Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer | Page 3

but as the overthrow of this
dogma does not come within the scope of my essay, I would suggest to
those who may have been influenced by that paper to read Shelley's
"Defence of Poetry." I shall quote two extracts therefrom, each
pertinent to my subject. The first describes the function of the poet:

"But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws,
and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life,
and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful
and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible
world, which is called religion."
The other is in extension of the same idea, and concludes the essay:
"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors
of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the
words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which
sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is
moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world."
I have no hesitation in saying that for treating Shelley as a philosopher,
I shall be attacked with great "positivism" by the disciples[A] of
manufacturers of bran-new Brummagen philosophies dug out of
Aristotelian and other depths to which are added new thoughts, not
their own. The reason which David Masson offers in his "Recent
British Philosophy" for placing Alfred Tennyson among the same class
is equally applicable now:
[Footnote A: If Diogenes or Socrates, leaving High Olympus and sweet
converse with the immortals, were to condescend to visit New York
some Friday evening. I am sadly afraid they would be astounded at
many of their would-be brothers in philosophy. On seeing the travestie
of ancient academies and groves where the schools used to congregate,
the dialogues consisting of bald atheism under sheep's clothing to trap
the unwary, and termed "The Religion of Humanity," of abuse and
personality in lieu of argument, of buffoonery called wit, of airing pet
hobbies alien to the subject instead of disputating, of shouting vulgar
claptrap instead of rhetoric, etc.--I sadly fear these stout old Greeks,
having power for the nonce, would, throwing philosophy to the dogs in
a moment of paroxysmal indignation, despite physiognomies trained to
resemble their own, have these fellows casked up in tubs without

lanterns, but with the appropriate "snuffers," fit emblems of their faiths,
and dropped far outside Sandy Hook. A proper finale to the vapid
utterance made by one of these gentry that all "Reformers should be
annihilated," Imagine Plato or Epicurus offering such a suggestion. O
tempora! O mores!]
"To those who are too strongly possessed with our common habit of
classifying writers into kinds, as historians, poets, scientific and
speculative writers, and so on, it may seem strange to include Mr.
Tennyson in this list. But as I have advisedly referred to Wordsworth as
one of the representatives and powers of British philosophy in the age
immediately past, so I advisedly named Tennyson as succeeding him in
the same character. Though it is not power of speculative reason alone
that constitutes a poet, is it not felt that the worth of a poet essentially is
measured by the depth and amount of his speculative reason? Even
popularly, do we not speak of every great poet as the exponent of the
spirit of his age? What else can this mean than that the philosophy of
his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the great elemental
problems, find expression in his verse? Hence I ought to include other
poets in this list, and more particularly Mr. Browning and Mrs.
Browning, and the late Mr. Clough. But let the mention of Mr.
Tennyson suggest such other names, and stand as a sufficient protest
against our absurd habit of omitting such in a connection like the
present. As if, forsooth, when a writer passed into verse, he were to be
abandoned as utterly out of calculable relationship to all on this side of
the boundary, and no account were to be taken of his thoughts and
doings, except in a kind of curious appendix at the end of the general
register? What if philosophy, at a certain extreme range, and of a
certain kind, tends of necessity to pass into poesy, and can hardly help
being passionate and metrical? If so, might not the omission of poets,
purely as being such, from a conspectus of the speculative writers of
any time, lead to erroneous conclusions, by giving an undue
prominence in the estimate of all such philosophizing as could most
easily, by its nature, refrain from passionate or poetic