Art of Letters — Aspects of Shelley: The Poet of Hope

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age.

He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom.

He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly.

He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn.

His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which Like a thousand dawns on a single night The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music.

He is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element.

We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave.

There are other great poets besides Shelley who have had a vision of the heights and depths.

Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous bulk.

Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task.

He does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell.

His cosmos is a constellation.

His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus into joy.

There is no other joy in literature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned ...

to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death.

It is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator.

Shelley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of God.

In the great morning of the world, The Spirit of God with might unfurled The flag of Freedom over Chaos.

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of God.

He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday.

He was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure.

In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of a finer future to-day.

Obdurate spirit!

Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.

Pride is thy error and thy punishment.

Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops Before the Power that wields and kindles them.

True greatness asks not space.

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics from his poetry.

But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry.

They are the politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope.

Europe did not adopt his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years later.

Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced.

Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House of Lords was described as a revolutionary step.

To Shelley even the new earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand.

He was almost the only English poet up to his own time who believed that the world had a future.

One can think of no other poet to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations.

Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion was not for that but for the British Empire.

He had the craven fear of being great on any but the old Imperialist lines.

His work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was before.

Shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity.

His patriotism was love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England.

Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.

He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph which the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by Mr. Buxton Forman.

The seditious paragraph ran: Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent them will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate.

This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear.

Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members.

But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.

It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new race throughout Europe.

Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time?

I do not think he would.

He would have been the singer of the new race to-day as he was then.

To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body of Prometheus.

He would have scattered the Furies with a song.

For Shelley has not failed.

He is one of those who have brought down to earth the creative spirit of freedom.

And that spirit has never ceased to brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until our own time.

His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature.

He made it desirable as the spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty as a wind.

Other poets speak of freedom, and invite the birds on to the platform.

Shelley spoke of freedom and himself became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea.

He did not humiliate beauty into a lesson.

He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a spirit-- Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The West Wind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_.

His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover.

The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation.

It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world.

He would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase.

On the other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare.

He may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day.

With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript.

Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the _Hymn of Pan_ and _The Indian Serenade_.

_The Cloud_ is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language.

Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen.

But he sees things, as it were, musically.

My soul is an enchanted boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing.

There is no other music but Shelley's which seems to me likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern Saul.

For this reason I hope that Professor Herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to Shelley again.

Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is shown in his book.

The average reader will probably be content with Mr. Hutchinson's cheap and perfect "Oxford Edition" of Shelley.

But the scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor Herford's edition a new pleasure in old verse.

XII. --THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE