To heanlic me þinceð
þaet ge mid urum sceattum to scype gangon
unbefohtene, nu ge þus feor hider
on urne eard in becomon.
Maldon, 55–8
Few poets have suffered more than Shelley from the modern dislike of the Romantics. It is natural that this should be so. His poetry is, to an unusual degree, entangled in political thought, and in a kind of political thought now generally unpopular. His belief in the natural perfectibility of man justly strikes the Christian reader as foolishness; while, on the other hand, the sort of perfection he has in view is too ideal for dialectical materialists. His writings are too generous for our cynics; his life is too loose for our ‘humanist’ censors. Almost every recent movement of thought in one way or another serves to discredit him. From some points of view, this reaction cannot be regarded as wholly unfortunate. There is much in Shelley’s poetry that has been praised to excess; much even that deserves no praise at all. In his metre, with all its sweetness, there is much ignoble fluidity, much of mere jingle. His use of language is such that he seldom attains for long to the highest qualities of distinction, and often sinks to a facility and commonplace almost Byronic. He is not a safe poet; you cannot open his works to refute one of his enemies with any sense of confidence. But reaction must not be allowed to carry us too far; and when Mr Eliot offers up Shelley as a sacrifice to the fame of Dryden it is time to call a halt. To be sure, Mr Eliot has his own purpose in that comparison: he is combating the view of the last century that Shelley must necessarily be a greater poet than Dryden because his subjects are more obviously poetical—because the one writes lyrics and the other satire, because one is in the coffee-house and the other in the clouds.* But we must not fall over, like Luther’s drunk man, on the other side of the horse. Those who prefer Shelley to Dryden need not do so on the grounds which Mr Eliot has envisaged; and to prove this I will now maintain that Shelley is to be regarded, on grounds which Mr Eliot himself will allow, as a more masterly, a more sufficient, and indeed a more classical poet than Dryden.
The days are, or ought to be, long past in which any well-informed critic could take the couplet poets of our ‘Augustan’ school at their own valuation as ‘classical’ writers. This would be quite as grave an error as the romantic criticism which denied them to be men of genius. They are neither bad poets nor classical poets. Their merits are great, but neither their merits nor their limitations are those of ancient literature or of that modern literature which is truly classical. It would be hard to find any excellence in writing less classical than wit; yet it is in wit that these poets admittedly excel. The very forms in which the greatest and most characteristic of classical poetry is cast—the epic and the tragedy—are the forms which they attempt with least success. Their favourite form is Satire, a form not invented by the Greeks, and even in Roman hands not very like Mac Flecknoe or the Dunciad. But it is needless to labour the point. To any one who still thinks Pope a classical poet we can only say ‘Open your Sophocles, your Virgil, your Racine, your Milton’; and if that experiment does not convince him, we may safely dismiss him for a blockhead.
Of the school in general, then, we may say that it is a good, unclassical school. But when we turn to Dryden, we must, I think, say more than this. We must admit that we have here a great, flawed poet, in whom the flaws, besides being characteristically unclassical, are scarcely forgivable even by the most romantic or revolutionary standards.
I have said ‘a great, flawed poet’. Of the greatness I wish to make no question; and it is a greatness to which the name of genius is peculiarly applicable. The most abiding impression which Dryden makes upon us is that of exuberant power. He is what Middle English critics would have called ‘boisteous’. He excels in beginnings. ‘A milk white Hind, immortal and unchang’d’1—‘In pious times, e’r Priestcraft did begin’2—there is no fumbling at the exordium. He leaps into his first paragraph as an athlete leaps into the hundred yards’ track, and before the fascination of his ringing couplets gives us leisure to take breath we have been carried into the heart of his matter. The famous ‘magnanimity’ of his satire is another aspect of this same quality of power. His strength is so great that he never needs—or never gives us the impression of needing—to use it all. He is justly praised by Mr Eliot for ‘what he made of his material’, for his ‘ability to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic’:* not that the value of a literary result is in a direct ratio to its difficulty—a theory with absurd consequences—but that the sheer strength of the poet is more easily judged when it is thus isolated. Of this transforming power I know no better example than the résumé of the political situation which opens Absalom and Achitophel. Not only is the prosaic made poetical, but the obscure and complicated is made clear and simple. A child can hardly fail to understand the state of Israel as Dryden describes it; and yet surprisingly little of that situation, as Dryden saw it, has been omitted. If anything is misrepresented, the misrepresentation is deliberate.
Mr Eliot himself selects, to illustrate this transforming power, a passage from Alexander’s Feast and another from Cymon and Iphigenia. The first is that in which the tipsy Alexander ‘Fought all his Battails o’er again; And thrice He routed all his Foes; And thrice He slew the slain’.3 Certainly, if the thing was to be done at all, this is the way to do it. The sudden irruption of the country-dancing fourteener among the nobler, if never very subtle, rhythms of the ode, most happily expresses the transition from heroics to a tavern scene. Dryden has brought off his effect—and it is an effect which will be dear to all who hate the heroic and cannot see any civil or religious ceremony without wishing that some one may slip. For a critic like Mr Eliot, however, the question must surely be not only whether a given effect has been attained, but also whether, and why, it ought to have been attempted. Certain classicists would resent the intrusion of the comic into the greater ode at all, as an offence against decorum. I am sure that Mr Eliot remembers, and almost sure he approves, the delicious reproaches levelled against Racine by French critics for venturing within the remotest hailing distance of comedy in certain scenes of Andromaque; and the greater ode is as lofty a form as tragedy. But even if we allow the comic note, can we excuse comedy of quite this hackneyed and heavy-handed type? That Alexander in his cups should resemble exactly the first drunken braggart whom you may meet in a railway refreshment room, appears to Mr Eliot to add ‘a delicate flavour’.* But what is there delicate about it? Indelicacy, in the sense of grossness and crudity of apprehension, ἀγροικία, is surely the very essence of it. It does not seem to have crossed Dryden’s mind that when Alexander got drunk he may have behaved like a drunk gentleman or a drunk scholar and not like an ‘old soldier’. No: this is not a subtle or delicate joke. If it is to be defended at all, it must be defended as a ‘good plain joke’. As such, Mr Eliot apparently likes it, and I do not: and this is of very little consequence. What is important is that the passage raises in our minds a rather disturbing doubt about Dryden’s poetical purity of intention. The joke may be good or bad in itself. Let us suppose that it is good;—the question remains whether even a good joke, of this tavern type, really contributes to the total effect of the ode. Does Dryden really care whether it contributes or not? Is he, in fine, a man ready, for every ray of accidental beauty that may come in his way, to sacrifice the integrity of his work—a dabbler in ‘good passages’—a man who can produce good poetry but not good poems?
As regards Alexander’s Feast I am content to leave the question open: when once it has been raised we shall have no difficulty in answering it for the rest of Dryden’s more considerable works. What do we enjoy in Absalom and Achitophel? Undoubtedly, the incidental merits. Of the poem taken as a whole, as a ποίημα, Johnson has said the last word.
There is . . . an unpleasing disproportion between the beginning and the end. We are alarmed by a faction formed out of many sects various in their principles, but agreeing in their purpose of mischief, formidable for their numbers, and strong by their supports, while the king’s friends are few and weak. The chiefs on either part are set forth to view; but when expectation is at the height the king makes a speech, and
‘Henceforth a series of new times began.’4
No doubt, the very nature of the case compelled Dryden to this fault; but that excuses the man without mending the poem. I do not argue why the work is botched, but that it is. It is even part of my case that the defect in Absalom was unavoidable. It is a radical defect, consubstantial with Dryden’s original conception. It is no mere accident. The work is not merely maimed, it is diseased at the heart. Like many human invalids, it is not lacking in charms and happy moments; but classicists like Mr Eliot (and myself) should not accept any amount of littered poetry as a poem. If we turn to the Hind and the Panther we find the same irredeemable defect in an aggravated form. Of course it is full of ‘good things’; but of the plan itself, the nerve and structure of the poem, what are we to say if not that the very design of conducting in verse a theological controversy allegorized as a beast fable suggests in the author a state of mind bordering on aesthetic insanity? If the poet had succeeded it would indeed provide a noble example of the transforming power which Mr Eliot claims for him. But he has not. The Hind and the Panther does not exist, as Phèdre or Persuasion or The Alchemist exist. It is not a poem: it is simply a name which we give for convenience to a number of pieces of good description, vigorous satire, and ‘popular’ controversy, which have all been yoked together by external violence.
It may be objected that I am selecting poems merely occasional, specimens at least of ‘applied’ poetry, which cannot fairly be judged by the highest standards. But this is dangerous argument for the defenders of Dryden. The two poems I have quoted are among his most considerable works: they contain much of his noblest, and much of his most piquant, poetry. If these have to be thrown to the wolves as mere applied poetry for which special indulgence is sued, it will be hard, on what remains, to support the plea that Dryden is a poet comparable to Shelley. But I pass over this difficulty. Let us turn to works more purely ‘poetical’, and specially to the Fables which no one asked him to write. Here, if anywhere, we may hope to find the real ‘maker’ at last instead of the mere fountain of brilliant ‘passages’. Here, perhaps, Dryden will become the master, not the slave, of inspiration.
It falls out very happily that Mr Eliot should have chosen from one of these fables a passage in illustration of the ‘transforming power’. It is the satire on the militia in Cymon and Iphigenia.
The Country rings around with loud Alarms,
And raw in Fields the rude Militia swarms, &c.5
Of this, Mr Eliot observes ‘the comic is the material, the result is poetry’.* Yes, but comic poetry. The passage, if not so lustily comic as the picture of Alexander’s tipsy valour, is a humorous passage; and I do not know why it shows more power to make comic poetry of comic material than to make idyllic poetry of idyllic material. Yet it shows power enough, and I will not press the point; but I cannot help wondering that Mr Eliot should think it worth while to quote this amusing description (a ‘beauty’ surely not very recondite), and yet not worth while to tell us why it should be in Cymon and Iphigenia at all. To what artistic end, precisely, is this satire on militias inserted in a romantic fable? I am afraid it is there only because Dryden wanted to write it. Doubtless, the fault is here much more venial than in Alexander’s Feast. The joke itself is less hackneyed, and the lower tone of the fable admits a laxer kind of relevance than the ode. Perhaps, justified as an ‘episode’, the lines are excusable: and if, in this place, Dryden ‘will have his joke’, have it he shall, for me. But there is worse behind. In Sigismonda and Guiscardo Dryden reveals so much of himself that I question whether any one who has read it with attention can fail to see, once and for all, the alte terminus haerens which divides Dryden from the class of great poets. Here he sets out to tell a tragic and ‘heroic’ story. It is not a story of the highest order. It suffers from that overstrain and tendency to falsetto which is the infallible mark of the prosaic mind desperately determined to be ‘poetical’. You could not make an Oedipus or a Lear out of it; you might make a Cid. But it is, at least, a story worth telling. And now mark what Dryden does with it. He does not intend to forgo a single thrill of the tragic ending. He intends to purge our emotions. We are to see the heroine ‘devoutly glew’6 her lips to the heart of her murdered husband, and our respect is to be demanded for her ‘Mute solemn Sorrow, free from Female Noise’.7 That is the note on which the poem is to end. And yet, with such an end in view, this old poet goes out of his way to insert at the beginning of his story a ribald picture of his heroine as the lascivious widow of conventional comedy. I will not quote the pitiful lines in which Dryden winks and titters to his readers over these time-honoured salacities. The reader may turn to the passage for himself. And when he has read on to the bitter end of it, to that couplet where even Dryden’s skill in language deserts him and we sink to the scribbled meanness of
On either Side the Kisses flew so thick,
That neither he nor she had Breath to speak,8
then let him remind himself that all this is the beginning of a tragic story, and that Dryden will presently try to make sublime this same woman whom he is here turning into a Widow Wadman. For such sin against the essential principles of all poetry whatever, no excuse can be made. It cannot be accident. Dryden is the most conscious of writers: he knows well what he is doing. He destroys, and is content to destroy, the kind of poem he sat down to write, if only he can win in return one guffaw from the youngest and most graceless of his audience. There is in this a poetic blasphemy, an arrogant contempt for his own art, which cannot, I think, be paralleled in any other great writer.
It would show a serious misunderstanding if Dryden’s partisans pleaded at this point that I was enslaved to some Victorian canon of solemnity as the essence of poetry and judging Dryden by an alien standard. I have no quarrel with comic or cynical or even ribald poetry. I have no quarrel with Wycherley, I admire Congreve, I delight in Prior and still more in Don Juan. I delight in Dryden himself when he is content to talk bawdy in season and consider ‘Sylvia the fair, in the bloom of Fifteen’ a very pretty piece. But in these fables—as also in the heroic tragedies which are similarly blemished—it is Dryden, not I, who has chosen that the heroic should be trumps, and has lost the game by rules of his own choosing. It was Dryden, not I, who decided to write Annus Mirabilis as a serious and lofty historical poem on what he regarded as the ‘successes of a most just and necessary War’.9 If, after that decision, he describes the enemy as
Vast bulks which little souls but ill supply,10
then we have every right to tell that a nation of reasonable men, not to say men of courage and honour, are very ill-celebrated by the insinuation that their enemies are lubbers. This kind of thing runs through all Dryden’s attempts at the graver and more enthusiastic kinds of poetry, and it must be remembered that such attempts make up a large part of his work. The sin is so flagrant that I cannot understand how so cultivated a critic as Mr Eliot has failed to see the truth; which truth had now better be stated quite frankly. Dryden fails to be a satisfactory poet because being rather a boor, a gross, vulgar, provincial, misunderstanding mind, he yet constantly attempts those kinds of poetry which demand the cuor gentil. Like so many men of that age he is deeply influenced by the genuinely aristocratic and heroic poetry of France. He admires the world of the French tragedians—that exalted tableland where rhetoric and honour grow naturally out of the life lived and the culture inherited. We in England had had an aristocratic tradition of our own, to be sure; a tradition at once more sober and more tenderly romantic than the French, obeying a code of honour less dissociated from piety. The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle were perhaps its last exponents. But Dryden seems to know nothing of it. He and his audiences look to Versailles, and feel for it that pathetic yet unprofitable yearning which vulgarity so often feels for unattainable graces. But the yearning does not teach them the secret. Where their model was brilliant they are flashy; where the Cid was brave, Almanzor swaggers; refinements of amorous casuistry out of the heroic romances are aped by the loves of grooms and chambermaids. One is reminded of a modern oriental, who may have the blood of old paynim knighthoods in him, but who prefers to dress himself up as a cheap imitation of a European gentleman.
The worst thing about such challenging praise as Mr Eliot offers Dryden—praise, I believe, with which Dryden would be seriously embarrassed—is that it forces the rest of us to remember Dryden’s faults. I have dealt with them, as I see them, plainly, not maliciously. The man is irremediably ignorant of that world he chooses so often to write about. When he confines himself to satire, he is at home; but even here, the fatal lack of architectonic power seldom allows him to make a satisfactory poem. That is the case against Dryden. It would have been pleasanter to state the case for him—to analyse, in order to praise, the masculine vigour of his English, the fine breezy, sunshiny weather of the man’s mind at its best—his poetical health; the sweetness (unsurpassed in its own way) of nearly all his versification. But we cannot allow him to be used, and so used, as a stick to beat Shelley.
I have now to show that Shelley, with all his faults of execution, is a poet who must rank higher than Dryden with any critic who claims to be classical; that he is superior to Dryden by the greatness of his subjects and his moral elevation (which are merits by classical standards), and also by the unity of his actions, his architectonic power, and his general observance of decorum in the Renaissance sense of the word; that is, his disciplined production not just of poetry but of the poetry in each case proper to the theme and the species of composition. But it is hardly possible in the present age to approach these questions without first removing some popular prejudices.
In the first place there is the prejudice which leads many people to mutter the word ‘Godwin’ as soon as Shelley is mentioned. They are quite sure that Godwin wrote a very silly book; they are quite sure that the philosophic content of much Shelleyan poetry is Godwinian; and they conclude that the poetry must be silly too. Their first premiss I cannot discuss, since a regrettable gap in my education has left me still the only critic in England who has not that familiar knowledge of Political Justice which alone can justify confident adverse criticism. But the second I can.* It is quite clear to any reader of general education—it must be clear, for example, to Mr Eliot—that the influence of Dante and Plato is at least as dominant in Shelley’s thought as that of Godwin—unless, indeed, Godwin shared the opinions of Dante and Plato, in which case Godwin cannot have been so very silly. Thus, I do not know what Godwin says about free love; but I see that the passage in Epipsychidion beginning
True Love in this differs from gold and clay11
may well derive from Purgatorio, XV, 49, and thus ultimately from Aristotle’s Ethics 1169 A. I do not myself agree with Shelley’s application of the doctrine to sexual promiscuity; but then Plato, and many communists, would, and neither Shelley nor Godwin need be made the scapegoat. Thus again, in Prometheus Unbound I see that the main theme—the myth of a universal rebirth, a restoration of all things—is one which may occur in any age and which falls naturally into place beside Isaiah or the Fourth Eclogue, and that to pin it down to Godwin is a provincialism. Something it may owe to Godwin; but its debts to Aeschylus and, as Mr Tillyard has shown, to Plato’s Politicus are at least equally interesting.12 If Shelley were an ignoramus who had read no book but Political Justice, or a dullard who could invent nothing, we might be driven to suppose that his Asia was merely a personification of Godwinian benevolence; but when we know that he had read of divine love and beauty in Plato and remember that he wrote the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the identification becomes merely perverse. And finally, whatever Godwin may really have said, one of the chief tenets attributed to him is explicitly rejected at the end of Act III. Let us hear no more of Godwin.*
Another prejudice is harder to combat because it is ill-defined. It usually expresses itself by the damning epithet ‘adolescent’; it began with Arnold’s phrase about the ‘ineffectual angel’.13 Shelley is supposed to be not merely seely in the Elizabethan sense, but silly in the modern sense; to believe ludicrously well of the human heart in general, and crudely ill of a few tyrants; to be, in a word, insufficiently disillusioned. Before removing this misunderstanding, I must point out that if it were granted it would not place him below Dryden. Dryden is equally ignorant of the world, though in the opposite direction, as his sorry joke about Alexander would be sufficient to show. Whenever he attempts to be lofty he betrays himself. There are senile and vulgar illusions no less than illusions adolescent and heroical; and of the two, I see no reason for preferring the former. If I must, in either event, be blindfold, why should I choose to have my eyes bandaged with stinking clouts rather than with cloth of gold? The fashion indeed is all for the stinking clouts, and it is easy to see why. Men (and, still more, boys) like to call themselves disillusioned because the very form of the word suggests that they have had the illusions and emerged from them—have tried both worlds. The claim, however, is false in nine cases out of ten. The world is full of impostors who claim to be disenchanted and are really unenchanted: mere ‘natural’ men who have never risen so high as to be in danger of the generous illusions they claim to have escaped from. Mr Mencken is the perfect example. We need to be on our guard against such people. They talk like sages who have passed through the half-truths of humanitarian benevolence, aristocratic honour, or romantic passion, while in fact they are clods who have never yet advanced so far. ’Απειροκαλία is their disease; and Dryden himself is not free from it. He has not escaped from those enchantments which some find in Shelley; he has tried desperately to taste the like, and failed, and the fustian remains in his poetry like a scar on his face. He indeed deserves pity, since he has struggled against the disease, unlike our modern impostors who glory in it and call it health; but this does not alter the conclusion that he cannot be set against Shelley as one who knows against one who is deluded. If we granted the doctrine of Shelley’s amiable ignorance of the one half of life, it would still but balance Dryden’s banausic ignorance of the other.
But I do not grant the doctrine, and I do not see how it can be accepted by any one who has read Shelley’s poetry with attention. It is simply not true to say that Shelley conceives the human soul as a naturally innocent and divinely beautiful creature, interfered with by external tyrants. On the contrary no other heathen writer comes nearer to stating and driving home the doctrine of original sin. In such an early work as The Revolt of Islam those who come ‘from pouring human blood’14 are told to
Disguise it not—we have one human heart—
All mortal thoughts confess a common home.
(VIII, XIX)
and again,
Look on your mind—it is the book of fate—
Ah! it is dark with many a blazoned name
Of misery—all are mirrors of the same.15
(VIII, XX)
This is weak, exclamatory poetry, I grant you, but my concern is with the sentens. When Shelley looks at and condemns the oppressor he does so with the full consciousness that he also is a man just like that: the evil is within as well as without; all are wicked, and this of course is the significance of the allegorical passage in Prometheus Unbound, where the Furies say to Prometheus
we will live through thee, one by one,
Like animal life, and though we can obscure not
The soul which burns within, that we will dwell
Beside it, like a vain loud multitude
Vexing the self-content of wisest men:
That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,
And foul desire round thine astonished heart,
And blood within thy labyrinthine veins
Crawling like agony.
Prom. Why ye are thus now.16
The same doctrine, more briefly and suggestively expressed, occurs in the Triumph of Life, where he explains the failure of the wise, the great, and the unforgotten by saying
their lore
Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might
Could not repress the mystery within,
And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night
Caught them ere evening.17
(211–15)
We mistake Shelley wholly if we do not understand that for him, as certainly as for St Paul, humanity in its merely natural or ‘given’ condition is a body of death. It is true that the conclusion he draws is very different from that of St Paul. To a Christian, conviction of sin is a good thing because it is the necessary preliminary to repentance; to Shelley it is an extremely dangerous thing. It begets self-contempt, and self-contempt begets misanthropy and cruelty. In the Revolt of Islam the passage I have already quoted leads up to the statement that it is this self-contempt which arms Hatred with a ‘mortal sting’.18 The man who has once seen the darkness within himself will soon seek vengeance on others; and in Prometheus self-contempt is twice mentioned as an evil. I do not think we can seriously doubt that Shelley is right. If a man will not become a Christian, it is very undesirable that he should become aware of the reptilian inhabitants in his own mind. To know how bad we are, in the condition of mere nature, is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse. The process is very accurately described in some of the most memorable lines Shelley ever wrote:
’tis a trick of this same family
To analyse their own and other minds.
Such self-anatomy shall teach the will
Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,
Into the depth of darkest purposes:
So Cenci fell into the pit; even I
Since Beatrice unveiled me to myself,
And made me shrink from what I cannot shun,
Show a poor figure to my own esteem,
To which I grow half reconciled. . . .
(Cenci, II, ii, 108 et seq.)
The lines which I have italicized provide an excellent short history of thought and sentiment in the early twentieth century, and the whole passage is a measure of the difference between Byron and Shelley. Byron, speaking through his Byronic heroes, is in the very article of that process which Shelley describes, and rather proud of it. He suffers the predicament; Shelley observes and understands it. He understands it, I think, a good deal better than most of his modern critics.
Shelley’s poetry presents a variety of kinds, most of them traditional. The elegy and the greater ode come down to him from the exemplaria graeca through eighteenth-century practice; the metrical structure of the latter is indeed rooted in a misunderstanding of Pindar, but a misunderstanding which had become itself a precedent by Shelley’s time. Swellfoot is almost an attempt to revive the Old Comedy—an attempt which should interest Mr Eliot since Shelley in it faces the cardinal problem of much of Mr Eliot’s poetry: namely, whether it is possible to distinguish poetry about squalor and chaos from squalid and chaotic poetry. I do not think it a great success. The lyrical drama is in part Aeschylean; in part, I think, Shelley’s redemption of a bad eighteenth-century form. It derives from, and redeems, the drama of Mason, just as The Prelude and Excursion derive from, and confer new power upon, the eighteenth-century treatise-poem. Shelley’s lyric is a greater novelty, but heavily indebted on the metrical side to Dryden himself. The fantastic tale or idyll (as in Alastor or the Witch of Atlas) probably derives from the mythological epyllion of the Elizabethans. In all these kinds Shelley produces works which, though not perfect, are in one way more satisfactory than any of Dryden’s longer pieces: that is to say, they display a harmony between the poet’s real and professed intention, they answer the demands of their forms, and they have unity of spirit. Shelley is at home in his best poems, his clothes, so to speak, fit him, as Dryden’s do not. The faults are faults of execution, such as over-elaboration, occasional verbosity, and the like: mere stains on the surface. The faults in Dryden are fundamental discrepancies between the real and the assumed poetic character, or radical vices in the design: diseases at the heart. Shelley could almost say with Racine, ‘When my plan is made my poem is done’; with Dryden the plan itself usually foredooms the poem’s failure.
Thus Alastor is a poem perfectly true to itself. The theme is universally interesting—the quest for ideal love. And both the theme and the treatment are fully suited to Shelley’s powers. Hence the poem has an apparent ease, a noble obviousness, which deceives some readers. Mr Eliot himself is too experienced a writer to be guilty of the delusion that he could write like Shelley if he chose; but I think many of Mr Eliot’s readers may suffer from it. They mistake the inevitability of Alastor, which really springs from the poet’s harmony with his subject, for the facility of commonplace, and condemn the poem, precisely because it is successful. Of course it has its faults—some of the scenery is over-written, and the form of line which ends with two long monosyllables comes too often. But these are not the sort of defects that kill a poem: the energy of imagination, which supports so lofty, remote, and lonely an emotion almost without a false note for seven hundred lines, remains; and it deserves to be admired, if in no higher way, at least as we admire a great suspension-bridge. I address myself, of course, only to those who are prepared, by toleration of the theme, to let the poem have a fair hearing. For those who are not, we can only say that they may doubtless be very worthy people, but they have no place in the European tradition.
Perhaps this muscular sustaining power is even more noticeable in the Witch of Atlas, for there Shelley goes more out of himself. In Alastor the congeniality of the theme was fully given in Shelley’s temper; in the Witch he is going successfully beyond the bounds of his temper—making himself something other than he was. For in this poem we have, indeed, Shelley’s ordinary romantic love of the fantastical and ideal, but all keyed down, muted, deftly inhibited from its native solemnity and intensity in order to produce a lighter, more playful effect. The theme, at bottom, is as serious as ever; but the handling ‘turns all to favour and to prettiness’. The lightness and liquidity of this piece, the sensation which we feel in reading it of seeing things distinctly, yet at a vast distance, cannot be paralleled in any poem that I know. We must go to another art, namely to music, to find anything at all similar; and there we shall hardly find it outside Mozart. It could not, indeed, have been written if Shelley had not read the Italians; but it is a new modification, and in it all the light-hearted dancing perfection of Ariosto is detached from Ariosto’s hardness and flippancy (though not from his irony) and used with a difference—disturbed by overtones, etherialized. The whole poem is a happy reproof to that new Puritanism which has captured so many critics and taught us to object to pleasure in poetry simply because it is pleasure. It is natural, though regrettable, that such people should be exasperated by this mercurial poem; for to them it is miching mallecho (as Shelley said of Peter Bell) and means, as so much of his poetry means, mischief. They know very well that they are being laughed at; and they do not like to be told how
Heaven and Earth conspire to foil
The over-busy gardener’s blundering toil.19
If Shelley had written only such poems he would have shown his genius: his artistry, the discipline and power of obedience which makes genius universal, are better shown elsewhere. Adonais naturally occurs to the mind, for here we see Shelley fruitfully submitting to the conventions of a well-established form. It has all the traditional features of the elegy—the opening dirge, the processional allegory, and the concluding consolation. There is one bad error of taste. The Muse, lamenting Adonais, is made to lament her own immortality,
I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
(xxvi)
This is to make a goddess speak like a new-made human widow, and to dash the public solemnity of elegy with the violent passions of a personal lyric. How much more fitting are the words of the Roman poet:
Immortales mortales si foret fas flere
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam.20
But it is a slip soon recovered, and not to be compared with the prolonged indecorum of Dryden’s satiric conceits in his elegy for Mrs Anne Killigrew:
To the next Realm she stretcht her Sway,
For Painture neer adjoyning lay,
A plenteous Province, and alluring Prey.
A Chamber of Dependences was fram’d,
(As conquerors will never want Pretence,
When arm’d, to justifie the Offence)
And the whole Fief, in right of Poetry she claim’d.
The Country open lay without Defence, &c.21
There are eighteen lines of it, and I not do know whether any major poet other than Dryden ever played such silly tricks at a funeral. No one demands that every poet should write an elegy: let each man be a master of his own trade. But the fact remains that when Shelley intends to do so, he does so; Dryden, equally intending, does not—nimium amator ingenii sui. I do not now speak of the unexampled rapture of Shelley’s close. I might do so if I were to argue with Dryden, for he loves this ecstasy and quotes with approval furentis animi vaticinatio; being often a romantic in wish, though seldom happily romantic in the event. But I do not know whether Mr Eliot shares Dryden’s admiration for ‘those enthusiastic parts of poetry’; and I would prefer to argue from positions that are, or ought in logic to be, admitted by Mr Eliot. But I have slipped into that sentence ‘If I were to argue with Dryden’ unawares. Let no one suppose I am such a coxcomb as to think that my defence of Shelley could stand against Dryden’s humane and luminous and Olympian dialectic; or, indeed, that it would be required in the presence of one who would almost certainly shame and anticipate me with such generous praise of Shelley as he has given to Shakespeare, or Milton, or Tasso, and a frank acknowledgement (he made more than one) of his own offences against the laws of poetry. Whoever else is a Drydenian in Mr Eliot’s way, I have no fear lest Dryden himself should be one.
Of course Shelley too had his failures. The Revolt of Islam does not really exist much more than the Hind and the Panther exists, and the ruin is less redeemed by fine passages. The Letter to Maria Gisborne is little better than a draft—a thing scrawled as quickly as the pen would cover the paper and really unfit for the printer. Peter Bell the Third is a more doubtful case. I am not prepared to endure either its squalors or its obscurity by any such moderate promise of enjoyment as it holds out; but perhaps the creator of Sweeney ought to have more patience both with the one and with the other. I do not greatly admire—but perhaps some of Mr Eliot’s weaker disciples should—this little picture.
As he was speaking came a spasm,
And wrenched his gnashing teeth asunder;
Like one who sees a strange phantasm
He lay,—there was a silent chasm
Between his upper jaw and under.22
Epipsychidion raises in an acute form a problem with which Mr Eliot has been much occupied: I mean the problem of the relation between our judgement on a poem as critics, and our judgment as men on the ethics, metaphysics, or theology presupposed or expressed in the poem. For my own part, I do not believe that the poetic value of any poem is identical with the philosophic; but I think they can differ only to a limited extent, so that every poem whose prosaic or intellectual basis is silly, shallow, perverse, or illiberal, or even radically erroneous, is in some degree crippled by that fact. I am thus obliged to rate Epipsychidion rather low, because I consider the thought implied in it a dangerous delusion. In it Shelley is trying to stand on a particular rung of the Platonic ladder, and I happen to believe firmly that that particular rung does not exist, and that the man who thinks he is standing on it is not standing but falling. But no view that we can adopt will remove Epipsychidion from the slate. There is an element of spiritual, and also of carnal, passion in it, each expressed with great energy and sensibility, and the whole is marred, but not completely, by the false mode (as Mr Eliot and I would maintain) in which the poet tries to blend them. It is particularly interesting to notice the internal, perhaps unconscious, control which arises amidst the very intensity of the experience and tightens up the metrical form: the first forty lines are almost ‘stopped couplets’ and the whole movement is much closer to Dryden’s couplet than to that of Keats.
But we are now rapidly approaching that part of our subject where the difference between Mr Eliot and myself ceases. In his essay on Dante, Mr Eliot says that he thinks the last canto of the Paradiso ‘the highest point that poetry has ever reached’.* I think the same—and since it is so pleasant to agree, let me add irrelevantly that I think as he does about the Bhagavad-Gita.* And a few pages later Mr Eliot singles Shelley out as the one English poet of his century (I would have said the one English poet yet recorded) ‘who could even have begun to follow’ Dante’s footsteps;* and he generously allows that Shelley, at the end of his life, was beginning to profit by his knowledge of Dante. I do not know how much of Shelley’s work Mr Eliot would admit by this concession. I suppose he would admit, at the very least, the Triumph of Life. If any passage in our poetry has profited by Dante, it is the unforgettable appearance of Rousseau in that poem—though admittedly it is only the Dante of the Inferno. But I am not without hope that Mr Eliot might be induced to include more. In this same essay he speaks of a modern ‘prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry’.* Now Dante is eminently the poet of beatitude. He has not only no rival, but none second to him. But if we were asked to name the poet who most nearly deserved this inaccessible proxime accessit, I should name Shelley. Indeed, my claim for Shelley might be represented by the proposition that Shelley and Milton are, each, the half of Dante. I do not know how we could describe Dante better to one who had not read him, than by some such device as the following:
‘You know the massive quality of Milton, the sense that every word is being held in place by a gigantic pressure, so that there is an architectural sublime in every verse whether the matter be sublime at the moment or not. You know also the air and fire of Shelley, the very antithesis of the Miltonic solidity, the untrammelled, reckless speed through pellucid spaces which makes us imagine while we are reading him that we have somehow left our bodies behind. If now you can imagine (but you cannot, for it must seem impossible till you see it done) a poetry which combined these two all-but incompatibles—a poetry as bright and piercing and aereal as the one, yet as weighty, as pregnant and as lapidary as the other, then you will know what Dante is like.’
To be thus half of Dante (Caesar is my authority for such a rarefied critical symbolism)23 is fame enough for any ordinary poet. And Shelley, I contend, reaches this height in the fourth act of Prometheus.
Genetically considered, the fourth act, we know, is an afterthought: teleologically it is that for which the poem exists. I do not mean by this that the three preceding acts are mere means; but that their significance and beauty are determined by what follows, and that what came last in the writing (as it comes last in the reading) is ‘naturally prior’ in the Aristotelian sense. It does not add to, and therefore corrupt, a completed structure; it gives structure to that which, without it, would be imperfect. The resulting whole is the greatest long poem in the nineteenth century, and the only long poem of the highest kind in that century which approaches to perfection.
The theme is one of sane, public, and perennial interest—that of rebirth, regeneration, the new cycle. Like all great myths its primary appeal to the will and the understanding can therefore be diversely interpreted according as the reader is a Christian, a politician, a psycho-analyst, or what not. Myth is thus like manna; it is to each man a different dish and to each the dish he needs. It does not grow old nor stick at frontiers racial, sexual, or philosophic; and even from the same man at the same moment it can elicit different responses at different levels. But great myth is rare in a reflective age; the temptation to allegorize, to thrust into the story the conscious doctrines of the poet, there to fight it out as best they can with the inherent tendency of the fable, is usually too strong. Faust and the Niblung’s Ring—the only other great mythical poems of modern times—have in this way been partially spoiled. The excellence of Shelley is that he has avoided this. He has found what is, for him, the one perfect story and re-made it so well that the ancient version now seems merely embryonic. In his poem there is no strain between the literal sense and the imaginative significance. The events which are needed to produce the λύσις seem to become the symbols of the spiritual process he is presenting without effort or artifice or even consciousness on his part.
The problem was not an easy one. We are to start with the soul chained, aged, suffering; and we are to end with the soul free, rejuvenated, and blessed. The selection of the Prometheus story (a selection which seems obvious only because we did not have to make it) is the first step to the solution. But nearly everything has still to be done. By what steps are we to pass from Prometheus in his chains to Prometheus free? The long years of his agony cannot be dramatically represented, for they are static. The actual moment of liberation by Heracles is a mere piece of ‘business’. Dramatic necessity demands that the Titan himself should do or say something before his liberation—and if possible something that will have an effect on the action. Shelley answers this by beginning with Prometheus’s revocation of the curse upon Jupiter. Now mark how everything falls into place for the poet who well and truly obeys his imagination. This revocation at once introduces the phantasm of Jupiter, the original curse on the phantasm’s lips, and the despair of Earth and Echoes at what seems to be Prometheus’s capitulation. We thus get at one stroke a good opening episode and a fine piece of irony, on the dramatic level; but we also have suggested the phantasmal or nightmare nature of the incubus under which the soul (or the world) is groaning, and the prime necessity for a change of heart in the sufferer, who is in some sort his own prisoner. Prometheus, we are made to feel, has really stepped out of prison with the words, ‘It doth repent me.’24 But once again structural and spiritual necessities join hands to postpone his effective liberation. On the structural side, the play must go on; on the other, we know, and Shelley knows, how long a journey separates the first resolve, from the final remaking, of a man, a nation, or a world. The Furies will return, and the act closes with low-toned melodies of sadness and of hopes that are as yet remote and notional.
The whole of the next act, in story, is occupied with the difficult efforts of Asia to apprehend and follow a dream dreamed in the shadow of Prometheus: the difficult journey which it leads her; her difficult descent to the depths of the earth; and her final re-ascension, transformed, to the light. Difficulty is, so to speak, the subject of this act. The dramatic advantage of splitting the sufferer’s rôle into two parts, those of Prometheus and Asia, and of giving the latter a task to perform in the liberation, is sufficiently obvious. But we hardly need to notice this. Most of us, while we read this act, are too absorbed, I fancy, by the new sensation it creates in us. The gradual ineluctable approach of the unknown, where the unknown is sinister, is not an uncommon theme in literature; but where else are we to find this more medicinable theme—these shy approaches, and sudden recessions, and returnings beyond hope, and swellings and strengthenings of a far-off, uncertainly prognosticated good? And again, it is a necessity for Shelley, simply because he has placed his fiend in the sky, to make Asia go down, not up, to fetch this good; but how miraculously it all fits in! Does any reader, whether his prepossessions be psychological or theological, question this descent into hell, this return to the womb, this death, as the proper path for Asia to take? Our imaginations, constrained by deepest necessities, accept all that imagery of interwoven trees and dew and moss whereby the chorus drench the second scene with darkness, and the softness and damp of growing things: by the same necessity they accept the harsher images of the final precipitous descent to Demogorgon’s cave, and the seated darkness which we find there. It is out of all this, silver against this blackness, that the piercing song of Asia’s reascension comes; and if any one who has read that song in its setting still supposes that the poet is talking about Godwin or the Revolution, or that Shelley is any other than a very great poet, I cannot help him. But for my own part I believe that no poet has felt more keenly, or presented more weightily the necessity for a complete unmaking and remaking of man, to be endured at the dark bases of his being. I do not know the book (in profane literature) to which I should turn for a like expression of what von Hügel would have called the ‘costingness’ of regeneration.
The third act is the least successful: Shelley’s error was not to see that he could shorten it when once he had conceived the fourth. Yet some leisure and some slackened tension are here allowable. We are certainly not ready for the fourth act at once. Between the end of torment and the beginning of ecstasy there must be a pause: peace comes before beatitude. It would be ridiculous, in point of achievement, to compare this weak act in Shelley’s play with the triumphant conclusion of the Purgatorio; but structurally it corresponds to the position of the earthly paradise between purgatory and heaven. And in one scene at least it is worthy of its theme. The dialogue between Ocean and Apollo (at ‘the mouth of a great river in the island Atlantis’) is among his best things: a divine indolence soaks it, and if there are better lines in English poetry there are none that breathe a more heartfelt peace than Ocean’s:
It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm.
Peace, monster; I come now. Farewell.25
The fourth act I shall not attempt to analyse. It is an intoxication, a riot, a complicated and uncontrollable splendour, long, and yet not too long, sustained on the note of ecstasy such as no other English poet, perhaps no other poet, has given us. It can be achieved by more than one artist in music: to do it in words has been, I think, beyond the reach of nearly all. It has not, and cannot have, the solemnity and overwhelming realism of the Paradiso, but it has all its fire and light. It has not the ‘sober certainty of waking bliss’ which makes Milton’s paradise so inhabitable—but it sings from regions in our consciousness that Milton never entered.
Some anti-romantic repudiations of such poetry rest, perhaps, on a misunderstanding. It might be true, as the materialists must hold, that there is no possible way by which men can arrive at such felicity; or again, as Mr Eliot and I believe, that there is one Way, and only one, and that Shelley has missed it. But while we discuss these things, the romantic poet has added meaning to the word Felicity itself. Whatever the result of our debate, we had better attend to his discovery lest we remain more ignorant than we need have been of the very thing about which we debated.