Shelley; an essay | Page 5

so far as it
was not the inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can only be
ascribed to this same child-like irrationality--though in such a form it is
irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley. Pity, if you will, his spiritual
ruins and the neglected early training which was largely their cause; but
the pity due to his outward circumstances has been strangely
exaggerated. The obloquy from which he suffered he deliberately and
wantonly courted. For the rest, his lot was one that many a young poet
might envy. He had faithful friends, a faithful wife, an income small
but assured. Poverty never dictated to his pen; the designs on his bright
imagination were never etched by the sharp fumes of necessity.
If, as has chanced to others--as chanced, for example, to
Mangan--outcast from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a
bleared future, an anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered
without
self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not
abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless
of the bays and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the
dews of love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent
arms of childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his

unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might
he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening
chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened
to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death. But no
such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats,
half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de
Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel
jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully mumbled for the major portion of his
life. Shelley had competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could
lie down like a tired child and weep away his life of care. Is it ever so
with you, sad brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of
pearls except they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his
desire, or having it is satisfied?"
It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets
contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered
from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry
between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project
beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked
criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the
"established canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we
decline to believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously
grieved by want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found
consolation in that senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity."
Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears,
carves beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm
must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be,
has quite other gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!
A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need
not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful
support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable,
and such support Shelley had:
La gloire
Ne compte pas toujours les voix;
Elle les pese
quelquefois.

Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the
applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been
needful to him as motive: the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet's
singing is that expressed by Keats:
I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies.
Precisely so. The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling
the baby-song. No enmity of outward circumstances, therefore, but his
own nature, was responsible for Shelley's doom.
A being with so much about it of child-like unreasonableness, and yet
withal so much of the beautiful attraction luminous in a child's sweet
unreasonableness, would seem fore-fated by its very essence to the
transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair.
Did some shadow of this destiny bear part in his sadness? Certain it is
that, by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and Maddalo jestingly
foretold the manner of his end. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said
Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); "If you can't swim, Beware of
Providence." Did no unearthly dixisti sound in his ears as he wrote it?
But a brief while, and Shelley, who could not swim, was weltering on
the waters of