Shelley; an essay | Page 3

be execution by electricity;--so in our
own society the talk of benevolence and the cult of childhood are the
very fashion of the hour. We, of this self-conscious, incredulous
generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our children, think we
are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify
ourselves with children; we play at being children. And the result is
that we are not more child-like, but our children are less child-like. It is
so tiring to stoop to the child, so much easier to lift the child up to you.
Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different
from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the
waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to
believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper
in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses,
lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has
its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to
count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your
hand,
And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition
that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in
dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when
we become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but just
beginning. Now if Shelley was but too conscious of the dream, in other
respects Dryden's false and famous line might have been applied to him
with very much less than it's usual untruth. {5} To the last, in a degree
uncommon even among poets, he retained the idiosyncrasy of
childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last he
was the enchanted child.
This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is as really, though
perhaps less obviously, manifest in his poetry, the sincere effluence of
his life. And it may not, therefore, be amiss to consider whether it was
conditioned by anything beyond his congenital nature. For our part, we
believe it to have been equally largely the outcome of his early and
long isolation. Men given to retirement and abstract study are
notoriously liable to contract a certain degree of childlikeness: and if
this be the case when we segregate a man, how much more when we
segregate a child! It is when they are taken into the solution of
school-life that children, by the reciprocal interchange of influence with
their fellows, undergo the series of reactions which converts them from
children into boys and from boys into men. The intermediate stage
must be traversed to reach the final one.
Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy.
And the reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his
school-days. Of that persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in
The Revolt of Islam, a picture which to many or most people very
probably seems a poetical exaggeration; partly because Shelley appears
to have escaped physical brutality, partly because adults are inclined to
smile tenderly at childish sorrows which are not caused by physical
suffering. That he escaped for the most part bodily violence is nothing
to the purpose. It is the petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by
hour, day by day, month by month, until its accumulation becomes an
agony; it is this which is the most terrible weapon that boys have
against their fellow boy, who is powerless to shun it because, unlike the

man, he has virtually no privacy. His is the torture which the ancients
used, when they anointed their victim with honey and exposed him
naked to the restless fever of the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian,
sinking under the incessant flight of shafts which skilfully avoid the
vital parts.
We do not, therefore, suspect Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt,
in terrible misery. Those who think otherwise must forget their own
past. Most people, we suppose, must forget what they were like when
they were children: otherwise they would know that the griefs of their
childhood were passionate abandonment, dechirants (to use a
characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the
griefs of their maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but so is
the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while its nervous
impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of relativity; the
sorrow should be estimated by its proportion