to natures like Shelley’s, admits of no qualification; but with regard to more versatile and many-sided natures, the same would not hold rigorously, unless the impulses of the moment, the moods and caprices, the jests and the despondencies which would necessarily vary their correspondence, were considered as not affecting the general and permanent mood.
There are thoughtful and noteworthy passages in this Essay, some of which we shall quote elsewhere; and all Shelley’s admirers will thank Browning for his appreciation, with which, in the main, they will agree. Here is a passage worth pondering:—
“I conjecture, from a review of the various publications of Shelley’s youth, that one of the causes of his failure at the outset was the peculiar practicalness of his mind, which was not without a determinate effect on his progress in theorizing. An ordinary youth, who turns his attention to similar subjects, discovers falsities, incongruities, and various points for amendment, and, in the natural advance of the purely critical spirit, unchecked by considerations of remedy, keeps up before his young eyes so many instances of the same error and wrong, that he finds himself unawares arrived at the startling conclusion, that all must be changed—or nothing: in the face of which plainly impossible achievement, he is apt (looking perhaps a little more serious by the time he touches at the decisive issue,) to feel, either carelessly or considerately, that his own attempting a single piece of service would be worse than useless even, and to refer the whole task to another age and person—safe in proportion to his incapacity. Wanting words to speak, he has never made a fool of himself by speaking. But, in Shelley’s case, the early fervour and power to see, was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive: he endeavoured to realize as he went on idealizing; every wrong had simultaneously its remedy; and, out of the strength of his hatred for the former, he took the strength of his confidence in the latter—till suddenly he stood pledged to the defence of a set of miserable little expedients, just as if they represented great principles, and to an attack upon various great principles, really so, without leaving himself time to examine whether, because they were antagonistical to the remedy he had suggested, they must therefore be identical or even essentially connected with the wrong he sought to cure,—playing with blind passion into the hands of his enemies, and dashing at whatever red cloak was held forth to him, as the cause of the fireball he had last been stung with—mistaking Churchdom for Christianity, and for marriage, ‘the sale of love’ and the law of sexual oppression.
“Gradually, however, he was leaving behind him this low practical dexterity, unable to keep up with his widening intellectual perception; and, in exact proportion as he did so, his true power strengthened and proved itself. Gradually he was raised above the contemplation of spots and the attempt at effacing them, to the great Abstract Light, and, through the discrepancy of the creation, to the sufficiency of the First Cause. Gradually he was learning that the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle. I shall say what I think,—had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians: his very instinct for helping the weaker side (if numbers make strength), his very ‘hate of hate,’ which at first mistranslated itself into delirious Queen Mab notes and the like, would have got clear-sighted by exercise. The preliminary step to following Christ, is the leaving the dead to bury their dead—not clamouring on His doctrine for an especial solution of difficulties which are referable to the general problem of the universe. Already he had attained to a profession of ‘a worship to the Spirit of good within, which requires (before it sends that inspiration forth, which impresses its likeness upon all it creates) devoted and disinterested homage, as Coleridge says,’—and Paul likewise. And we find in one of his last exquisite fragments, avowedly a record of one of his own mornings and its experience, as it dawned on him at his soul and body’s best in his boat on the Serchio—that as surely as
The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
And the thin white moon lay withering there—
Day had kindled the dewy woods,
And the rocks above, and the stream below,
And the vapours in their multitudes,
And the Appenine’s shroud of summer snow—
Day had awakened all things that be;
just so surely he tells us (stepping forward from this delicious dance-music, choragus-like, into the grander measure befitting the final enunciation),
All rose to do the task He set to each,
Who shaped us to his ends and not our own;
The million rose to learn, and One to teach
What none yet ever knew or can be known.
“No more difference than this, from David’s pregnant conclusion so long ago!
“Meantime, as I call Shelley a moral man, because he was 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, and because I find him everywhere taking for granted some of the capital dogmas of Christianity, while most vehemently denying their historical basement.”
That Shelley was eminently a religious man—that he was imbued with what we almost all call Christianity, understanding thereby an exaltation of our moral aspirations, and a belief in the practicability of Goodness and Self-Sacrifice—is a fact as certain as that Shelley lived; but we altogether dissent from Browning’s position, that Shelley would finally have ranged himself with the Christians, if by that be meant a recognition of the truth of that body of dogmas which theologians very properly insist upon as constituting Christianity. As he grew older, the antagonism which vexed his heart and obscured his intellect would assuredly have dwindled; he would have become more tolerant of speculative differences; but he would not, we think, have learned to see Truth in that creed from which his mind had so thoroughly emancipated itself.
Let us hear Browning on the predominating characteristic of Shelley as a poet:—
“This I call his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet’s station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge; proving how, as he says,
The spirit of the worm within the sod,
In love and worship blends itself with God.
“I would rather consider Shelley’s poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral point of view, under the mere conditions of art. It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Shelley: there is the unrivalled Cenci; there is the Julian and Maddalo, too; there is the magnificent Ode to Naples; why not regard, it may be said, the less organised matter as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect even as those? But I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high,—and, seeing it, I hold by it. There is surely enough of the work ‘Shelley’ to be known enduringly among men, and, I believe, to be accepted of God, as human work may; and around the imperfect proportions of such, the most elaborated productions of ordinary art must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations.”
[The balance of this review pertains to Shelley’s letters.]
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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