Ideas of Good and Evil

V

In one of his little socialist pamphlets he tells how he sat under an elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old horse and an old labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and women he had seen in towns; and he wondered how all these had come to be as they were. He saw that the starlings were beautiful and merry and that men and the old horse they had subdued to their service were ugly and miserable, and yet the starlings, he thought, were of one kind whether there or in the south of England, and the ugly men and women were of one kind with those whose nobility and beauty had moved the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine the gods and the heroes after the images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to meditate how this great difference might be ended and a new life, which would permit men to have beauty in common among them as the starlings have, be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words, his mind was illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone worth having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established in the constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things, he announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says, I think, that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had not enough artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is, to admit the authority of the vision; or enough faith to understand that all that is imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think, have argued with us in a serious spirit. Though I think that he never used the kinds of words I use in writing of him, though I think he would even have disliked a word like faith with its theological associations, I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the vision of men like him, from the vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds. The early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree, and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the Well and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly Paradise.

He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he was in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then houses of other people, places where one could live happily; and he obeyed it when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when he spoke at street corners about the coming changes.

He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a time when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that priests and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years ago. His art was not more essentially religious than Rossetti’s art, but it was different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he being less intense and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would wither if it did not set us at peace with natural things, and if we did not believe that it existed always a little, and would some day exist in its fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.

1902.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY’S POETRY

I. HIS RULING IDEAS

When I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in a mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and more interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I never found anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and that one should begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting nothing as the make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can recollect my thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers. Since then I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know. I have re-read Prometheus Unbound, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I remember going to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin’s Political Justice put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist, and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker, who mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless one compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe the liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief that lay behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full of subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he should be a metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his ‘huntings after the obscure’ with regret, and said of that Prometheus Unbound, which so many for three generations have thought Political Justice put into rhyme, ‘It requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observation and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.’ From these scattered fragments and observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty of Political Justice that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its perfection till the hours bore ‘Time to his grave in eternity.’ In A Defence of Poetry, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station by the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the other in the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the Intellectual Beauty. ‘Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things are to be ordained, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of latest time.’ ‘Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry.’ Poetry is ‘the creation of actions according to the unchangeable process of human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.’ ‘Poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and merchants… It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is the more useful… Whilst the mechanist abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them be sure that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want… The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer… such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.’ The speaker of these things might almost be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when she moves over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the priests cast aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock his own sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and friends are united; while the power, which in Laon and Cythna, awakens the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the tyrannies of the world, is first seen, as the star of love or beauty. And at the end of The Ode to Naples, he cries out to ‘the spirit of beauty’ to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its ‘harmonizing ardours.’ He calls the spirit of beauty liberty, because despotism, and perhaps, as ‘the man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys,’ all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its expressions in thought and in action, by making us ‘seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.’ ‘We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness.’ We have ‘a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap,’ and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist evil itself. He bids the reformers in The Philosophical Review of Reform receive ‘the onset of the cavalry,’ if it be sent to disperse their meetings, ‘with folded arms,’ and ‘not because active resistance is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory;’ and he gives them like advice in The Masque of Anarchy, for liberty, the poem cries, ‘is love,’ and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the hearts of men. Even in Queen Mab, which was written before he had found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest thought, he is less anxious to change men’s beliefs, as I think, than to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the field, ‘the cause and the effect of tyranny.’ He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have ‘pure desire and universal love,’ are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when ‘the spirit of nature,’ the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who has her ‘throne of power unappealable in every human heart,’ shall have made men so virtuous that ‘kingly glare will lose its power to dazzle and silently pass by,’ and as it seems even commerce, ‘the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should purchase not,’ come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that ‘power unappealable.’ Maddalo, in Julian and Maddalo, says that the soul is powerless, and can only, like a ‘dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray’; but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions have replied —

‘Where is the beauty, love and truth we seekBut in our minds? And if we were not weak,Should we be less in deed than in desire?’

while Mont Blanc is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its sources in ‘the secret strength of things,’ ‘which governs thought and to the infinite heavens is a law.’ He even thought that men might be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the ‘Red Comet,’ the image of evil in Laon and Cythna, when it began its war with the star of beauty, brought not only ‘Fear, Hatred, Fraud, and Tyranny,’ but ‘Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.’

When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to Queen Mab, that ‘there is no great extravagance in presuming … that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species,’ and thinks it ‘certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of the word is out of the reach of civilized man.’ In Prometheus Unbound he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of danger and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’

‘by the lightOf wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,And music soft,’

This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries —

‘Heardst thou not sweet words amongThat heaven-resounding minstrelsy?Heardst thou not that those who dieAwake in a world of ecstasy?How love, when limbs are interwoven,And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,And thought to the world’s dim boundaries clinging,And music when one beloved is singing,Is death? Let us drain right joyouslyThe cup which the sweet bird fills for me.’

And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as of a mistress. ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.’ ‘Die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou wouldst seek;’ and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture of prophecy, for ‘the fire for which all thirst’ beams upon him, ‘consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’ When he is dead he will still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled ‘to the burning fountains whence he came,’ and ‘is a portion of the eternal which must glow through time and change unquenchably the same,’ and has ‘awaked from the dream of life,’ he has not gone from ‘the young dawn,’ or the ‘caverns in the forests,’ or ‘the faint flowers and the fountains.’ He has been ‘made one with nature,’ and his voice is ‘heard in all her music,’ and his presence is felt wherever ‘that power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own,’ and he bears ‘his part’ when it is compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows men’s minds at their supreme moments, for

‘when lofty thoughtLifts a young heart above its mortal lair,And love and life contend in it for whatShall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.’

‘Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit when we appear to die,’ Mrs. Shelley has written, ‘a mystic ideality tinged these speculations in Shelley’s mind; certain stanzas in the poem of The Sensitive Plant express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent, accordant with our being – but that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in their “love, beauty, and delight,” in a world congenial to them, and we, clogged by “error, ignorance, and strife,” see them not till we are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state.’ Not merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions of the eternal.

‘In this lifeOf error, ignorance, and strife,Where nothing is, but all things seem,And we the shadows of the dream,It is a modest creed, and yetPleasant, if one considers it,To own that death itself must be,Like all the rest, a mockery.This garden sweet, that lady fair,And all sweet shapes and odours there,In truth have never passed away;’Tis we, ’tis ours are changed, not they.For love and beauty and delightThere is no death, nor change; their mightExceeds our organs, which endureNo light, being themselves obscure.’

He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil remain for ever, ‘thinking the thought and doing the deed,’ though not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that ‘love and beauty and delight’ remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes ‘all knowledge of the past,’ and the good and evil ‘events of old and wondrous times,’ was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.

Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the Elemental Spirits of mediæval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland, and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley’s ignorance of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense, the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of itself or out of supersensual power. These are ‘gleams of a remoter world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of all the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal silence,’ ‘visions swift and sweet and quaint,’ which lie waiting their moment ‘each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among ‘ever-blooming eden trees’, ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘The golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’ ‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; the ‘guardians’ who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought’ as ‘the birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,’ or man’s thought itself through all things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing away —

‘As the flying fish leapFrom the Indian deep,And mix with the seabirds half asleep.’

It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint songs, by eddies of echoes that draw ‘all spirits on that secret way,’ by the ‘dying odours’ of flowers and by ‘the sunlight of the sphered dew,’ beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon, eternity, that ‘the painted veil’ ‘called life’ may be ‘torn aside.’

There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came to Prometheus —

‘As from the rose which the pale priestess kneelsTo gather for her festal crown of flowers,The aërial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,So from our victim’s destined agonyThe shade which is our form invests us round;Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.’

Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in The Triumph of Life, coming from the procession that follows the car of life, as ‘hope’ changes to ‘desire,’ shadows ‘numerous as the dead leaves blown in autumn evening from a poplar tree’; and resembling those they come from, until, if I understand an obscure phrase aright, they are ‘wrapt’ round ‘all the busy phantoms that live there as the sun shapes the clouds.’ Some to sit ‘chattering like apes,’ and some like ‘old anatomies’ ‘hatching their bare broods under the shade of dæmons’ wings,’ laughing ‘to reassume the delegated powers’ they had given to the tyrants of the earth, and some ‘like small gnats and flies’ to throng ‘about the brow of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist,’ and some ‘like discoloured shapes of snow’ to fall ‘on fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,’ to be ‘melted by the youthful glow which they extinguish,’ and many to ‘fling shadows of shadows yet unlike themselves,’ shadows that are shaped into new forms by that ‘creative ray’ in which all move like motes.

These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than metaphors or picturesque phrases to one who believed the ‘thoughts which are called real or external objects’ differed but in regularity of recurrence from ‘hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,’ and lessened this difference by telling how he had dreamed ‘three several times, between intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream,’ and who had seen images with the mind’s eye that left his nerves shaken for days together. Shadows that were as when there could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being to one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had fainted at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who had tried to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams’ account, because he believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had sought refuge there.

‘hoversA flock of vampire bats before the glareOf the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,Strange night upon some Indian vale,’

It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age of faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the saints have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had heard the commandment, ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.’ I have re-read his Prometheus Unbound for the first time for many years, in the woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills, and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand, with Blake, that the holy spirit is ‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.

II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS

At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind, and write out this wisdom upon the sand in ‘signs’ that were ‘clear elemental shapes whose smallest change’ made ‘a subtler language within language’ and were ‘the key of truths, which once were dimly taught in old Crotona.’ His early romances and much throughout his poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any deep study. One finds in his poetry, besides innumerable images that have not the definiteness of symbols, many images that are certainly symbols, and as the years went by he began to use these with a more and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine that, when he wrote his earlier poems, he allowed the subconscious life to lay its hands so firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was little conscious of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what seemed the idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound symbols,1 whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for years. Nor I think has any one, who has known that experience with any constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before him, and grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and men’s thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood this, as is proved by what he says of the eternity of beautiful things and of the influence of the dead, but whether he understood that the great memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot tell. He had certainly experience of all but the most profound of the mystical states, of that union with created things which assuredly must precede the soul’s union with the uncreated spirit. He says in his fragment of an essay upon life, mistaking a unique experience for the common experience of all: ‘Let us recollect our sensations as children … we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being,’ and he must have expected to receive thoughts and images from beyond his own mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its preoccupation with particular time and place, for he believed inspiration a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.