Shelley; an essay | Page 4

to the sorrower; a gash is
as painful to one as an amputation to another. Pour a puddle into a
thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and mountain overflow.
Adult fools, would not the angels smile at our griefs, were not angels
too wise to smile at them?
So beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the
drawbridge. He threw out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to
maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of
others into the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until
it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in which Hogg
encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university, it
swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the
gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this
seclusion--lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of
youth--which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most
saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation, as the
seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry,
they must first be divided from the body of men. It is the severed head
that makes the seraph.
Shelley's life frequently exhibits in him the magnified child. It is seen

in his fondness for apparently futile amusements, such as the sailing of
paper boats. This was, in the truest sense of the word, childlike; not, as
it is frequently called and considered, childish. That is to say, it was not
a mindless triviality, but the genuine child's power of investing little
things with imaginative interest; the same power, though differently
devoted, which produced much of his poetry. Very possibly in the
paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon and Cythna, or
That thinnest boat
In which the mother of the months is borne
By
ebbing night into her western cave.
In fact, if you mark how favourite an idea, under varying forms, is this
in his verse, you will perceive that all the charmed boats which glide
down the stream of his poetry are but glorified resurrections of the little
paper argosies which trembled down the Isis.
And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in
Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellent no less than in his amiable
weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made its goal its
starting-point, and firmly expected spiritual rest from each new divinity,
though it had found none from the divinities antecedent. For we are
clear that this was no mere straying of sensual appetite, but a straying,
strange and deplorable, of the spirit; that (contrary to what Mr.
Coventry Patmore has said) he left a woman not because he was tired
of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul. When he found Mary
Shelley wanting, he seems to have fallen into the mistake of
Wordsworth, who complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness
that his wife's love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:
Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me
poor.
Wordsworth probably learned, what Shelley was incapable of learning,
that love can never permanently be a fountain. A living poet, in an
article {6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should
flutter some of the frail pastel-like bloom, has said the thing: "Love
itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the

interior heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an
affection, its display an emotion: love is the air, its display is the wind.
An affection may be constant; an emotion can no more be constant than
the wind can constantly blow. All, therefore, that a man can reasonably
ask of his wife is that her love should be indeed a well. A well; but a
Bethesda-well, into which from time to time the angel of tenderness
descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved. Such a
love Shelley's second wife appears unquestionably to have given him.
Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true; she
companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his
aspirations, and yet--yet, even at the date of Epipsychidion the foolish
child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia Viviani's
sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain, irreversible
happiness by a cold and callous society. Yet few poets were so mated
before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning stooped
and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.
In truth, his very unhappiness and discontent with life, in