Shelley (Part 2)

(Pictured: Elizabeth Hitchener) We herewith present the second of the three 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.

To Shelley’s old detractor of Blackwood’s (when religion was a fairly serious concern) his philosophy was “pestiferous blasphemy”; his modern academic admirer merely disregards it as “hopelessly superficial.” To me, I confess, it is chiefly unliterary, destructive, that is to say, of that self-knowledge out of which the great creations and the magnificent joys of literature grow. The importance of Shelley’s Letters also is largely derived from their confirmation of this critical attitude by their betrayal of the same force at work in his conduct. It is not that he was by nature base or sensual or cruel; on the contrary, his life was ennobled by many acts of instinctive generosity, and his feelings were normally fine. Nevertheless, there was some flaw at his heart, some weakness of overweening self-trust, which exposed him to the most insidious poison of the age, and in the final test left him almost inhuman. “In all Shelley did,” wrote his wife after his death, “he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience.” The words have been used by Matthew Arnold as a text; they would have been still truer to character if to “at the time” Mrs. Shelley had added “and always.” Opinions may differ in regard to Shelley’s culpability toward his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, although no chivalrous mind, I think, can read his letters at the time of his elopement with her and, later, of his desertion of her for another woman, without feeling a touch of resentment at his self-absorption and his complete assumption of righteousness. And resentment deepens into detestation at his letters written when the abandoned woman, a pitiable thing no matter what her fault, drowned herself in the Serpentine. On the day he heard the news, or possibly the day after, he wrote to Harriet’s supplanter:

“Everything tends to prove, however, that beyond the shock of so hideous a catastrophe having fallen on a human being once so nearly connected with me, there would, in any case, have been little to regret. Hookham, Longdill, every one does me full justice; bears testimony to the upright spirit and liberality of my conduct to her. There is but one voice in condemnation of the detestable Westbrooks. If they should dare to bring it before Chancery [they did dare, and nothing derogatory to them transpired]. a scene of such fearful horror would be unfolded as would cover them with scorn and shame.”

Little to regret, save the shock to his nerves of so unpleasant an event. Mr. Clutton-Brock observes that Shelley did not do himself “full justice in this letter.” He did not, for he was by birth neither maniac nor brute; but he wrote on that day a lurid comment on the effect upon individual character of revolutionary Pharisaism; nor did his sentiments change with time, for in a letter to Southey four years later he wrote of the event in the same vein. The malignant reviewer of Blackwood’s called those principles “pestiferous”; Miss Scudder rebukes the reviewer and styles them “superficial,” Perhaps it is more critical to reflect merely that, as Mrs. Shelley said, the poet’s verse was inspired by the passions of his private life, and that the horrors threatened in Prometheus against the “foul tyrant both of Gods and Human-kind” sprang from precisely the same source as the imprecations upon the Westbrooks. “I have confidence in my moral sense alone,” said Shelley once in a letter to Leigh Hunt; “but that is a kind of originality.”

With that moral self-complaisance went another trait, if indeed it was not merely a different aspect of the same influence. By Shelley each emotion as it arose in his breast was accepted as justified in itself, without pausing to consider its cause or consequence. The full meaning of this emotionalism can be grasped only by a long view into the past. To the great writers of the seventeenth century human nature was a thing to distrust as containing tendencies of ruinous evil. “Men naturally know no Good,” said Jeremy Taylor, voicing the constant opinion of his age, “but to please a wild, indetermined, infinite Appetite.” But along with this fear of undisciplined nature, went a belief in the efficacy and virtue of certain supernatural emotions, in an infinite appetite that was not wild and indetermined—in enthusiasm.

The following age—and this was the whole force of Deism, one of the most important movements in history—brought about a complete reversal of this position. The very titles of the leading publications show the change: Dr. Clarke writes on The Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion; Wollaston elaborates his Religion of Nature Delineated; Butler preaches Upon the Natural Supremacy of Conscience, etc., etc. But this rehabilitation of nature, toward which the eighteenth century, and particularly England of that age, laboured so assiduously, was based, in the earlier years, on a constant distinction: nature was used almost without deviation as a synonym of reason; and strong emotion, or enthusiasm, was condemned as contrary to nature and perilous. Pages might be filled with the utterances of deists and even of the opponents of Deism on this head, but nothing, perhaps, can be found more characteristic and inclusive than the simple words of the Rev. Nicholas Carter to his daughter Elizabeth, the learned translator of Epictetus: “You seem extremely fond of her [Mrs. Rowe’s] writings. I have seen some that have in them a tincture of enthusiasm. ’T is proper to caution you not to read them with too much pleasure. Enthusiasm grows upon us insensibly.” I doubt if more of the eighteenth century was ever summed up in a few unpretentious sentences. In that distrust of free emotion lay the strength of the time, the power that made its belief in nature ancillary to its belief in order and subordination (cf. Butler’s Sermons and Dr. Johnson’s conversation passim on subordination); here, too, lay the cause of its limitation, for this dread of enthusiasm cut off the great inspirations of the preceding age as well as the disturbing passions. The fascination of the century for the student is to watch the rise of this hated spirit of enthusiasm through all obstacles to the surface. The word was long repudiated even by those who were bringing back its force; so Wesley cries out: “The reproach of Christ I am willing to bear; but not the reproach of enthusiasm.” Who can measure all that has passed in the inner life of man between the timidity of Dr. Carter and the bold utterance of Shelley in the preface to The Revolt of Islam: “It is the business of the poet to communicate to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm,” etc.? There is expressed the elevation and the power of the romantic renaissance; the peril of the movement lies in the fact that with its return to seventeenth-century enthusiasm it retained the eighteenth-century acceptance of nature, but now without restriction, thus leaving to itself no inner check.

All the revolutionary poets of England were affected by the same emotional philosophy, however their practice was modified by other principles, Wordsworth proclaimed it in his worship of the “impulse from the vernal wood,” but with an admixture of Puritanic asceticism which made of it a kind of passive discipline. Byron possessed with it a saving self-reproach and cynicism. In Keats it was qualified by an aesthetic humility which rendered him in the end curiously docile to tradition. Few things are more significant in the romantic poetry of England than the change in Keats’s versification from the license of his rhymed couplets in Endymion to the almost Drydenian regularity of Lamia. Whether or not that change will appear altogether a profit, it must be admitted that no such organic development can be discovered in Shelley; nor in his correspondence will you find anything comparable to the long letter of Keats to Reynolds (3 May, 1818) in which he questions the very principles of his poetic theory. “The thought of such discipline,” wrote Keats himself to Shelley, “must fall like cold chains upon you.” Shelley, indeed, grew in metrical skill and power of expression, but from first to last his procedure was essentially unaltered: his Prometheus is only Queen Mab writ large; his Epipsychidion re-echoes in firmer strain the vagaries of Alastor, Always his philosophy, whether magnified into a shadowy mythology or expressed in human drama, whether it be the love or hate of Prometheus or his own relation to mankind, is the voice of enthusiasm, of unreasoned emotion.

It would not be profitable to follow out all the workings of that emotionalism, but one aspect of it shows so curious a link between the man and the poet as to deserve emphasis. Critics have commented on Shelley’s extraordinary facility of self-deception in regard to his friends, who so often were angels of light when first they appeared to him under the radiance of his own imagination, and demons of malevolence when they came to be known as real men and women having wills at variance with his. This form of delusion was not due merely to the inexperience of youth, for at the end of his life in Italy he was subject to the same revulsion, if not so violently expressed, toward such friends as the Gisbornes. But the classic example (classic as being so perfect an expression of a trait common to all the Rousselian tribe) is in the letters to Miss Hitchener. These have been for some time known in manuscript, and have forced even the most ardent romanticists to admit a certain weakness in their hero. A few years ago they were printed in a separate edition, but the full weight of their testimony is best understood by reading them as they are now incorporated by Mr. Ingpen in the general correspondence.

Elizabeth Hitchener was a young school-mistress with whom Shelley became acquainted shortly before his marriage to Harriet Westbrook. Her notions were liberal and her fancy ardent; “an esprit fort,” Medwin called her; “ceruleanly blue,” who “fancied herself a poet.” After his marriage Shelley began to send her letters in the most rhapsodical vein of adulation. She is the sister of his soul: “I look up to you,” he exclaims, “as a mighty mind. . . . I anticipate the era of reform with the more eagerness as I picture to myself you the barrier between violence and renovation”; with his brain and his heart she constitutes “the Trinity of his Essence; she must leave all and come to live with him and Harriet—“nothing shall prevent our eternal union in the summer”; and to defer to the opinions of those who foresee scandal in such a union is to sacrifice “to the world ! to the swinish multitude, to the indiscriminating million, to such as burnt the House of Priestley, such as murdered Fitzgerald,” etc. Well, this female paragon closed her school, and joined the young married couple in July of 1812; in November of the same year she had left them, and Shelley is soon writing to his friend Hogg of “the Brown Demon, as we call our late tormentor and school-mistress. . . . She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman.” To another friend he describes her as “a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undeviating revenge.”

Do not these fragments of correspondence offer a curious comment on the statement of Mr. Clutton-Brock that most of the characters of the Prometheus are “so abstract that we do not even know who they are”; and again that The Cenci, which deals with human beings, is even “far more unreal” than the Prometheus, which is professedly allegorical? As Shelley judged his friends from the immediate emotions they aroused in him, or from some fanciful association with the emotion dominant in his mind, without a care for the various and real springs of action in himself or them, so he created his poetical characters.

[To be continued.]