Shelley (Part 4)

(Pictured: Keats/Adonais.) We herewith present the fourth and concluding post of 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.

The fact is that if you press the meaning from all but the very few unreasoning worshippers of Shelley, you will find that they regard his long poems, organically conceived, as sublime failures, and that they really cherish him for the strains of lyric ecstasy caught up in the amorphous mass. That is fair criticism, and a man may pass over much in the waiting expectation for those scattered strains of music,

Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones
Which pierce the sense and live within the soul.

Of Shelley, taken merely as the author of a group of lyrics, brief in compass, but exquisite in melody and feeling, quite another account might be given than this I am writing. Here, whether in independent songs or in short strains that can be detached from their context without any mark of incompleteness, here, when he expresses a purely personal joy or sorrow, love or regret, his genius suffers no let or thwarting; it is even strengthened by that romantic acceptance of the emotions. That is the Shelley of the young man’s and the maiden’s passionate admiration:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead.
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when Thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

But it is necessary to add that even this wonderful lyric vein is subject at times to a kind of defeat from excess of the very power that produced it. Adonais is commonly reckoned, and no doubt is, the most perfect of his longer lyrics; yet the best stanzas of that poem, those that contain lines which have sung themselves into the memory of the world, are almost always marred by lapses into the vague and inane. There is no greater stanza in the elegy than the forty-fifth:

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

The literary inspiration of those lines (and in pointing to this I mean no disparagement of Shelley’s originality) is clearly born from a kind of mystical blending of Virgil’s

Heu, miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas,
Tu Marcellus eris—
[Alas, pitiable boy, if in some way thou shouldst break the unfair fates,
Thou wilt be Marcellus—]

and of Milton’s

So were I equalled with them in renown.

There are lines in Shelley’s stanza—the first and the eighth, particularly—which are in no wise diminished by this association with two of the most celebrated passages in literature; yet a comparison of the stanza as a whole with the full parts of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost shows quite as clearly the weakness of Shelley. It is inconceivable that Virgil or Milton should have held so loose a rein on his genius as to sink from “The inheritors of unfulfilled renown” to the vapid “Far in the Unapparent,” or should have dropped immediately from the magnificent directness of Shelley’s eighth verse (which rings like Lucan himself when most Roman) to the vague allegory of oblivion shrinking reproved.

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to a considerable number of Shelley’s most admired lyrics—to show, for instance, that the throbbing and tumultuous music of the great Ode to the West Wind straggles here and there to unmelodious conclusions, chiefly because the poet—like all his English compeers—disdained the inherent laws of the terza rima as these are exemplified in the works of Dante and the lesser Italian masters of the measure. There is no other metre in which it is so imperative to mould the thought to the pauses of the rhythm, under penalty of letting the rhymes hang as an impertinence instead of a support; but this lesson none of the English poets learned, and least of all was Shelley capable of such wise docility.

Nevertheless, granted that Adonais may occasionally descend into bathos, if it contains also images of pure and radiant beauty, why not give ourselves to these, and pass the errors by? Doubtless that is the part of wisdom, so far as it is feasible; but here again we are blocked by certain insurmountable exclusions of taste. There is a pleasure, the highest critical joy, in the perfection and harmonious unity of such work as Milton’s Lycidas, and he who has trained his mind to respond to that joy has by the very process rendered himself sensitive to false and obtrusive notes. He simply cannot read the stanza quoted from Adonais without suffering from the spirit of perversity at work within it. It is true, no doubt, that there are blemishes—occasional awkwardnesses of execution, failures of the imagination, even lapses of taste of a kind—which may not affect essentially our attitude toward an extensive work of art; but they are not the faults which throw a suspicion of obliquity or vanity upon the very sources of the artist’s inspiration.

These, I say, are the inevitable exclusions of taste. If a man avers that the thorough appreciation of Lycidas does not exclude for him an unmarred pleasure in Adonais, I can only suspect that he has never felt the full force of the former. This is by no means to say that the enjoyment of Milton deadens a man to all lower forms of literature. The commonplace or the small may in its own sphere be commendable and may afford a true relish to the finest palate; and, indeed, one of the functions of criticism is to set forth and so far as possible rescue from oblivion the inexhaustible entertainment of the lesser writers. But the humble is another thing than the false, the false is noxious just in proportion to the elevation of the genius to which it adheres. There is nothing mutually exclusive in the complete enjoyment of both Milton and Crabbe; it is at least questionable whether the same man can heartily admire both Milton and Shelley.

[Concluded.]