Shelley | Page 4

as capricious as they were violent, always seem to lack
something which is perhaps the most valuable element in human
affection. If in this way we can analyse his temperament successfully,
the process should help us to a more critical understanding, and so to a
fuller enjoyment, of the poems.
This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of the Romantic
Movement in English literature, appeared in an age which, following
on the series of successful wars that had established British power all
over the world, was one of the gloomiest in our history. If in some
ways the England of 1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others
it lagged far behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us
from a nation of peasants and traders into a nation of manufacturers,
had begun; but its chief fruits as yet were increased materialism and
greed, and politically the period was one of blackest reaction. Alone of
European peoples we had been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's
conquests, which, when it receded from the Continent, at least left
behind a framework of enlightened institutions, while our success in
the Napoleonic wars only confirmed the ruling aristocratic families in
their grip of the nation which they had governed since the reign of
Anne. This despotism crushed the humble and stimulated the
high-spirited to violence, and is the reason why three such poets as
Byron, Landor, and Shelley, though by birth and fortune members of
the ruling class, were pioneers as much of political as of spiritual
rebellion. Unable to breathe the atmosphere of England, they were
driven to live in exile.
It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. A foreign
critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main Currents of
Nineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that
England was then pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her
native energy was diverted to oppression, in morals and religion it took

the form of hypocrisy and persecution. Abroad she was supporting the
Holy Alliance, throwing her weight into the scale against all
movements for freedom. At home there was exhaustion after war;
workmen were thrown out of employment, and taxation pressed heavily
on high rents and the high price of corn, was made cruel by fear; for the
French Revolution had sent a wave of panic through the country, not to
ebb until about 1830. Suspicion of republican principles--which, it
seemed, led straight to the Terror--frightened many good men, who
would otherwise have been reformers, into supporting the triumph of
coercion and Toryism. The elder generation of poets had been
republicans in their youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that
it was "bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even
planned to found a communistic society in the New World. Now all
three were rallied to the defence of order and property, to Church and
Throne and Constitution. From their seclusion in the Lakes, Southey
and Wordsworth praised the royal family and celebrated England as the
home of freedom; while Thomson wrote "Rule, Britannia," as if Britons,
though they never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were to a
home-grown tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than that of
Napoleon. England had stamped out the Irish rebellion of 1798 in blood,
had forced Ireland by fraud into the Union of 1800, and was strangling
her industry and commerce. Catholics could neither vote nor hold
office. At a time when the population of the United Kingdom was some
thirty millions, the Parliamentary franchise was possessed by no more
than a million persons, and most of the seats in the House of Commons
were the private property of rich men. Representative government did
not exist; whoever agitated for some measure of it was deported to
Australia or forced to fly to America. Glasgow and Manchester
weavers starved and rioted. The press was gagged and the Habeas
Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second rebellion in Ireland, when
Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young hands in Erin's gore," was
suppressed with unusual ferocity. In England in 1812 famine drove
bands of poor people to wander and pillage. Under the criminal law,
still of medieval cruelty, death was the punishment for the theft of a
loaf or a sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--on the
one hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vast
Church-and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who had

"a stake in the country." The strain was not to be relieved until the
Reform Act of 1832 set the wheels in motion again; they then moved
painfully indeed, but still they moved. Meanwhile Parliament was the
stronghold of selfish interests; the Church was the jackal of the gentry;
George III, who lost