R520315A. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Critic, 15 March 1852, pp. 152–153.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 396–397.
This volume proves to be a forgery. Mr. Moxon has been imposed upon by one of the most remarkable literary frauds upon record, and he has, with the spirit of a gentleman, instantly and unhesitatingly suppressed it.
[This review continues with a quotation from The Athenæum (6 March 1852) concerning the discovery that the Shelley letters were forged. This we omit.]
But the volume is not all worthless. Mr. Browning’s introductory essay on the genius of Shelley remains, to be still of permanent value. We had procured this volume to be reviewed for us by an author of note; the review was in type when the news of the forgery reached us. Perhaps our readers will be desirous of perusing so much of it as relates to Shelley, and Mr. Browning’s Essay, and that portion of the article we preserve and present.
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This little volume derives additional interest from Mr. Browning’s introductory Essay. This essay, though brief, contains some interesting and profound remarks upon poets, considered with regard to their subjectivity and objectivity (words which have now become almost naturalized in our language), and on the greater importance of which the knowledge of the life of the subjective poet is to the right understanding of his writings, than that of the objective poet is to his. This is followed up by a short dissertation on the genius of Shelley as a poet and a man, for, in his case, these two characters are inseparable. As Mr. Browning truly says: “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.” Passing from Shelley’s objective works—his “minor excellences,” Mr. Browning thus describes what he conceives to be “his noblest and predominating characteristic:”
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 connection 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.
It was the universe that Shelley sang—the sublime and immortal unity of the moral and intellectual “cosmos”—and he sang it in music full of beauty so pure and spirit-like, that it would almost seem he had been privileged to hear the mystic melody of the spheres, and to transfer into his human song the tones of the divine harmony. Humanly speaking, Shelley possessed almost every intellectual quality necessary for his poet’s work, and many moral ones. He possessed boundless sympathy, noble generosity, passionate earnestness, spotless truth. He was lifted far above the littleness of vanity. One fault, however, he had—intellectual pride—which led to a melancholy irreverence for much that the [p. 153→] noblest minds of humanity have consented to honour, and to an unpardonable rashness both of judgment and conduct. We should be one of the last on earth to wish to abridge the right of private judgment; but, we as solemnly affirm, this right only belongs to those who have examined—and examined with the humility of those who know they are but learners. Shelley, from his youth, if from nothing else, was necessarily ignorant of the real value of those institutions he would have abolished—merely because they partook of the imperfection inherent in all things human. With much divine philosophy in his heart, he rushed, with unphilosophical impatience, to the most sweeping conclusions. We are inclined to think, with Mr. Browning, that had Shelley lived, he would have ranged himself with the Christians, not only on account of “his very instinct for helping the weaker side,” not only on account of his “love of love, and hate of hate,” but because it seems to us that so pure a heart, so truthful a mind, so magnanimous a spirit, must, as experience and knowledge were poured upon it, have recognised in that heavenly faith the only perfect image on earth of Love, Goodness and Beauty—must have learned, in the end, that humility the want of which was the great original sin of his nature. But it is impossible to say what might have been. As he is, Shelley is the most truthful adversary of the Great Truth, the most loving denier of the Great Source of love, and the most sublime disbeliever in the sublimest of all facts.
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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