Shelley (Part 1)

(Pictured: Percy Bysshe Shelley) Having presented the entirety of Irving Babbit’s Rousseau and Romanticism over the course of nearly three years, I believe that selections from the critical works of P. E. More, Babbitt’s close friend and collaborator, would be of interest to the readers of Tradition Restored. 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. “Shelley” appears in the seventh volume of The Shelburne Essays.

In confessing that he wrote his life of Shelley (1) as a middle-aged man for others of his class, Mr. Clutton-Brock forgot to reckon with the wit of his youthful reviewers; and yet, if by middle-age he means the experience of life, what right, after all, has Shelley or any other darling of the Muses to be exempt from that censure? The biographer’s real fault is rather an amazing ingenuousness in trying to ride at once the horses of both youth and maturity. On one page he analyses Prometheus Unbound as a drama of a single event, and that causeless, acted by characters who drift about aimlessly and know not who they are or what relation they bear to one another: that is the critical attitude of mature common-sense. It is the audacious enthusiasm of youth when in a later passage he insists that the author of this drama proves himself an “intellectual poet.” The same double-dealing appears when in one place he asserts that Shelley’s ideas and emotions underwent little change; and then, a few pages after, with a covert allusion to Matthew Arnold, declares that the poet “was not a vapid angel singing silly hymns; but a man who only learnt to live well and write well by sharp experience.” Now, Shelley is “a being prophetic of some higher state to which mankind shall attain, and unfit for this life only because he was fit for a better”; elsewhere, his Paradise is pronounced “a mere impossibility, an incongruous mixture of present pleasure of the flesh with imagined delights of the spirit.”

I do not quote these acrobatic feats of criticism because I wish to ridicule Mr. Clutton-Brock’s book, which is as a whole a fairly illuminating piece of work; but because they are so characteristic of our modern way of dealing with facts and tendencies. Look, for instance, into Miss Vida Scudder’s school edition of the Prometheus, with its long Introduction—not a very wise production, perhaps, but significant as a woman’s conception of a peculiarly feminine genius and as a specimen of what commonly, no doubt, passes in courses of literature. You will there find that the drama “has a noble and organic unity,” although, while the second act is the most wonderful thing “in the whole cycle of English song, the third “drops into bathos” and is “weak, sentimental, empty.” The poem as a whole is “a work of resplendent insight,” yet its interpretation of evil—that is, the very heart of its theme—is “hopelessly superficial,” and man is depicted in it as “a creature of no personality, scarcely higher, except for his aesthetic instincts, than an amiable brute.”

After all, these knights and ladies of the romantic pen seem to discover in Shelley traits pretty much like those which they so magnificently disdain Matthew Arnold for dilating
upon. Nor is Arnold’s criticism the only field of their inconsistent attack. Mr. Clutton-Brock
cites for reprobation a long passage from Hazlitt’s Table Talk; yet most of what the old bludgeoner says can, with some change of emphasis, be matched in the modern biographer’s own pages. In like manner Miss Scudder puts the ancient reviewers in the stocks to show by comparison how wise we since have grown. She quotes from Blackwood’s of September, 1820, and from the Quarterly Review of October, 1821 :

“In short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this poem [Prometheus], which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties of the highest order.” (Blackwood’s.)

“In Mr. Shelley’s poetry, all is brilliance, vacuity, and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words which sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid: fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by, and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory. The mind, fatigued and perplexed, is mortified by the consciousness that its labour has not been rewarded by the acquisition of a single distinct conception.” (Quarterly.)

Really, with the best will in the world, I cannot see that Miss Scudder differs so much from the reviled reviewer of Blackwood’s, except that she seems to feel no indignation against an author whose sense of evil is “hopelessly superficial.” Nor does Mr. Clutton-Brock stand very far from the Quarterly when he says that “in a story there should be some relation of cause and effect, otherwise it will not hold together; in The Revolt of Islam there is none”; and admits that “in its very absurdity it shows the character of Shelley’s mind.” The chief difference is that Mr. Clutton-Brock apparently thinks it quite a small matter if a long and professedly philosophical poem leaves the reader perplexed and without any distinct conception of what it is all about.

Now these names represent no isolated paradox of taste, but the almost constant current of criticism from Shelley’s own day to this. Their dilemma is due, I think, to a fact which his contemporary critics held, if anything, too belligerently in view, and which his modern worshippers commonly allow and then deliberately forget—that his was a genius fine and impressionable, meant by nature for the perception and utterance of rare truths, but marred in its very essence by the obliquity of Time. His work is a confirmation in a way of his master Godwin’s theory—though contrary in direction to his master’s wish—that education is a power to shape the destinies of man. The value of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s biography lies in the clearness and frankness with which he unravels Shelley’s motives and ideas; and this value is enhanced, perhaps, by the biographer’s sympathy, paradoxical indeed, but so profound as to make him in the end deny utterly the logic of his premises. But we need not go to the commentators on Shelley’s life to discover the influences that worked upon him. Sufficient testimony may be found in his own Letters, which have just been brought together and excellently edited by Roger Ingpen. (2) The new material here offered is slight, but the collection has the merit of setting the recently discovered letters to Elizabeth Kitchener—and others less important—in their proper place in the full correspondence. I do not see how any open mind can go through these letters without feeling that Shelley was powerfully affected by the prevailing forces of the age (which is commonly conceded), and that his character and poetry suffered a certain perversion from this influence (which is often conceded and denied in the same breath).

Those directing forces were the twin spirits—if they were not one power in dual manifestation—of revolution and romanticism. The revolutionary spirit, whether for weal or for ill, had breathed upon all the finer minds of the age, and indeed not upon the minds of that age alone. But the impulse that came to Shelley was not merely revolt against tyranny, or even the wanton itch for change—neoterism, as the ancients called it. That kind of political excitement may or may not have a perverting effect upon a poet. Milton lived in such a time of upheaval; and if the excess and bad taste that here and there mar his later works are attributable to the harsh pride of rebellion, it left his genius sound at heart, perhaps even strengthened the wings of his fierce aspiration. But with Shelley revolution meant the fluttering of an opaque and dizzying flag between the poet’s inner eye and the truth of human nature. He was peculiarly the child of his age, betrayed by his own feminine fineness of nature, and lacking that toughness of fibre, or residue of resistant prose, which made Byron and Wordsworth followers but not altogether the victims of the ever-despotic Hour. With a child-like credulity almost inconceivable he accepted the current doctrine that mankind is naturally and inherently virtuous, needing only the deliverance from some outwardly applied oppression to spring back to its essential perfection. With Rousseau the perverting force had been property. With Shelley it was more commonly personified as Jehovah or Jove,

“Foul tyrant both of Gods and Human-kind.”

Shelley was a pretty wide reader of Greek, and it may be that in writing his drama on this creed he had in mind not only the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, but for a remote analogy to his personification of evil went back to Homer’s blind Ate, which Zeus cast upon the minds of those who were doomed to sin. And in so far as he did this he would only have voiced a universal and unreasoning sentiment of the human heart; for Achilles was but the type of us all, when in the stress of bewilderment he cried out against the government of the world:

“It is thou, father Zeus, that givest to men the great passions of evil” (μεγαλας ατας).

But Zeus was to Homer at least a living being, whereas Shelley’s Jehovah is merely a symbol of a power in human nature tremendously energetic, yet, if you seek it, nowhere to be found. And Shelley, when he made of man’s bewildered outcry a rigid philosophy and principle of action, might have remembered also the words of Zeus (to which Pope has given so amusing an anti-Calvinistic twang):

“Perverse mankind! whose wills, created free,
Change all their woes on absolute decree;
All to the dooming gods their guilt translate,
And follies are miscall’d the crimes of fate.”

(1) Shelley: The Man and the Poet. By A. Clutton-Brock. New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909.

(2) The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Collected and edited by Roger Ingpen. Two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909.