Whatever Shelley’s relative rank as a poet, most who have studied him will grant that his writings are so individual and original that he can be neither hidden in the shade nor lost in the brightness of any other poet. No idea of his works could be conveyed by comparison, since he resembles no other English writer closely enough.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, on 4 August 1792, the son of Timothy Shelley, Esq., and grandson of Sir Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet. His ancestors had long been large landowners in Sussex.
As a child he was noticeable for rambling by moonlight, inventing wonderful tales, and strange, sometimes dangerous amusements. At thirteen he went to Eton, where was first roused his determined opposition to anything that seemed an invasion of human rights and liberty, later the animating principle of most of his writings. Were we not aware of far keener distress from greater injustice later, we might suppose that his sufferings for refusing to fag against school custom had made him morbidly sensitive on liberty. At eighteen he entered Oxford, at a time when freedom of speech, as a sign of freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to the authorities, and no allowance was made for youth, still less for individual peculiarity. Devoted to metaphysics and fond of logical discussion, he printed in his first year and distributed among the college authorities and members a two-page pamphlet opposing the usual arguments for the existence of a Deity, arguments that perhaps even the most ardent believers find inconclusive. Whether it embodied his own opinions or was only a logical confutation, the way he was treated was certainly not required of those charged with educating his opinions: without making sure he was the author, and satisfied by his refusal to answer when asked, they handed him a sentence of expulsion already drawn up in due form.
About this time Shelley wrote, or began, Queen Mab, which he never published, though he gave copies to friends. Later he thought so poorly of it in every respect that he regretted printing it at all, and when an edition appeared without his consent he applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to suppress it.
Shelley’s opinions in politics and theology, which he seems to have been far more anxious to maintain than the peace of the household allowed, were peculiarly obnoxious to his father, a man as different from his son as can be conceived, and expulsion from Oxford was soon followed by exile from home. In London, through his sisters, who were at school nearby, he met Harriet Westbrook, and eloped with and married her when he was nineteen and she sixteen. It seems doubtful whether the attachment was more than her enthusiasm responding to his, in wild talk about human rights and equally wild plans for securing them. However that may be, the result was unfortunate. For rather more than two years they wandered about England, Scotland, and Ireland, changing residence often and suddenly. Shelley gained the friendship of some of the age’s most eminent men, and the most influential on his character and future was William Godwin, whose instructions and expostulations tended to give solidity and form to the young reformer’s vague, extravagant opinions and projects. Early in the third year of their marriage an estrangement that had gradually widened ended in final separation. We are not told its causes, except that it seems owing considerably to Mrs. Shelley’s elder sister, who domineered over her and whose presence became absolutely hateful to Shelley. His wife went back to her father’s house, where, apparently about three years later, she committed suicide. There seems no immediate connection between this and any conduct of Shelley’s. One biographer says that while they lived happily together, suicide was a favourite subject of speculation and conversation with her.
Shortly after his first wife’s death Shelley married Godwin’s daughter, with whom he had lived almost since the separation and twice visited Switzerland. In 1817 Chancery decreed that Shelley was not a proper person to have charge of his two children by his first wife, who had lived with her until her death; their grandfather, Mr. Westbrook, filed the bill. The effects on Shelley may be easily imagined; perhaps he never recovered from them. That year he lived at Marlow and wrote The Revolt of Islam and parts of other poems; the next he left England, not to return. His health (he had seemed for some time to be in a consumption) and fear that his son by his second wife would be taken from him drove him to take refuge in Italy. At Lucca he began his Prometheus and wrote Julian and Maddalo. He moved about Italy as he had about England. Their two children died, leaving them for a time childless, but this grieved him less than the loss of his eldest two, taken from him by the hand of man. In 1819 he finished Prometheus Unbound, writing most of it at Rome and completing it at Florence, and wrote his tragedy The Cenci, which drew more attention in his lifetime than any other work of his. The Ode to a Skylark was written at Leghorn in the spring of 1820, and the Witch of Atlas near Pisa in August. The next year he and Byron met at Pisa and were much together; but their friendship, though real, was not very profound, for though unlikeness is a necessary element of friendship, some kinds of unlikeness will not harmonize. All this time he was maligned by unknown enemies and abused by anonymous writers, and other attempts are said to have been made to make his life as uncomfortable as possible, though there are grounds for doubting whether he was not subject to a kind of monomania on this and similar points. In 1821 he wrote Adonais, a monody on the death of Keats, partly arising from the mistaken notion that a brutal criticism of Endymion in the Quarterly Review caused Keats’s illness and death. Its last verse seems almost prophetic of his own end. Passionately fond of boating, he and his friend Mr. Williams built a boat of peculiar build, very fast but hard to manage. On 8 July 1822 they sailed from Leghorn for Lerici, on the Bay of Spezia, near which his home then lay. A sudden squall came on and the boat disappeared. The bodies were cast ashore and, under quarantine regulations, burned to ashes; Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Trelawney were present at Shelley’s burning, so his ashes were saved and buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, near the grave of Keats, buried there the preceding spring. His widow inscribed on the tomb the words Cor Cordium.
Shelley’s character has been sadly maligned. Whatever faults he committed against society did not come from sensuality. One biographer, his companion at Oxford, who seems inclined to do him no more than justice, says his conduct there was immaculate, and his whole picture of the youth makes this easy to believe. To discuss the moral question in one part of his history would be out of place here; but even if a man’s conduct is altogether inexcusable in individual instances, there is the more need that only the truth be said of that and other portions. And whatever society felt justified in condemning, Shelley owed it less than most men. Yet his heart seemed full of love for his kind, and the distress others’ oppression caused him was the source of much of the wild denunciation that exposed him to the contempt and hatred of those made uncomfortable by his unsparing, indiscriminate anathemas. In private he was beloved by all who knew him, a steady, generous, self-denying friend to all within reach of his aid, and to the poor a true and laborious benefactor. That man must have been good to whom his widow’s heart returns with such devotion and thankfulness for the past and fond hope for the future as Mrs. Shelley shows in the extracts from her private journal given us by Lady Shelley.
As regards his religious opinions, one of the strongest thoughts is how ill he must have been instructed in the principles of Christianity! He says himself in a letter to Godwin, “I have known no tutor or adviser (not excepting my father) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust.” Far from being an opponent of Christianity properly so called, he might, one feels, have been a fine Christian had he seen it in any way except through the traditional and practical misrepresentations around him. All his attacks on Christianity are really against evils to which its true doctrines are more opposed than his own could be. How far he was excusable in giving the name of Christianity to what he might have seen was only a miserable perversion is another question, hardly for discussion here. It was, however, in the name of Christianity that the worst injuries he suffered were inflicted. Coming out of the cathedral at Pisa one day, [Footnote: From Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley, which the writer of this paper has principally followed in regard to the external facts of Shelley’s history.] Shelley warmly assented to Leigh Hunt’s remark “that a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.” Surely the founders of Christianity, even when they magnified faith, meant a spiritual condition whose central principle coincides with charity. Shelley’s own feelings toward others, as judged from his poetry, seem tinctured with the very essence of Christianity. [Footnote: His Essay on Christianity is full of noble views, some held today by some of the most earnest believers. We are not told when in his life it was written, but it seems such as would insure his acceptance with any company of intelligent and devout Unitarians.] At one time at least he did not believe we could know the source of our being, and seemed to take it as self-evident that the Creator could not be like the creature. But it is unjust to fix on any utterance and call it the religion of a man who died in his thirtieth year and whose opinions must have been constantly changing. Coleridge says in a letter that Shelley’s discussions, tending toward atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared him: to him they would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, through which he would have seen the true image, the final metamorphosis. He has always thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity, and the better faith he learned from Paul and John does not interfere with his cordial reverence for Benedict Spinoza.
Shelley’s favourite study was metaphysics. The more impulse in any direction, the more education and experience are needed to balance it, and one cannot help thinking his taste for such exercises developed faster than the power. His favourite physical studies were chemistry and electricity, pursued from childhood, apparently with more delight in the experiments than interest in their general conclusions. Their influence seems to show in his poetic embodiment of metaphysical ideas: he uses forms that appeal more to the outer senses than the inward eye, and similes of fancy rather than imagination; they lack vital resemblance. Logic attracted him; geometry and mathematics he was indifferent to. A biographer says “he was neglectful of flowers,” having no interest in botany; but one who took such full delight in their external forms could hardly feel much impulse to dissect them. He took exceeding pleasure in Greek literature, especially Plato.
Several little peculiarities of Shelley’s tastes are worth mentioning because, though insignificant in themselves, they seem to correspond with the nature of his poetry. The most prominent was his passion for boat-sailing. He could not pass any water without launching boats made from whatever paper he had in his pockets, often the fly-leaves of the books he constantly carried and read, and watching them with utmost interest until they sank or reached the other side. He was just as fond of real, often dangerous, boating; yet characteristically all the boats in his poems are fairy, fantastic ones, barely related to boats that battle earthly winds and waves. Pistol-shooting was a favourite amusement, and fireworks gave him great delight. He was remarkably abstemious, preferring bread and raisins to anything else and seldom drinking anything stronger than water; honey was a favourite luxury. At college, says his biographer Hogg, he would sleep in the evening on the rug close to a blazing fire, heat seeming never to do him anything but good, then wake perfectly restored and stay actively occupied far into the morning. His movements were rapid, hurried, and uncertain: he would appear and disappear suddenly, forget appointments, and burst into wild laughter, heedless of his situation, when something struck him as peculiarly ludicrous. He changed residence so often and so hastily that whole little libraries were left behind and often lost. He was very fond of children and used to try humorously to get them to disclose the still-remembered secrets of their pre-existence. He seemed peculiarly drawn to mystery and ready to believe in a hidden secret where no one else would. His room at college was in indescribable confusion, personal necessities mixed with books and philosophical instruments, and things belonging to one department of service often pressed into the slavery of another. He dressed well but carelessly. He was tall, slender, and stooping, awkward in gait but in manners a thorough gentleman; delicate in complexion, with a remarkably small head, face, and features, not very regular but wonderfully beautiful in intellectual and moral expression; his eyes deep blue, “of a wild, strange beauty”; his forehead high and white; his hair dark brown, curling, long, and bushy. In later life he is described as singularly combining premature age and prolonged youth.
The only art in which his taste seems to have developed was poetry, and even in his poetry the artistic element is not generally very manifest. His earliest verses (none in his collected works) can hardly be called good in any sense. He seems to have chosen poetry as fit material for his ardent, hopeful, indignant thoughts and feelings but, provided he says what he wants, does not much care how. There is too much of this throughout; for if art’s object were the utterance rather than the conveyance of thought, not only imperfection of language but absolute unintelligibility would be admissible. But his art grows constantly with his sense of its necessity, so that the Cenci, the last work of any pretension he wrote, is decidedly the most artistic. There are beautiful passages in Queen Mab, but it is a boy-poet’s work, and since he nearly repudiated it, I need not remark further on it. The Revolt of Islam is a poem of twelve cantos in the Spenserian stanza, but except for the arrangement of lines and rhymes his stanza, like all imitations of the Spenserian, has little of the original’s spirit or individuality. It is dedicated to the cause of freedom and records the efforts, successes, defeats, and triumphant death of two inspired champions of liberty, a youth and a maiden, in marvellous adventures not meant to be within the bounds of probability, scarcely of possibility. It has very noble sentiments, fine passages, and now and then grandeur. But the lack of art shows in its often obscure meaning, frequently caused by the difficulty of the stanza, the hardest mode of composition in English except the rigid sonnet. His words and forms sometimes seem mechanical devices rather than a natural utterance from a mind where the thought was vitally present: more a clothing of the thought than an embodiment of it, not lying near enough to the thing represented. It is only just to say, however, that some of the obscurity is because, even with Mrs. Shelley’s superintendence, the works have not yet been satisfactorily edited, or at least not seen through the press with enough care. [Footnote: This statement is no longer true.]
The Cenci is a very powerful tragedy, unfit for public performance by the horror of the historical facts behind it. In executing it, though, Shelley kept much nearer to nature than in any other work, rigidly keeping to his sense of artistic propriety in dramatic speech. It may be doubted whether the characters’ ways of speaking differ enough, but speech can be individualized far too minutely for probable nature, and in this at least he has not erred. Perhaps the action is a little hurried, and a central moment of awful repose and fearful anticipation might add force; the scenes might also have been built to suggest more evolution. But the central point of horror is handled most powerfully and delicately: you see a possible spiritual horror still behind it, more frightful than all before. The whole drama is built around not a prominent point but a dim, infinitely withdrawn, underground perspective of dismay and agony. Perhaps it detracts a little from our interest in Beatrice that after all she should wish to live and try to save her life by denying her crime. She evidently justifies the denial to herself on the ground that the deed was absolutely right, though her judges count it most criminal, so that the only way to get true justice is to deny the fact, which, there being no guilt, she might consider only a verbal lie. Her very purity of conscience lets her say it with the most absolute innocence of look, word, and tone. This is probably historical, and Shelley had to make the best of it. The drama has great tenderness as well as terror; but for full effect one wishes to know the individuals better than its want of graduation allows. Shelley, however, was only twenty-six. He must have been drawn to the subject because it embodies the concentration of tyranny, lawlessness, and brutality in old Cenci exercised upon an ideal loveliness and nobleness in Beatrice.
But of all Shelley’s works Prometheus Unbound combines the greatest individual power and peculiarity. It has an airy grandeur like vast masses of cloud scattered in broken, magnificently suggestive forms over the summer sky after a thunderstorm; the fundamental ideas are grand, and the superstructure in many parts so ethereal that one hardly knows whether he gazes at towers of solid masonry dimmed by vapour or golden turrets of cloudland born of the mist that haloes them. The beings of Greek mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. Here, as in most of his poetry, we feel that, unable to cope with the world’s evils and wrongs as they are, he builds a new universe where he rules by his will, a good will in the main, good always in intent, generally in form and utterance. Of the wrongs Shelley suffered from the collision between his lawless goodness and the lawful wickedness of those in authority, this is one of the greatest: in the proper period of pupillage he was driven from the place of learning, cast on his own mental resources long before they could support him, and embittered against the purest embodiment of good by the harsh treatment he received in its name. Had the reverence that was far from lacking in his nature been offered, in some guide to his spiritual being, an object worthy of its homage and trust, the free and noble result of his individuality would probably have come to the world in a form that, while still attracting only the few, would not have repelled the many, at least by things merely accidental to his earnest efforts for humanity’s well-being.
What chiefly distinguishes Shelley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader of, say, the fantastically brilliant Witch of Atlas, the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, always with “a low melodious thunder.” Pure imagination is rare in his writings compared with fancy: there are not half as many direct embodiments of idea in form as presentations of strange resemblances between external things.
One of the finest short specimens of Shelley’s peculiar mode is his Ode to the West Wind, full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But the most popular of all his poems, deservedly, is the Skylark. The Cloud may rival it in popular favour, but though full of beautiful words and fantastic cloud-like images the Cloud is mainly fancy; the Skylark, though fancy predominates over imagination even in its visual images, is as a whole a lovely, true, individual work of art, a lyric not unworthy of the lark Mason calls “sweet feathered lyric.” Its strain of sadness is only enough to make the lark’s song human.
In The Sensitive Plant, full of the peculiarities of his genius and tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket of mystical speculation, one idiosyncrasy is more prominent than anywhere else, curious in the poet of beauty and loveliness: he is fascinated by what is ugly and revolting, and cannot withdraw his thoughts until he has described it in language that is powerful and poetic for its end but, by those very excellences, nearly as revolting as the objects. Associated with this is a tendency to find strangely unpleasant likenesses between things, which he is not content to see but seems compelled, perhaps to be rid of them himself, to force on his reader. His admirer is not pleased that one or two such passages have been omitted in some editions.
Few men have been more misunderstood or misrepresented than Shelley. This has partly been his own fault, as Coleridge implies in writing that his horror of hypocrisy made him speak so wildly that Southey, so much a man of forms and proprieties, was quite misled, not only in estimating his worth but in judging his character. But setting that aside and regarding him merely as a poet, Shelley has written verse that will last as long as English literature, valuable for the peculiarity as well as the excellence of it. To say nothing of his noble aims and hopes, he will always be admired for his sweet melodies, lovely pictures, and wild prophetic imaginings. His indignant remonstrances, mixed with grand imprecations, burst like thunder from a heart overcharged with love of his kind and roused to a keener sense of all oppression by the wrongs that sought to overwhelm himself. But as he recedes in time and men see the man’s proportions more truly, they will judge that, without having gained the rank of a great reformer, Shelley had that wide sympathy and lofty hope for his kind which is essential both to the birth and the subsequent making of the greatest of poets.