R520400A. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Westminster Review, April 1852, pp. 502–511.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 400–402.
“Silence,” says Wordsworth, “is a privilege of the grave, a right of the departed;” and he concludes that there is no cause why the lives of authors should be pried into with diligent curiosity, and laid open with the same disregard of reserve which may sometimes be expedient in composing the history of men who have borne an active part in the world. This conclusion is surprising from a meditative man, and we venture to think it as illogical as surprising. Are, then, those who have influenced the spiritual life of the nation to be set aside, “not having borne an active part” in the world? Are the permanent moral forces to be disregarded, and our attention concentrated on the transitory machines worked by those forces—are the machines to be considered as fulfilling the great functions of life? Is the silent mighty Thought to be passed over in favour of the loud and limited Fact? Are poets whom Shelley grandly—and truly as grandly—calls “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” not to be recognised among the active influences, but to be set aside in favour of the Eldons or Lord Johns? Not so. The curiosity mankind feels respecting the lives of poets and other teachers is no vulgar feeling, or is vulgar only in the vulgar mind. Biography has its office. All men will admit that it is of some importance to find in the poet’s life a sanction for those high thoughts which have moved us in his works; and although it is true that no precept can be made false by any falling short in the practice of him who uttered it, yet the precept comes home to us with added significance when we learn that what was nobly thought was also nobly lived—that the poetry we delight in was the voice of the harmonious manhood of him who sang it. Wordsworth, indeed, adds to the remark just quoted, “it is only for moral or intellectual purposes that such disclosures are justifiable,” and this concedes the point, since even affectionate curiosity may be justly called a moral purpose.
The publication of a few insignificant letters of Shelley’s, with an elaborate preface by Browning, set us thinking on the very great importance one might reasonably attach to characteristic letters written in the unreserve of friendship by poets. Not that these letters threw any light whatever on Shelley’s history: that was felt from the first by all readers; and it disturbed no conclusions to learn that these letters were forgeries—at least the majority of them—and so well executed as forgeries, that [p. 503→] they will probably hold a place in the annals of literary vagabondage.
[The review continues with remarks on Shelley’s letters; these we omit.]
Returning to the volume before us, now suppressed by Mr. Moxon, we are struck with the unseemly merriment excited by Mr. Browning’s Introduction. The critics, now the letters are known to be forgeries, make merry with Mr. Browning for having written an elaborate preface to them; but if any one will read the preface with candid attention, he will see that it is not specifically an introduction to these few letters, but to the whole mass of Shelley’s authentic correspondence. Considered, indeed, as a preface to the new letters it is little less incongruous than the façade of the Parthenon would be to a wayside cottage. But it is quite evident that Browning wanted to say something about Shelley, and seized this occasion for saying it. We will not quarrel with the occasion, nor indeed with the style. The one has proved unhappy; the other is misty and metaphorical, as the prose style of poets is apt to be. A poet is out of his natural element in prose. The swan, whose grace flatters every eye when floating with majestic calmness
On the smooth bosom of the silent lake,
has a most graceless waddle on dry land. But if the manner of this preface be open to criticism, the matter is acceptable.
Mr. Browning says, that to him the chief value of Shelley’s correspondence lies in its perfect moral and intellectual harmony with the highest efforts of the writer’s genius. As a study of character, the letters and the poems yield precisely the same result. In Shelley there was no discordance between the author and the man; he had no stage attitudes, he wore no tragic mask to be wearily laid aside behind the scenes; in the letters we see everywhere the germs of which the poems were but the full and necessary blossom. We wholly agree with Mr. Browning that this was the fact with regard to Shelley, and that it was a beautiful manifestation of the sincerity and unity of his nature. But we must observe, that the opposite fact, noticeable in the letters of some other poets, does not necessarily argue the mere artificiality of their loftier productions. Many-sided minds and versatile temperaments will not only be “everything by turns,” but will be everything with equal thoroughness and good faith. A Byron, for example, may be sincerely poetical in his more impassioned moods, and yet write those flippant letters of his that carry with them the unpleasant perfume of the gin-and-water under the stimulus of which he wrote Don Juan. [p. 505→] It is bad psychology to doubt the earnestness of an earnest mood, because of the outbreaks of a scornful, sardonic, or playful mood. The poet is more than poet—he is Man. If his nature be many-sided, many-sided will be its manifestations; and instead of our knowledge of the man illustrating his works, it will throw us into inextricable confusion, unless we look deeper and recognise the cause of the contradiction. We are such children in our judgment of men! We catch at the merest appearances, and suffer them to guide us in our difficult path. If a profound thinker, in his hours of lassitude, have but a grave ennui, and amuse himself with grave trivialities—if he be absent, awkward, dirty, and not given to Homeric laughter, we yield him our respectful admiration—we acknowledge him a true philosopher—we laugh perhaps at his dirt, quiz his manners, and relate anecdotes of his social stupidity, but he is “so absorbed in his ideas!” An incomplete man, we hold him as a complete philosopher! But if, unhappily, a quick temperament, a facile laughter, a gay manner, a love of life in other aspects than those of the study or the laboratory, be added to that thinking power which first won our admiration, we have great difficulty in believing the man of the world does not injure the philosopher. Even Dr. Johnson could with difficulty persuade himself of Shakspeare’s tragic power, because of the affluent comedy which Johnson thought so much more natural to him. To believe in the seriousness of a man who can betray levity is so perplexing! Nature has given to all men the faculties of laughter and of tears; and because one or other of these faculties is apt to predominate in remarkable men, we refuse to acknowledge that both may be highly developed. Voltaire regretted that Newton had never written vaudevilles: “je l’en estimerais d’avantage,” says he; and however absurd the conjunction may appear, it is sanctioned by the great examples of Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. In France it is otherwise. The mercurial temperament of the race breaks out in mathematicians and philologues; men of science are handsome and gay without suspicion; metaphysics do not shun the salon; archæology has its elegant professors.
But we must not be seduced into a dissertation; the point we wished to touch was, the value of correspondence as letting us into the real secret of the writers. When characters are “all of a piece,” the letters do but convince us of this, and show a pale reflection of the mind we have learned to know in its splendour; when the characters are more varied, the letters present them to us in aspects not presented in the works. Charles Lamb, for example, is Elia in his letters, neither more nor less. But how excessively unlike Gertrude of Wyoming are the letters of Tom Campbell! Some men are like the authors of their works, other [p. 506→] men perplex us with the contradiction between men and writers. In the one case the man has contrived to express himself; in the other, the writer has only expressed a mood. We gain a tolerably vivid conception of Burns the man from Burns the poet; but what reader has the slightest idea of the man Campbell or the man Rogers? Mr. Browning would perhaps explain this by his classification of the poets, as objective and subjective—or, as we should prefer stating it, impersonal and personal.
The objective poet, he tells us, simply reproduces the phenomena of the external world, whether physical or moral, without any conscious blending of his individual emotions or any intrusion of his judgment. His function is purely to depict nature and life, and he is perfect in his kind in proportion as he stands aloof from his creations, and gives them a wholeness independent of himself. Hence his poetry can be enjoyed apart from any knowledge of his character or history. The Iliad has not to wait for its appreciation until we have settled the question of Homer and the Homerides. The subjective poet, on the other hand, views the external world mainly in its relations with his inward being; he aims to pass beyond the transient form to the permanent idea, to trace the laws of spiritual harmony and “round the universal meaning.” While by the objective poet the outer world is painted, with a finer and more vivid sense, it is true, but still not otherwise than it appears to the common perceptions of humanity; by the subjective poet it is used almost entirely as the exponent of his peculiar ideas and emotions. Hence, in the latter case, we have not a perfect key to the productions of the poet, unless we know the man. We agree with Mr. Browning, that this is the reason why the biography of a Shelley is of more importance to us than that of a Shakspeare; and, of all the materials for a biography, there are none that so effectually reveal a man’s nature as a varied collection of letters.
[The review continues with remarks on the correspondence of other poets; these we omit.]
But to return to Shelley. His fame has lived down calumny, but the old echoes are still flying about among the hills, and every tribute from those who speak with the authority of commanding intellects and unsullied lives is useful in aiding to dissipate the lingering prejudices which hang around his name. For this reason we are sorry that circumstances should have checked the influence of a loving but wise appreciation of him recorded by such a man as Browning.
Of all his contemporaries Shelley seems to us to have been the nearest approach in life and works to the ideal of a poet; we do not say he was the greatest, but he was the purest poet. He reminds us of the plants called Oscillatoriæ, which continue in a state of rhythmical vibration throughout the greater part of their lives. He was not poetical by fits and starts; his whole life was one rhythmic evolution. He had no need, like Milton, to “put on his singing robes:” he sang as the bird sings.
The principle of classification announced by Mr. Browning, in his remarks on the poetry of Shelley, that, namely, of assigning rank according to the presence of the highest faculty, we believe to be correct. In the same way our classifications in zoology take the nervous system as their point of departure, because the brain is the culmination of organic development. But while accepting the principle laid down by Mr. Browning, we must confess to a certain hesitation in accepting the “predominant characteristic” which he offers in illustration. If we understand the thought lying in his mind (and of that we have doubts) when he speaks of the “simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete,” we should say that this was by no means a characteristic of a poet exclusively, but might as truly [p. 510→] be applied to writers like Plato, Carlyle, Emerson, or George Sand; and if the characteristic is not exclusive, it cannot be taken as determining the poet’s rank. The poet is a speciality: he is something different from what other men are. He has indeed no faculties he does not share with them, but he has them in such different degrees of intensity, and so differently combined, that he becomes thereby distinguished from them. All varieties in human nature are but the endless combinations of the same elements: as sugar, wood, and starch—widely as they differ in properties and appearance—are but different combinations of the same number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. To make the speciality of the poet more appreciable, let us glance at his brother artist, the musician: no one doubts his speciality. When we speak of a musician, we mean to designate one in whom the faculty of tune is developed to such a degree, that he can not only, in common with other men, enjoy and remember melodies heard by him, but can also create melodies for his and their enjoyment. What music is to Sense that is poetry to Thought. The poet is a Seer and a Singer. His rank, therefore, will be determined by the clearness of his vision, and the melody of his song. Thus Homer, Shakspeare, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and Göthe are the undisputed “emperors of the world of rhyme.” The depth and clearness of their vision, the exquisite melody of their song, are peculiarities which have never been so combined by others.
Commonly we hear the single faculty of Imagination set up as the distinguishing superiority of a poet, especially by those who do not perceive, that inasmuch as poetry is the voice of the whole man, it must take its calibre from the calibre of the man. Imagination, be it never so daringly active, will produce no good poetry if conjoined with inferior faculties, or if deprived of the requisite materials which are to become plastic in its hands. Good sense will assuredly create no poetry; but neither will poetry be created by the mind that is unable to distinguish sense from nonsense—though repeated volumes of verse every year attempt it. Coleridge used to insist, and wisely, on the necessity of the poet’s being largely endowed with logical power. Indeed the great poets manifest all powers. We return therefore to our position, that the Poet is at once Seer and Singer, and his rank in Art is determined not by the grandeur and depth of his conceptions, nor by the beauty and melody of his song, but by the degree in which the two are united. As a fine landscape painter is superior to a poor historical painter, although historical painting is in itself a higher reach of art, so a fine lyrical poet is infinitely superior to a mediocre dramatist or epic poet. The highest poet is not he who aims at the [p. 511→] highest subjects, but he who fitly represents the highest subjects. William Tell, who strikes the apple from his child’s head, is justly regarded as a finer marksman than the archer in Virgil who shot at the stars; and artists should learn how idle it is to shoot at the stars with a beechwood bow.
We are trying here to enforce a truth which Göthe has expressed in one of his profound aphorisms: “None will comprehend the simple truth that the highest, the only operation of Art as of Nature, is formation (gestaltung);” or, as he puts it elsewhere,—
Müsset in dem Kunst betrachten,
Immer Eins wie Allels achten,
Nichts ist drinnen, Nichts ist draussen,
Denn was Innen das ist Aussen.
[George Henry Lewes]
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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