Shelley; an essay | Page 7

of his imagination the
commonest object becomes encrusted with imagery. Herein again he
deviates from the true Nature poet, the normal Wordsworth type of
Nature poet: imagery was to him not a mere means of expression, not
even a mere means of adornment; it was a delight for its own sake.
And herein we find the trail by which we would classify him. He
belongs to a school of which not impossibly he may hardly have read a
line--the Metaphysical School. To a large extent he is what the
Metaphysical School should have been. That school was a certain kind
of poetry trying for a range. Shelley is the range found. Crashaw and

Shelley sprang from the same seed; but in the one case the seed was
choked with thorns, in the other case it fell on good ground. The
Metaphysical School was in its direct results an abortive movement,
though indirectly much came of it--for Dryden came of it. Dryden, to a
greater extent than is (we imagine) generally perceived, was Cowley
systematised; and Cowley, who sank into the arms of Dryden, rose
from the lap of Donne.
But the movement was so abortive that few will thank us for
connecting with it the name of Shelley. This is because to most people
the Metaphysical School means Donne, whereas it ought to mean
Crashaw. We judge the direction of a development by its highest form,
though that form may have been produced but once, and produced
imperfectly. Now the highest product of the Metaphysical School was
Crashaw, and Crashaw was a Shelley manque; he never reached the
Promised Land, but he had fervid visions of it. The Metaphysical
School, like Shelley, loved imagery for its own sake: and how beautiful
a thing the frank toying with imagery may be, let The Skylark_ and
_The Cloud witness. It is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to
a fixed object, lags continually from the path to play. This is
commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The Metaphysical School
failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it
frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial
idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neaera is
that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in
mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write
acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a
Sensitive Plant. In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they went astray
cannot be said to have done anything so dainty as is implied by toying
with imagery. They cut it into shapes with a pair of scissors. From all
such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate spontaneity. No
trappings are too splendid for the swift steeds of sunrise. His sword-hilt
may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of an Excalibur. His
thoughts scorch through all the folds of expression. His cloth of gold
bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked poetry.

It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in
figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so
almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his
well-known power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction.
Science can now educe threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the
feet of the tiniest infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest
insubstantiality Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing
is abstract. The dustiest abstractions
Start, and tremble under his feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous
imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and
scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson
of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more
intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed of,
Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here afresh
he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn from
this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that pursuit from
the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their poetic smithy
they had left never a place for a forge. They laid their fancies chill on
the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated Shelley's success, and
yet further did a later poet, so much further that we find it difficult to
understand why a generation that worships Shelley should be reviving
Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The generality of readers,
when they know him at all, usually know him by his Ode on the
Passions. In this, despite its beauty, there is still a soupcon of
formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century
periwig,