Shelley (Part 3)

(Pictured: John Milton.) We herewith present the third of the (now) four posts comprising P. E. More’s essay, “Shelley,” which appears in the seventh volume of The Shelburne Essays. Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. He collaborated with Irving Babbitt from before 1900 in the project later called the New Humanism. His conservative literary criticism was published in the eleven-volume Shelburne Essays (1904-1921) and the three-volume New Shelburne Essays (1928). He also published several books on Plato and Greek philosophy, including the Greek Tradition. Late in his life he undertook Christian apologetics, notably in The Christ of the Testament.

I am aware that my criticism of Shelley may seem harsh and prosaic, yet I am really saying nothing which cannot be confirmed by the words of Mr. Clutton-Brock, and in fact by the views, less openly avowed perhaps, of the more whole-hearted Shelleyans, It is scarcely doing a violence to draw such support even from a critical work like Arthur Symons’s Romantic Movement, which is written with the avowed purpose of exalting the work of Blake and Coleridge and Shelley as the final criterion of poetry. Mr. Symons does indeed look upon Shelley as an enchanter who “never mistakes the images which he calls up for realities,” but, with that extraordinary contradiction which dogs all such critics, he adds immediately that the Prometheus is “a cloudy procession of phantoms, seen in a divine hallucination.” Even more significant is that strangely-fated essay on Shelley by the late Francis Thompson. Dithyrambic praise has never poured itself out in more intoxicated language than in some of these paragraphs:

“It [Prometheus Unbound] is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley’s powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and a weeping mist of music fills the air. The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic reel and rout and revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to drunken waste. The choruses sweep down the wind, tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost cries for respite from the unrolling splendours.”

Yet these closing scenes are “nevertheless the artistic error of the poem”; yet Shelley wrote “with some misdirected view to truth”; yet in religion and morals “his methods were perniciously mistaken”; yet “his theory was repulsive but comprehensible”; and “the spell on which depend such necromantic castles is some spirit of pain charm-poisoned at their base,” That charm-poisoned spirit was nothing less than the peculiar romantic illusion of the Revolution which ignored the native impulse of evil, ever lurking in the heart of man, ready to leap forth when its chains are shaken, and which valued the emotions in accordance with their mere spontaneity and intensity.

If, notwithstanding these admissions, the true Shelleyan still cherishes the Prometheus and The Revolt of Islam as great and beautiful powers in the intellectual world, the issue becomes a matter of emphasis, or, rather, of exclusions in taste. What really appeals to the romantic idealist in the spirit of these poems, in their total effect, is a kind of elusive, yet rapturous, emanation of hope devoid of specific content. The poet may look upon the world of living men with perverted gaze, but his truth is faith in the future; he is “a being prophetic of some higher state to which mankind shall attain”; and from the intoxication of this sheer hope the destinies of mankind become like the vision of the chariots of the Hours [in Prometheus Unbound]:

“In each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before.
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet’s flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward.”

There is at least something in this that seems dynamic, a power to make man

“. . . hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

And indeed it is on this power, without account of its direction, that Mr. Clutton-Brock bases his admiration; to him Shelley “in his worst errors . . . was far more admirable and less mischievous than those who persuade us to submit to the mere mechanism of life by their own comfortable submission to it.” Shall we, then, end here? The right comparison, I maintain, is not with those sunk in the comfortable mechanism of life, but rather with those strong poets of the true romance, who can hope and still maintain the balance of common-sense. I am bold to assert that this surrender to hope without thought of the thing it contemplates is possible only to a mind which has, in a sense, been debauched by false ideas and vain reading; that a mind deeply nourished on the true poets may for a time and by a sort of self-violence suffer itself to become inflated with this wind of vanity, but cannot long forget the actual outcome of that spirit in the poet’s own life and its sterility or falseness in dealing with the actual motives of mankind. It is no sufficient answer to say that the veritable content of Shelley’s hope is love, for the scope of this emotion is left as vague, if not as morbid, as the other. It is a long hope to build on the power which “makes the reptile equal to the God”; nor will that power convey much satisfaction to the heart that has sustained itself on the amor of Catullus in this world or on that of Dante in the visionary spheres. Love without a true understanding of evil is meaningless.

Or it may be that your Shelleyan eschews philosophy and ideas altogether, caring only for the poet’s musical evocation of beauty. To such a one, as to Francis Thompson, the Prometheus is like a magical incantation, under the spell of which forms of fleeting iridescent loveliness float before his dream-open eyes:

Dim twilight-lawns, and stream-illumined caves,
And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist.

That is an innocent and blissful kind of inebriation, very desirable, no doubt, in a world too much given to seeking its escape from prose in quite other and baser ways; but he who indulges therein should beware of speaking of this phantom realm as if it were peopled with ideas. There is a beauty of dreaming and a beauty of waking; they are sisters both and daughters of the gods, but only one is acknowledged on Olympus. If you desire to know them apart, read in the Prometheus of the voices that emanate from those wind-enchanted shapes:

“Canst thou imagine where those spirits live
Which make such delicate music in the woods?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“’T is hard to tell:
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,
The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noon-tide kindles thro’ the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors thro’ the night,
They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again.”

Read that and then recall Adam’s account to Eve of the music that haunted the woods of Paradise:

“How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air . . .”

The change is a transition from dreaming to the sober certainty of waking bliss; from a bubble-blown phantasmagoria to the ecstasy of intellectual beauty.

[To be continued.]