It is seldom that the work of a scholiast is so soon wanted as in Shelley’s case it
has been. The first collected edition of his works had many gaps and errors patent
and palpable to any serious reader. His text is already matter for debate and comment,
as though he were a classic newly unearthed. Certain passages begin to be famous as
crucial subjects for emendation; and the master-singer of our modem poets shares with
his own masters and models the least enviable proof of fame that given by corrupt
readings and diverse commentaries. Awaiting the appearance, now long looked for, of
a surer and carefuller text, I have but a word to say in passing, a hand to lend in
this humble service of verbal emendation. One poet only of late times, and that but
once, has suffered more than Shelley from the negligence and dullness of those to
whose hands the trust of his text was committed. The last relics of Landor came before us distorted and deformed in every page by this shameful neglect; and
the value is thus impaired of some among the most precious and wonderful examples
extant of great genius untouched by great age, full of the grace, the strength, the
clear light and harmony of noon unclouded by the night at hand.
I take at random a few of the disputed or disputable passages in the text of Shelley,
keeping before me the comments (issued in Notes and Queries and elsewhere) of Mr. Gamett, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Rossetti, and others. In March and April 1868, the critic last named put forth a series of
short papers on proposed or required emendations of passages evidently or apparently
defective or corrupt The first is that crucial verse in the famous “Stanzas written
in dejection near Naples—
“The breath of the moist air is light.”
Another reading is “earth” for “air;” which at first sight may seem better, though
the “unexpanded buds” in the next line might be called things of air as well as of
earth, without more of literal laxity or inaccuracy than Shelley allows himself elsewhere.
As to the question whether “light” (adjective) be legitimate as a rhyme to “light”
(substantive), it may be at once dismissed. The license, if license it be, of perfection
in the echo of a rhyme is forbidden only, and wrongly, by English critics. The emendation
“slight” for “light” is absurd.
In the eighteenth stanza of the first part of the “Sensitive Plant” there is a line impossible to reduce to rule, but not obscure in its bearing. The
plant, which could not prove by produce of any blossom the love it felt, received
more of the light and odour mutually shed upon each other by its neighbour flowers
than did any one among these, and thus, though powerless to show it, yet
“Loved more than ever,Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver:”
in other words, felt more love than the flower which gave it gifts of light and odour
could feel, having nothing to give back, as the others had, in return; all the more
thankful and loving for the very barrenness and impotence of requital which made the
gift a charity instead of an exchange. This license of implication, this inaccuracy
of structure, which would include or involve a noun in its, cognate verb (the words
“loved more” being used as exactly equivalent to the words “felt more love”), it certainly
not imitable by others, even if defensible in Shelley; but the change proposed in
punctuation and construction makes the passage dissonant and tortuous, throws the
sense out of keeping and the sound out of tune.
In the eighth stanza of the third part the following line seems to me right as it
stands—
“Leaf after leaf, day by day —”
if the weight and fall of the sound be properly given. Mr. Rossetti would slip in
the word “and;” were it there, I should rather wish to excise it.
In the twenty-second stanza of the “Adonais” I may remark that in Shelley’s own Pisan edition the reading of the fourth line runs as it should, thusi—
“A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs.”
I do not understand wherein can be the objection to the “magic mantles” of the thirteenth
stanza. It is the best word, the word most wanted to convey, by one such light and
great touch as only a great workman can give, the real office and rank
of the divine “shepherds,” to distinguish Apollo from the run of Admetus’s herdsmen. The reading “tragic” would be by comparison insignificant, even were
there any ground of proof or likelihood to sustain it. In the fourth stanza of this
poem Shelley calls Milton “the third among the sons of light” It has been asked who were the two first: it
has been objected that there were at least three—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. I should be slow to doubt that Shelley had in view the first and the last names
only. To him Dante could scarcely have seemed a type of spiritual illumination, a son of light elect
above other poets; of this we might be sure without the evidence we have. No man,
not even Landor, has laid upon the shrine of Dante a thankoffering of more delicate and passionate praise, has set a deeper brand of
abhorrence upon the religion which stained his genius. Compare the twenty-second of
Shelley’s collected letters with the “Pentameron” of Landor—who has surely said enough, and said it with all the matchless force and
charm of his most pure and perfect eloquence, in honour of Dante, to weigh against
the bitterness of his blame. Had I the right or the strength to defend the name of
one great man from the charge of another, to vindicate with all reverence the fame
of Landor even against the verdict of Mazzini, I would appeal to all fellow-students whether Landor has indeed spoken as one “infirm
in mind” or tainted with injustice—as one slow of speech or dull of sense to appreciate
the divine qualities of the founder of all modern poetry. He has exalted his name
above wellnigh every name on record, in the very work which taxes him with the infection
of a ferocity
caught from contact with the plague-sores of religion. It is now hoped and suggested
that a spirit and a sense wholly unlike their outer habit may underlie the written
words of Dante and of Milton.
Note
Of the poet of the English commonwealth Shelley has elsewhere said, “The sacred Milton
was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and
religion;” a passage which may serve as comment on this of the “Adonais.” On the other hand, Shelley in the “Defence of Poetry” does certainly place Dante, “the second epic poet,” between Homer and Milton; and so far he would seem to be referred to here also as second “among the sons of
light.” But where then is Shakespeare who surely had the most “light” in him of all?
That may be; but the outer habit remains, the most hateful creed in all history;
uglier than the faith of Moloch or of Kali, by the hideous mansuetude, the devilish loving- kindness of its elections and damnations.
Herein perhaps only do these two great poets fell below the greater, below Homer and Æschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare; the very skirts of whose thought, the very hems of whose garments, are clean from
the pollution of this pestilence. Their words as well as their meanings, their sound
not less than their sense, we can accept as wise and sweet, fruitful and fresh to
all time; but the others have assumed the accent with the raiment of Dominic and Calvin—mighty men too, it may be, after their kind, but surely rather sons of fire than
sons of light At the same time it may be plausibly if not reasonably allied that Shelley
and Landor were both in some measure disqualified by their exquisite Hellenism of spirit to
relish duly the tone and savour of Dante’s imagination.
There are at least two passages in the “Ode to Liberty” where either the meaning or the reading is dubious and debateable. In the thirteenth
stanza, having described, under the splendid symbol of a summons sent from Vesuvius to Etna across the volcanic islets of Stromboli (the “Æolian isles” of old), how Spain calls England, by example of revolution, to rivalry of resurrection (in 1820, be it observed),
the poet bids the two nations, “twins of a single destiny,” appeal to the years to
come. So far all is plain sailing. Then we run upon what seems a sudden shoal or hidden
reef. What does this mean?
“Impress us from a seal.All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.”
The construction is at once loose and intricate; the sentence indeed limps on both
feet; but I am not sure that here is not rather oversight than corruption. The sense
at starting is clearly—“Impress us with all ye have thought or done, which time cannot dare conceal;” or, “Let all ye have thought and done impress us,” and
so forth. The construction runs wild and falls to pieces; we found and we must leave
it patchwork; for no violence of alteration, were such permissible, could force it
into coherence. When Shelley’s grammar slips or trips, as it seems to do at times,
the fault is a fault of hasty laxity, not of ignorance, of error, of defective sense
or taste such as Byron’s; venial at worst, not mortal
We start our next question in the fifteenth stanza. Whose or what is “the impious
name” so long and so closely veiled under the discreet and suggestive decency of asterisks?
It was at once assumed and alleged to be the name of which Shelley had already said,
through the lips of Prometheus, that “it had become a curse:” the name of Christ.
Note
When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant that in an extant manuscript
of this poem Shelley had himself filled up the gap with the word “king;” but this
certainly did not appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the
original reading, aware as I was of the excisions and alterations to which Shelley
was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to submit his yet unpublished or
half-published poems. I am now, however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended
was between the “king” of this stanza and the “priest” of the next; though I still
think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously impaired if we
are to assume that the “foul gordian word” is simply the title of king, and not (as
so much of the context would appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which
might at the time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And this,
with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we know that the creed of
historical Christianity did always appear to Shelley. In this adoration of the personal
Jesus, combined as it was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps
superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with Blake the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so much in common.
I for one could hardly bring myself to doubt that the reviewer of the moment had
read aright. No other word indeed will give so adequate a sense, fit in so fairly
with the context. It should surely be a creed, a form of faith, upon which the writer
here sets his foot. What otherwise shall we take to be “the snaky knot of this foul
gordian word”—a word which, “weak itself as stubble,” serves yet the turn of tyrants
to bind together the rods and axes of their rule? If this does not mean a faith of
some kind, and a living faith to this day, then it would seem at first sight that
words have no meaning—that the whole divine fabric of that intense and majestic stanza
crumbles into sparkling dust, dissolves into sonorous jargon. Any such vaguer substitute
as “priest” or “king” weakens not one verse only, but makes the rest comparatively
feeble and pointless,
even if it can be said to leave them any meaning at all; and why any such word should
be struck out upon revision of the text by any fool or coward who might so dare, none
surely can guess; for such words recur at every turn as terms of reproach. Then comes
the question whether Shelley in 1820 would have used so bitter and violent a phrase
to express his horror and hatred of the evil wrought in the world by the working of
the Christian religion. It may help us to decide if we take into account with how
terrible and memorable a name he had already branded it in the eighth stanza of this
very poem. That he did to the last regard it as by all historical evidence the invariable
accomplice of tyranny—as at once the constant shield and the ready spear of force
and of fraud—his latest letters show as dearly as that he did no injustice to “the
sublime human character” of its founder. The word “Christ,” if received as the true reading, would stand merely as equivalent to the word “Christianity;”
the blow aimed at the creed would imply nothing of insult or outrage to the person.
Next year indeed Shelley wrote that famous chorus in the “Hellas” which hails the rising of “the folding star of Bethlehem,” as with angelic salutation, in sweeter and more splendid words than ever fell from
any Christian lyrist But when that chorus was written Shelley had not changed or softened
his views of history and theology. His defence of Grecian cross against Turkish crescent
did not imply that he took for a symbol of liberty the ensign of the Christian faith,
the banner of Constantine and of Torquemada, under which had fought and conquered such recruits, and with such arms, as the
“paramour”
Note
“L’amoroso drudoDelia fede cristiana.”
Paradiso, xii. 55.
of Dante’s Church, who begot on the body of that bride no less hopeful and helpful an offspring
than the Holy Inquisition. Such workings of the creed, such developments of the faith,
were before Shelley’s eyes when he wrote; he had also about him the reek of as foul
an incense going up from the priests of that day to their Ferdinand or their George as those of ours have ever sent up to Bonaparte or to Bourbon of their own, mixing with the smell of battlesmoke and blood the more fetid fumes
of prayer and praise; and wide as is the gap between his first and his last manner,
great as is the leap from “Queen Mab” to “Hellas” the passage of five years had not transformed or worn out the “philanthropist, democrat,
and atheist” of 1816. For thus he signed himself in the Swiss album, not merely as
ἄθεος; and the cause or provocation is clear enough; for on the same leaf there appears
just above his signature an entry by some one who saw fit here to give vent to an
outbreak of overflowing foolery, flagrant and fervid with the godly grease and rancid
religion of a conventicle; some folly about the Alps, God, glory, beneficence, witness of nature to this or that divine thing or person,
and such-like matter. A little below is the name of Shelley, with this verse attached:—
“εἰμὶ φιλάνθρωπος δημωκράτικός τ’ ἄθεός τε.”
I copy the spelling with all due regret and horror, but not without rejoicing on his
account that Shelley was clear of Eton when he committed this verse, and had now for critic or commentator a Gifford only
in place of a Keate.
Note
A reference to the Eton Lists has shown me the truth of what I had long suspected, that the school-days of
Shelley must have ended before the beginning of Dr. Keate’s reign as Head Master. In effect, I find that Shelley, then a fifth form boy, left
in 1808, and that the Head Mastership of Dr. Keate began in 1809. The jocularities,
therefore, of Mr. Hogg as to the mutual relations of Shelley and the “Old Boy” prove to be like most of his other jests—as baseless as they are pointless.
The remarks on this entry added by Christian pilgrims who came after are, in the
phrase of the archetypal Pecksniff, “very soothing.” One of these, I think, observes, with a pleasant pugency of originality,
that the fool hath said in his heart—we have seen what.
Most of the emendations or solutions offered by Mr. Rossetti of corrupt or obscure passages in the “Revolt of Islam” seem to me probable and sound; but in this verse—
“Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore,Which might not be withstood”—
I take the verb to be used in the absolute not the active sense—“bore onward or forward;”
this use of the word here is a somewhat ungraceful sign of haste, but makes dear a
passage otherwise impracticably dense and chaotic. Before passing from this poem,
I have to express a hope that a final edition of Shelley’s works will some day, rather
sooner than later, restore to it the proper title and the genuine text. Every change
made in it was forced upon the author by pressure from without; and every change is
for the worse. Has no reader ever asked himself what can be the meaning of the second
title? What is the revolt of Islam? Islam is not put forward as the sole creed of
the tyrants and slaves who play their parts here with such frank ferocity; Persian
and Indian, Christian and Mahometan mythologies are massed together for attack. And
certainly Islam is not, as the rules of language would imply, the creed of the insurgents.
Note
It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent population has been delivered
by the preaching of Laon and Cythna was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not the doctrine itself,
but the mass of men or nations reared in the belief or tradition of that doctrine.
This use may doubtless be permissible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later
title of the poem; but the original title as well as the original text still seems
to me preferable.
Could the phrase “revolt of the Christians” be taken to signify a revolt against
the Christians? There is at least meaning in the first title—“Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City.” Readers may prefer a text which makes hero and heroine strangers in blood, but
the feet remains that Shelley saw fit to make them brother and sister, and to defend
their union as essentially innocent even if socially condemnable. The letters printed
in the “Shelley Memorials” show with what staunch resolution he clung to this point, when beaten upon by remonstrance
from all sides. This most singular of his social and ethical heresies was indeed never
quite thrown over. “Incest,” he wrote in 1819 to Mrs. Gisborne, with reference to Calderon’s tragic treatment of the story of Anmon and Tamar, “is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the
excess of love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another,
which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism; or it may be that cynical
rage which, confounding the good and bad in existing opinions, breaks through them
for the purpose
of rioting in selfishness and antipathy; “the one he had painted in” Laon and Cythna, “the other in the “Cenci.” And in that absurd abortion of a book which would discredit any man’s boyhood,
not to speak of Shelleys—“St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian”—the unfledged and half-hatched bird of paradise had uttered a weak note to the same
tune. The only thing our memory carries away after that rubbish has been handled and
sifted is the proof given in one passage that Shelley felt thus early some attraction
to this subject; which is indeed suggestive and fruitful enough of possible tragic
effect. It is noticeable that he has never cited or referred to the magnificent masterpiece
of Ford’s genius. Those who please may deplore or may applaud this proclivity; but the student
must at any rate accept and take account of it, for the influence permeates much of
Shelley’s verse with a thin but clear undercurrent of feeling and allusion. The rarity
of the cancelled edition of “Laon and Cythna” has been exaggerated by fraudulent or ignorant assertions. Besides my own copy,
I have known of others enough at least to refute the fiction that there are but three
in the world. I give but one proof among many of the injury done to the poem by minor
changes of reading. In the thirtieth stanza of the twelfth canto we now read,
“Therefore ye shall beholdHow those who love, yet fear not, dare to die;”
where the languid tautology of this verse impairs the force of a noble passage; the
genuine reading is this:
“Therefore ye shall beholdHow Atheists and Republicans can die.”
Note
This reading among others has been restored by Mr. Rossetti in the only critical edition of Shelley which has yet been given to the world; and
the gain in every such instance is so manifest that we are more than ever impelled
to demand a full and final restoration of the complete and uncorrupted text as it
came from the hands of the author.
Such throughout was the process by which the more outspoken verses of a poem outspoken
enough throughout were weakened and disfigured. Remembering by what forcible extortion
of assent a reluctant admission of these changes was wrung from the poet, we must
hope now to have back his own fresher and clearer words in their first fullness and
freedom.
The passage cited from “Alastor” is, I believe corrupt, but I cannot accept the critic’s proposed change of punctuation.
Here are the words disputed:—
“On every side now roseRocks which in unimaginable formsLifted their black and barren pinnaclesIn the light of evening, and its precipiceObscuring the ravine disclosed above’Mid toppling stones, black gulfs, and yawning streams,” &c.
Mr. Rossetti in evident desperation would rearrange the last lines thus:—
“i.e.” (he adds), “the rocks, obscuring the precipice (the precipitous descent) of the
ravine, disclosed said ravine overhead.”
This I must say is intolerable, and impossible. If the words could be wrenched and
racked into such a meaning, we should have here from one of the mightiest masters
of language the most monstrous
example on record of verbal deformity, of distorted and convulsed inversion or perversion
of words. I suspect the word “its” to be wrong, and either a blind slip of the pen
or a printer’s error. If it is not, and we are to assume that there is any break in
the sentence, the parenthesis must surely extend thus far—“its precipice obscuring
the ravine”—i.e., the rocks opened or “disclosed” where the precipice above the ravine obscured it
But I take “disclosed” to be the participle; “its precipice darkened the ravine (which
was) disclosed above.” Then the sentence is left hanging loose and ragged, short by
a line at least, and never wound up to any end at all. Such a sentence we too certainly
find once at least in the “Prometheus Unbound” (II. 4):—
“Who made that sense which, when the winds of springIn rarest visitation, or the voice Of one beloved heard in youth alone,(A line wanting)Fills the faint eyes with falling tears?” &c.
It is waste of time to attempt any patching or furbishing of this passage by excision
or substitution. Perhaps the author never observed what a gap was left in sense and
grammar. As it is, we can only note the omission or oversight and pass on; unless
we should please or dare to slip in by way of complement some verse of our own devising;
which happily no one has done or is like to do.
The “Prometheus Unbound” has this among other and better things in common with its Æschylean models, that
we want now and then a scholiast for interpreter, having at times to read it as we
might read for instance the “Suppliants,” and lacking a critic to “cure the halt and maimed,” as Mr. Browning says of that glorious and hapless poem whose godlike grace and heroic beauty so many
readers have more or less passed over with half a recognition, for no fault but its
misfortune. I shall touch but on one or two points of dispute in the text as we find
it; and first on this (II. 4):—
“Till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men seeReflected in their race, behold, and perish.”
The simplest explanation here possible is, I believe, the right. Women with child
gazing on statues (say on the Venus of Melos) bring forth children like them—children whose features reflect the passion of the
gaze and perfection of the sculptured beauty; men, seeing, are consumed with love;
“perish” meaning simply “deperire;” compare Virgil’s well-worn version, “Ut vidi, ut perii.” I do not think there is any hint of contrast between transient flesh and immortal
marble.
In another passage Mr. Rossetti, with the touch of true and keen criticism, has given
us at least a reasonable reading in place of one barely explicable. As the text has
hitherto stood, Prometheus says to the Earth-Spirit (I. i),
“I only know that thou art moving nearAnd love. How cursed I him?”
This I always assumed to mean merely—“That thou art moving near, and dost love (me),”
finding elsewhere such laxities of remiss writing or printing as that of “love” for
“lovest;”
Note
Landor has noted one instance of this error. Having set a mark against Milton’s use of “empowered” for ““empoweredst,” “cast” for “castedst,” he adds, “I find
the same fault, where I am as much surprised to find it, in Shelley:
‘Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.’”
While at work on the text of Milton, he has given us a rule which all editors and commentators would be wise to lay to
heart in Shelley’s case: “It is safer and more reverential to correct the punctuation
of a great poet than his slightest word.” Mr. Palgrave’s proposal of “sea-girt” for “sun-girt city” (“Lines written among the Euganean Hills”) may look plausible, but the new epithet is feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city; it is interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled;
pierced through with water, but not ringed about Seen by noon from the Euganean heights,
clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid with the arms of the sun-god.
nor am I now sure that this was not meant, for the “scorn” of Earth and her sons for Prometheus, of which he has lately complained, is not even in his eyes real; he says only that
to refuse his request looks as though they scorned their saviour. But this new reading
shows keen critical power and a quickeyed ingenuity;
“And Jove—how cursed I him?”
though it may be objected that the sentence preceding comes to an abrupt and feeble
close with the close of the verse; and this I think is conclusive proof that the suggestion,
however ingenious, must be decisively rejected. No conjectural emendation of a great
poet’s text is admissible which corrects a loose or faulty phrase by the substitution
of one more accurate, but also more feeble and prosaic. When in the same act the Furies are described as
“Blackening the air of night with countless wings, And hollow underneath like death,”
the critic would take the word “hollow” as an epithet of the wings, “with wings countless
and hollow;” wrongly, as I think. These Furies of Shelley are “phantasms,” hollow and shadowy emanations of “the all-miscreative
brain:” quoedam simulacra modis pallentia miris.
The difficult passage at the end of the third act I can only explain by some such
paraphrase as this: “the thrones, altars, and prisons of the past were now like those
barbaric and monumental figures carved or engraved on obelisks, which survive the
decay of later structures raised by their conquerors, tombs and prisons built by kings
of a dynasty more recent than the race which had reared them; these they see mouldering round them, built since their date in honour of the religion
and the pride of past kings and priests, and are themselves now merely looked on as
wonders;” thus only, and awkwardly, can I make anything of the involved and longdrawn
sentence, unless with Mr. Rossetti we put a full period after the words “mouldering round,” and start afresh in this
fashion; “those monuments imaged (i.e.did image; but I take imaged to be the participle) a dark faith, to the satisfaction and pride of kings and priests
… and are now but an astonishment.” This again seems to me inadmissible: I fear the
passage must be left more or less in confusion, the parenthesis being so long between
the two main verbs which prop the sentence (“which look forth … and are now,” &c.);
but in fact these large and stately structures of massive and majestic verse do seem
too often to need more help of damps and girders, if the main stones and joists of
the fabric are to hold together.
At the close of that transcendant interlude of antiphonal music in the fourth act,
the Earth takes up and gives back the last notes of the Moon’s chant before resuming
a graver and deeper
strain—:
(“When the sunset sleepsUpon its snow.
The Earth.And the weak day weepsThat it should be so.”)
Mr. Rossetti would add these two last short lines to the song of the Moon, and make
the Earth’s part begin at the words “O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight,” &c.:
to me there has always seemed to be a sweet and subtle miracle of music in the text
as it stands; but how much of this effect may be the mere impression of habit and
fancy, the mere fruit of the fondness of years for these verses as I have always known
them, I cannot of course judge; though of course, too, I incline to take the verdict
of my own delight in them.
Note
Here again I must make some partial recantation of the judgment given in my text.
Exquisite as would be the echo of the parting song of the Moon given back by the deeper
tone of the music of the Earth, I think now that the fantastic beauty of that angle
repercussive note would perhaps be out of tune with the supreme and equable harmony
of the whole; and there seems full reason to attribute this probable misprint to a
misreading of the interpolation of these two lines in the manuscript of Shelley.
It may be worth notice that the earliest editions of Shelley’s poems are sometimes
accurate in small points where all others have gone wrong; for example, the first
line of the speech closing the “Prometheus” runs rightly thus in the first edition:—
“This is the day, which down the void abysm,”
while from every later copy in the collected works the word “is “has dropped off.
So in the “Cenci” (II. i) the Livornese edition of 1819 reads:—
“Then it was I whose inarticulate wordsFell from my lips, and who with tottering stepsFled from your presence,” &c.
The later copies drop the word and, thus breaking down the metre. But this genuine edition reads (IV.V. #x00a0;4) with
the later text—
“Guilty! who dares talk of guilt? My lord,” &c.,
giving no authority for the insertion of “to” before “talk,” which indeed rather weakens
the force of emphasis in this sudden outbreak of passionate protest But in the speech
of Marzio (V.V. #x00a0;2) it again brings us right:—
“Oh, dartThe terrible resentment of those eyesOn the dead earth!”
In the “Works” we find dread printed in place of dead which Mr. Rossetti knew by instinct for the right reading. Again, at the end of the
third act, Shelley’s Italian edition runs thus:—
“Orsino.When next we meet—
Giacomo.May all be done—and allForgotten; Oh, that I had never been!”
Surely a better than the current version—
“Orsino.When next we meet may all be done!
Giacomo.And allForgotten,” &c.
The first English edition alone reads (I. i)—
“Respited me from hell! So may the devil,” &c.
All others, from the Livornese onward, have let fall the word me. These slight things, so tedious to dwell upon all help us—and they only can help
us—towards a true text of our greatest modern poet. In the case of Æschylus or of Shakespeare, such light crumbs and dry husks would be held precious as grains of gold. I have
but a few more to glean and reserve or reject as they seem worth.
I would certainly not agree to alter without authority that admirable verse in the
fragment on Leonardo’s “Medusa;”
“Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;”
the intense effect of sound and accent is too rare a thing to lose or change. To shift
the stress of a verse and elongate an elided syllable must prove either a triumph
of musical instinct or a dissonant and hateful failure. Here the triumphant skill
and subtle sense of Shelley’s ear for metre give special charm to the delicate daring
of his verse, which would be lost were we to read “the far lands,” even did this not make the line otherwise symmetrical. In some other
cases cited by Mr. Rossetti there may be room and reason for cutting out or slipping in a syllable or so. His
corrections of text in the imperfect “Triumph of Life” seem to me worthy of all gratified acceptance: but the suggestion of “mouthless”
for “monthless,” in the fragment of a stanza rejected from the “Adonais,” is somewhat grotesque. “Time’s monthless torrent,” if these were indeed Shelley’s
deliberate words, must mean the eternal course of time without end or beginning,
which passes without taking account as we do of years or months, days
or hours. The last stanza of the “Medusa” is a mere sketch, not ripe for criticism or correction; so is the fragment of a
dirge—“Rough wind, that moanest loud.”
In the second line of the ninety-seventh stanza of t he translated “Hymn to Mercury,”
“Thus King Apollo loved the child of MayIn truth, and Jovecovered them with love and joy,”
for “covered” we ought evidently to read “clothed.”
In the translation of the “Cyclops,” the semichorus (v. 495-502 of the Greek text) is confused and inaccurate as we
now read it, and the change of “those” and “there” into “thou” is in each case a
clear gain as far as the English text is concerned, though it brings us no nearer
to the Greek; which runs literally thus:—
“Happy he who shouts his songTo the grape’s dear fountain-springs,For a revel laid along,Close in arms a loved man grasping,And on spread couch-coveringsSome soft woman-blossom clasping,Sleek, with love-locks oiled all o’er,Who, he cries, will open me her door?”
Shelley, working from an uncorrected text, has taken ξανθόν (the old reading for ἄνθος or κάλλος) as adjective to Βόστρυχον, and has washed off from the woman’s hair the sweet oil poured over the man’s curls.
His version, were it admissible in the eyes of more critical editors, would add grace
to the charm of a most graceful strophe—that is, up to the last line, here simply
misconstrued; but he has strayed again somewhat too far in his rendering of the semichorus
antiphonal to this; when Ulysses, hailed by the Cyclops, follows him out with the wine-skin, and the Chorus, secretly reassured and silly
hopeful, sings, to this ambiguous effect:—
“Fair, with fair looks prosperous,Comes he from the halls inside;One good friend is friends with us.For thy body fair the lampWaits alight—come, tender bride—In the caverns dewy-damp:And thine head shall soon be bound Not with single-coloured garlands round.”
I translate from Dindorf’s text; that given by Mr. Paley might run thus in English:—
“There awaits thy flesh a lamp Of fierce fire, no tender bride,” &c.
The “lamp” would then be, of course, the firebrand prepared to blind Polyphemus, and the two last lines, in the words of the editor (vol. iii. p. 509), “mean that
in the place of a crown of myrtle and roses a ring of gory hue shall encircle his
brows.” In either case I suppose the ironic allusions to the torch of marriage and
the marriage-wreath of divers colours must be the same.
There is no gap in the translation at v. 675, and the asterisks inserted after the
words “Nowhere, O Cyclops,”’ would be better away. The passage describing the cookery of Polyphemus (w. 390-395) is difficult and debateable enough, but less hard than the desperate
version of Shelley, who in his note “confesses that he does not understand this.”
The reading “four amphorae,” just above, is a misprint or slip of the pen for “ten;” the next few words
are curiously tumbled together and misconstrued. Shelley has not distinguished the
drinking can or cup (σκύφος) wrought of ivy-wood, or carved round with ivy-leaves, from the ninety-gallon bowl
(κρατὴρ) into which the Cyclops had just milked his cows. Read:—
“Then he milked the cows,And, pouring in the white milk, filled a bowlThat might have held ten amphorae; and by itHe set himself an ivy-carven cup—Three cubits wide and four in depth it seemed—[And set a brass pot on the fire to boil]
Note
This line seems misplaced here, and has been marked as such by later editors.
And spits made out of blackthorn shoots, with tipsBurnt hard in fire, and planed in the other partsSmooth with a pruning-hook; and huge blood-bowlsÆtnaean, set for the axe’s edge to fill”
Or if σφαγεῖα can mean the axes themselves, and γνάθους be read for γνάθοις;
“And the under-jawsOf axes, huge Ætnaean slaughtering-tools.”
I do not see the meaning of those asterisks marking omission where omission is none,
between the opening speech of Silenus and the parode. Of this Shelley has only translated the strophe and the latter part
of the epode. Why the intervening verses were omitted it is impossible to say. In
default of the better version he has begrudged us I offer this by way of makeshift,
following the exact order and cadence of rhymes observed by Shelley. After the call
to the she-goat
Note
Shelley seems to have overlooked the sex of the goat whom the satyrs are calling back
to give suck to her young. In his text the words “he of race divine,” and “father of theflocks,” should be altered to “she” and “mother.”
(which he translates “Get along;” it should rather be “Come,” as the shout is not
meant to
scare, but to reclaim) the song continues—a literal goat-song for once:—
“Ease your udders milk-distent,Take the young ones to the teat,Left in yeanlings’ penfolds pent;Now the sleepy midday bleat Of your sucklings calls you home;Come to fold then, will you? come From the full-flowered pasture-grassesUp in Ætna’s rock-strewn passes.
Here no Bacchus, no dance comesHere, nor Mænads thyrse-bearing.Nor glad clang of kettledrums.Nor by well or running springDrops of pale bright wine; nor nowWith the nymphs on Nysa’s browAn Bacchic melodyTo the golden AphroditeDo I life,” &c.
Read do for will, which stands in Shelley’s text through mere misreading of the passage; it was doubtless
wrongly pointed in the copy by which he worked.
There is another omission after verse 165, more accountable than this; whether any
part of Shelley’s version was struck out or not in the printing we have not been told.
Perhaps the passage, essential as it is to the continuity of the scene, may be borne
with in this reduced and softened form. After the verse—“I would give All that the
Cyclops feed upon their mountains,” add:
“And pitch into the brine off some white cliff,Having got once well drunk and cleared my brows.How mad is he whom drinking makes not glad!
Note
Rabelais gives an admirable version of this line (Book iv. ch. 65): “Veritablement, il est escript par vostre beau Euripides, et le diet Silenus, beuveur memorable;
Furieux est, de bon sens ne jouist,Quiconques boyt et ne s’en resjouist”
For drink means strength renewed for love-making,* * * * * ** * *; aye, dancing too,Aye, and forgetfullness of ills. What then.Shall I not buy me
Note
Or, if we retain the reading οὐ κυνήσομαι instead of admitting this of οὐκ ὠνήσομαι
“Shall I not worship such a drink,“ &c.,
for we are told to take κυνεῖν here in the sense of προσκυνεῖν, or I should render it simply, “Shall I not kiss a drink like this?”
such a drink, and bidFool Cyclops with his one mid eye go hang? “
In this laudable frame of mind the Falstaff or Olympus makes off on his sheep-stealing errand; and the Chorus, which hitherto has modestly
stood aside and left the talking to him, now first addresses the new-comer:—
“Hear you, Ulysses, we would talk with you.
Ulysses.
Well, on then, as you come like friends to a friend.
Chorus.
Ye have taken Troy, and laid your hands on Helen?
Ulysses.
And utterly destroyed the race of Priam.
Note
These two lines are in Shelley’s text.
Chorus.
Well, when ye had got the girl then, did ye notAll of you take your sport with her in turn.Seeing she delights in marrying many men?The wanton wretch!” &c.
After this discussion of Helen by the satyrs, Silenus returns with his plunder; his speech begins (v. 188) “See, here are sheep,” &c. Shelley,
following the older editions, puts into his mouth all this last answer of the Chorus
to Ulysses, with its exquisite satyric moralising on feminine levity. At the entrance of the
Cyclops there is some misconstruction:—
“Silenus.
What ho! assistance, comrades, haste, assistance!
Cyclops.
What is this tumult?”
The line given to Silenus belongs to the Cyclops as he bursts in upon the stage, and
might rather be rendered:—
“Hold hard, let’s see here, lend a hand: what’s this?What sloth? what rioting?”
At verse 220 there is another break; Silenus has said, “Anything you like, only don’t
drink me up;” and the Cyclops, as delicate a monster as Caliban, replies:—
“By no means, for you’d be the death of meThen, tumbling in my belly, with your tricks.”
At verse 345, read, to fill up the gap at the end of the Cyclops’ speech:—
“So creep in quick, to stand about the shrineO’ the god o’ the cave and feast me fairly full.”
The god of the cave is explained to be, as above,
“MyselfAnd this great belly, first of deities.”
Half a line is missed at v. 381:- “
Unhappy man!How was it with you, then, faring like this?”
The next break is at v. 439; if the verses here omitted be spurious, there is no need
to retain the asterisks. Anyhow they can only be given thus trimmed for translation
and curtailed into decency; the satyrs, though perforce living virtuously in a state
of servitude, retain their natural amativeness. Read:—
“And leave for everThe impious Cyclops; for this long time nowOur poor dear flesh has lived a widower’s lifeToward women, as we can’t give him the slip.”
At v. 585 there is a point of interrogation missed,and the dialogue has not all its
original briskness and ease of motion. Here the Cyclops—now, in Trinculo’s phrase,
“a howling monster; a drunken monster”—shows his affection for Silenus, as Caliban in the like case shows his adoration of Stephano. The parallel would be close rif Caliban had met Falstaff, but the humour of the two scenes is much alike. It must be remembered
that the poor monster’s in drink; an abominable monster! Read:-
“No, I’ll no kissing; let the Graces tempt me;I can do well enough with Ganymede here,Gloriously, by the Graces! where are womenWorth such sweet youths as this now?
Note
“A most ridiculous monster! to make a wonder of a poor drunkard.” (Tempest, ii.2) But poor old Silenus is now as sober or semi-sober as Trinculo
Silenus
Polypheme,Am IJove’s Ganymede, then?
Cyclops.
Yes, by Jove!And thus I snatch you off from Dardanus.
Silenus.
I’m done for, boys, I’m come to fearful grief.
Chorus.
What! wrangle and flout your lover when he’s drunk?
Silenus.
Alack! I’m like to find it bitter drink.”
I know that he who ventures to touch the text of Shelley should keep always before
his eyes the fate of Uzza, and the curse denounced on him who adds to or takes from the sacred writings so
much as a word; if I too have laid a presumptuous hand upon the ark, tampered rashly
with the inspired canon of scripture, I can only put forward the plea found in that
former case unavailing, that I meant but to prop the shaken vessel, to clear the blotted
records, which contain the divine treasure; putting my trust in judges of more than
Jewish or godlike tolerance. Were it for me to pass sentence, I would say of the very
rashest of possible commentators that his errors, though they were many, should be
forgiven, if he loved much. While revising the version of the “Cyclops” I have felt again, and more keenly, the old delight of wonder at its matchless grace
of unapproachable beauty, its strength, ease, delicate simplicity and sufficiency;
the birthmark and native quality of all Shelley’s translations. I have retouched nothing
but one or two confused lines; for who can hope, even though there be here and there
a slip in the rendering, to supply anything as good in place of a cancelled verse
of his? What I have ventured to retranslate in full, I never designed to supplant
the text, but merely
to elucidate. These small and slow labours of verbal criticism are the best returns
we can make, the best tribute we can pay to a great man’s work; and no man need think
that a waste of his time, which so often employed the hours and the minds of Milton and of Landor. It is easier to dilate at length on the excellence of a man’s genius
than to sift and test it by proof of syllable and letter, that so the next student
may at least find a clear and certain text to study, without the trouble of deciphering
a faded palimpsest or refitting a broken puzzle. And we have especial need of accuracy
and fullness of text when the text is Shelley’s. His mark is burnt in more deeply
and more durably upon men’s minds than that of any among the great poets of his day.
Of these, Coleridge and Keats set no such mark on the spirit of their readers;
Note
Coleridge’s personal influence as preacher or professor of hostly dialectics and marshlight
theosophy (brighter indeed than the bedroom rushlights about it, but no star or sun)
was a thing distinct from his doings as a poet. There was no more direct work done
by his mere verse than by the mere verse of Keats.
they left simple and perfect examples of work absolutely faultless, visibly unsurpassable,
self-resumed and self-content. Byron was first to stamp with his signet the thought
and feeling of one kind of men; then Wordsworth in turn set his mark on a different
kind. But the one for want of depth and sense and harmony, the other for want of heat
and eyesight and lifeblood, and both for want of a truer force and a truer breadth
of spirit, failed to impress upon all time any such abiding sign of their passage
and their power, any such inevitable and ineffaceable mark to bear witness of their
work, as Dante or Milton, Goethe or Shelley, each in his special fashion.
It is no bad way of testing an opinion held vaguely but sincerely to take it up and
rub it, as it were, against the opinion of some one else, who is clearly worth agreeing
with or disagreeing. Mr. Arnold, with whose clear and critical spirit it is always good to come in contact, as disciple
or as dissenter, has twice spoken of Shelley, each time, as I think, putting forth
a brilliant error, shot through and spotted with glimpses of truth. Byron and Shelley, he says, “two members of the aristocratic class” alone in their day,
strove “to apply the modern spirit” to English literature. “Aristocracies are, as
such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members have a high courage
and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the
idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles
which prevent him from freely developing it.” To the truth of this he might have cited
a third witness; for of the English poets then living, three only were children of
the social or political idea, strong enough to breathe and work in the air of revolution,
to wrestle with change and hold fast the new liberty, to believe at all in the godhead
of people or peoples, in the absolute right and want of the world, equality of justice,
of work and truth and life; and these three came all out of the same rank, were all
born into one social sect, men of historic blood and name, having nothing to ask of
revolution, nothing (as the phrase is now) to gain by freedom, but leave to love and
serve the light for the light’s sake. Landor, who died last, was eldest, and Shelley, who died first, was youngest of the three.
Each stood alike apart from the rest, far unlike as each was to the other two; not,
like Coleridge, blind to the things of the time, nor, like Keats, practically alien to all things but art; and leaving to Southey or Wordsworth the official laurels and loyalties of courtly content and satisfied compliance. Out
of their rank the Georges could raise no recruits to beat the drum of prose or blow
the bagpipes of verse in any royal and constitutional procession towards nuptial or
funereal goal.
Note
The one kindly attempt of Landor to fill Southey’s place for him when disabled could
scarcely have proved acceptable to his friend’s official employers.
“But since thou liest sick at heartAnd worn with years, some little partOf thy hard office let me try, Tho’ inexpert was always I To toss the litter of Westphalian swineFrom under human to above divine”—(Works, vol. ii. p. 654.)
“Call you that backing of your friends”—when they happen to be laureates?
So far we must go with Mr. Arnold; but I cannot follow him when he adds that Byron
and Shelley failed in their attempt; that the best “literary creation” of their time,
work “far more solid and complete than theirs,” was due to men in whom the new spirit
was dead or was unborn; that, therefore, “their names will be greater than their writings.”
First, I protest against the bracketing of the two names. With, all reserve of reverence
for the noble genius and memory of Byron, I can no more accept him as a poet equal
or even akin to Shelley on any side but one, than I could imagine Shelley endowed
with the various, fearless, keen-eyed,
and triumphant energy which makes the greatest of Byron’s works so great. With all
his glory of ardour and vigour and humour, Byron was a singer who could not sing;
Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time; his
depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as nature’s, and not sooner
exhaustible. He was alone the perfect singing-god; his thoughts, words, deeds, all
sang together. This between two singing-men is a distinction of some significance;
and must be, until the inarticulate poets and their articulate outriders have put
down singing-men altogether as unrealities, inexpedient if not afflictive in the commonwealth
of M. Proudhon and Mr. Carlyle. Till the dawn of that “most desired hour, more loved and lovely than all its sisters,”
these unblessed generations will continue to note the difference, and take some account
of it. Again, though in some sense a “child of the idea,” Byron is but a foundling
or bastard child; Shelley is born heir, and has it by birthright; to Byron it is a
charitable nurse, to Shelley a natural mother. All the more praise, it may be said,
to Byron for having seen so much as he did and served so loyally. Be it so then; but
let not his imperfect and intermittent service, noble and helpful now, and now alloyed
with baser temper or broken short through sloth or spite or habit, be set beside the
flawless work and perfect service of Shelley. His whole heart and mind, his whole
soul and strength, Byron could not give to the idea at all; neither to art, nor freedom,
nor any faith whatever. His life’s work therefore falls as short of the standard
of Shelley’s as of Goethe’s work. To compare “Cain” with “Prometheus,” the “Prophecy of Dante” with the “Ode to Naples,” is to compare “Manfred” with “Faust.” Shelley was born a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for
angel’s work. Byron, with a noble admixture of brighter and purer blood, had in him
a cross of the true Philistine breed.
There is no other word than this yet devised which will carry the exact weight of
meaning wanted. The use of it is however, it seems, offensive to certain persons;
one writer has actually signed his name to an article in which he asserts that Mr.
Matthew Arnold and I after him use or abuse it as a reproachful synonym for the name
of Christian. Anonymous fiction of this kind no man will notice who respects the truth
or himself; but some exposition of the meaning of words may be permissible and serviceable
for the correction of an error or the exposure of a falsehood. It is not the correction
of an error that is for the minute my task. This writer, whose article was signed
with the name of Peter Bayne, undertakes the defence of his gods in heaven above and on earth beneath against
Mr. Arnold and myself with engines and artillery of a somewhat shaky and explosive
kind. For myself, it appears that I, “who am refined” (teste Bayne) “in my language, and have quite the manners of a gentleman” (this I fear is
the scathing expression of a pungent irony), have denounced the whole race of “Christians”
at one fell swoop as “noisome Philistines;” exceeding Mr. Arnold by the addition of
an epithet I am not concerned to dispute the degrees of gentility with a falsifier
of the sense of words, to question the breeding or pass sentence on the manners of
a public and self-exposed libeller. I would only
remark that when the reader is led or driven off the bare highway of truth it is but
fair to afford him some morsel of slander so spiced and sauced that it may perhaps
slip glibly down some one’s gullet without sticking, some palatable and digestible
condiment of calumny, some pleasanter pasture, at least, than a twice-cooked and twice-chewed
mess of thistles: for it cannot be certain that he will by some divine inborn instinct
prefer that diet to any other. Mr. Bayne’s calumnies are somewhat dry, a little flat and hard; Crabtree, in this revival of
Sheridan’s play, moves clumsily in the coarse livery of slander in undress, without the brocade
and perfume of Backbite, the genial grace of Mrs. Candour, or the sinewy and flexible facility of Snake. His crude fiction wants breadth, delicacy,
sureness of touch; Tartuffe would scarcely have taken him on trial as a fellow-servant with Laurent. In one point
he is liker another once famous figure in the drama. The valet in Farquhar’s comedy knew when people were talking of him, “they laughed so consumedly.” Mr. Peter Bayne has sounded a baser string of humility than the valet. When he does but scent or
suspect anywhere a contemptuous allusion, he knows “they must be talking,” not of
him, but of the gods of his worship. Scrub knew his own place; but Mr. Bayne knows
the place of his gods; and indeed, if we judge of a deity by his worshippers, he may
he right in thinking that what he adores must be naturally liable to men’s contempt
He remarks, with cruelly satirical reference to my alleged heresies and audacities
in the choice of guides and teachers not chosen to his mind, that my “years and achievements
make it fitting” for me “to point the finger of scorn at” figures enthroned in the pantheon of his moral mythology. What may be the years
and what the achievements of Mr. Peter Bayne I know not; but I do know that the years of Nestor and the achievements of Napoleon would not suffice to extenuate fatuity on the one hand and false witness on the other.
A slandered man may, if he please, claim leave to take (though he may not care to
make) occasion in passing to set a mark on the calumniator; but he will hardly care
to take into his hands the hangman’s office of applying the iron or the lash. I have
done, and return without apology from mean to higher matters. Of the relation between
Shelley and Byron I have here no more to say; but before ending these notes I find
yet another point or so to touch upon. Perhaps to every student of any one among the
greater poets there seems to be something in his work not yet recognised by other
students, some secret power or beauty reserved for his research. I do not think that
justice has yet been done to Shelley as to some among his peers, in all details and
from every side. Mr. Arnold, in my view, misconceives and misjudges him not less when
set against Keats than when bracketed with Byron. Keats has indeed a divine magic
of language applied to nature; here he is unapproachable; this is his throne, and
he may bid all kings of song come bow to it. But his ground is not Shelley’s ground;
they do not run in the same race at all. The “Ode to Autumn,” among other such poems of Keats, renders nature as no man but Keats ever could.
Such poems as the “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” cannot compete with it But do they compete with it? The poem of Keats, Mr. Arnold
says, “renders Nature;” the poem of Shelley “tries to render her.” It is this that I deny. What Shelley tries to do he does; and he does not try
to do the same thing as Keats. The comparison is as empty and profitless as one between the sonnets of Shakespeare
and the sonnets of Milton. Shelley never in his life wrote a poem of that exquisite contraction and completeness,
within that round and perfect limit. This poem of the Euganean Hills is no piece of
spiritual sculpture or painting after the life of natural things. I do not pretend
to assign it a higher or a lower place; I say simply that its place is not the same.
It is a rhapsody of thought and feeling coloured by contact with nature, but not born
of the contact; and such as it is all Shelley’s work is, even when most vague and
vast in its elemental scope of labour and of aim. A soul as great as the world lays
hold on the things of the world; on all life of plants, and beasts, and men; on all
likeness of time, and death, and good things and evil. His aim is rather to render
the effect of a thing than a thing itself; the soul and spirit of life rather than
the living form, the growth rather than the thing grown. And herein he too is unapproachable.
Other and lesser critics than Mr. Arnold have taxed Shelley with a want of dramatic
power upon the characters and passions of men. While writing these notes I have come
across the way of such an one, who bids us notice how superior in truth and subtlety
is Mr. Browning’s study of Guido Franceschini to Shelley’s of Count Cenci. Here again a comparison is patched up between two things utterly unamenable to the
same rule. The wonderful figure so cunningly drawn and coloured by Mr. Browning is
a model of intense and punctilious realism.
Note
The word realism has a higher and a baser sense; there is the grand spiritual realism
of Balzac or Browning, as well as the crude and facile realism, or vulgarism rather,
of writers wanting alike in spirit and in form. It is so often used as a term of reproach
on one side, on the other as a boastful watchword, that when taken as a simple term
of definition it may perhaps be misconstrued.
Every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every vein and joint of
the subtle and intricate spirit divided and laid bare. A close and dumb soul compelled
into speech by mere struggle and stress of things labours in literal translation and
accurate agony at the lips of Guido. This scientific veracity which unbuilds and rebuilds the whole structure of spirit,
thought by thought and touch by touch, till the final splendour of solution is achieved,
and the consummate labour made perfect from key-stone to coping-stone, is so triumphant
a thing that on its own ground it can be matched by no poet; to match it we must look
back to Balzac Shelley worked by other rules to another end: with the sculptor’s touch rather than
the anatomist’s. But his figure of Cenci is not the less accurate for its breadth
of handling. We might as well consign Manon Lescaut to a place below Emma Bovary, because Provost wrought out his immortal study with broader lines and fewer colours
than Flaubert. A figure may be ideal and yet accurate, realistic and yet untrue, as a fact not
thoroughly fathomed may be in effect a falsehood. There is a far stronger cross of
the ideal in the realism of Æschylus or Shakespeare than runs through the work of the great modem realists. What was the latent breadth
or depth of Shelley’s dramatic genius we cannot say, as be had not time himself to
know. It is incomplete in the “Cenci;” for example, in the figure of Orsino the lines are not cut sharp and deep enough; he is drawn too easily and lightly;
the picture looks thin and shadowy beside the vivid image we get from the old report
of the Cenci trial. That sketch of Monsignor Guerra, the tall delicate young priest, with long curls and courtly graces, plauring on
crime as on a lute with fine fingers used to music-making, might have been thrown
out in keen relief against the great figure of Cenci; a Caponsacchi turned ignoble
instead of noble, and as well worth drawing had the hand been there to draw. As it
is, he plays but a poor part, borne up only by the sweet strength of Shelley’s verse.
But is Cenci himself the mere and monstrous embodiment of evil made flesh, the irrational
and soulless mask of lust and cruelty, that critics have called him? Is he in effect
as inanimate and unreal as Guido is real and alive? To me, putting aside the difference
of handling between the schools of which Shakespeare and Balzac are respectively the
heads, the one seems as true as the other. Cenci, as we see him, is the full-blown
flower, the accomplished result of a life absolute in its luck, in power and success
and energetic enjoyment. His energy is insatiable of emotions, and has few left to
make trial of; the conscience of this sharpens and exasperates the temper of his will.
Something within him, born as much of the spirit as the flesh, is ravenous and restless
as fire. To feel his power by dint of hard use is a need of his nature; “his soul,
which is a scourge,” must
needs smite to know itself alive and taste its strength: too strong for satiety or
collapse, while life endures his nature must bite and bum as surely as steel must
or flame. What he is, good fortune has made him—“Strength, health, and pride, and
lust, and length of days.” What Guido Franceschini is, he has been made by ill fortune. Fed with good things from his birth, the evil
nature in him might have swollen into the likeness of Cenci’s; as Cenci, crossed and cramped at every turn of life, with starved energies and
shrivelled lusts, might have shrunk into the shape of Guido, a pained and thwarted
spirit of self-suffering evil. The one, though drawn with less detail of growth from
seed to fruit, is surely not less conceivable than the other; but Cenci’s is the stronger
spirit, the more solid and rounded nature: he was not one to struggle or foil. Shelley
has made his ruling appetite the lust of strength, of self-conscious and spiritual
power: he has not added the fleshly lust of pain and subtle animal relish of the pungent
infliction, which was doubtless interfused with Cenci’s sensuous cruelty. But the
august and horrible figure is painted as naturally as nobly; his rage and his religion,
the loathing that underlies his lust, and the lust that inflames his loathing; his
hungry abhorrence of his daughters beauty of body and soul—(“Beast that thou art!”)—his
faith in God and fury against good, his splendid exaltation of spirit into a passionate
and winged rapture of ardent hatred or of fiery joy, consummate in that last outbreak
as of all the fumes and flames of hell at once, are no more alien from nature or each
other than Guido’s subtle crossings and windings of soul through backstairs and byways
of brute craft and baser pride, of barren anger and greed and pain. This is evidence
enough that if Shelley had lived the “Cenci” would not now be the one great play written in the great manner of Shakespeare’s
men that our literature has seen since the time of these. The proof of power is here
as sure and as clear as in Shelley’s lyric work; he has shown himself, what the dramatist
must needs be, as able to lace the light of hell as of heaven, to handle the fires
of evil as to brighten the beauties of things. This latter work indeed he preferred,
and wrought at it with all the grace and force of thought and word which give to all
his lyrics the light of a divine life; but his tragic truth and excellence are as
certain and absolute as the sweetness and the glory of his songs. The mark of his
hand, the trick of his voice, we can always recognise in their clear character and
individual claim; but the range is various from the starry and heavenly heights to
the tender and flowering fields of the world wherein he is god and lord: with here
such a flower to gather as the spinners’ song of Beatrice, and there such a heaven to ascend as the Prologue to Hellas, which the zealous love
of Mr. Garnett for Shelley has opened for us to enter and possess for ever; where the pleadings
of Christ and Satan alternate as the rising and setting of stars in the abyss of luminous
sound and sonorous light. We have now but to await the final gift of a perfect and
critical edition of the whole works, the supreme tribute of love and worship yet owing
to the master singer of our modem race and age; to the poet beloved above all other
poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word—divine.
Note.
Shortly after the publication of these slight and rapid notes, the appearance of the
edition whose advent was here hopefully invoked gave a fresh impulse and opened a
wider way to the study of Shelley. The ardour and labour expended on his glorious
task by Mr. W. M. Rossetti must link his name for ever in honourable association with
that of the poet to whom he has done such loyal and noble service. He has lightened
the darkness that perplexed us at so many turns of a labyrinth which others had done
their best to darken; he has delivered all students from the bondage of Medwin and
Hogg: at those muddy springs no future “mental traveller” will ever need again to
slake or to cheat his thirst for some dubious drop of information as to how the god
of song might have appeared on earth to the shepherds or the swineherds of Admetus.
He has done much more than this; he has had the glory of giving to the world fresh
verse of Shelley’s. Whole poems and priceless fragments, fresh instalments of imperfect
but imperishable work, we owe to the labour of his love. Often too he has found means
to elucidate and to rectify much that was corrupt and obscure. For all these benefits
he deserves all the gratitude that can be given by lovers of Shelley whose love has
borne no such fruit and done no such service as his. Outside the precincts of Grubstreet no dullness could ignore and no malignity deny the value of the service done, the
greatness of the benefits conferred. On the other hand, I am impelled, however unwillingly,
to enter my protest against the general principle on which the text has been recast
and rearranged. The very slightest change of reading, though it should be but a change
in punctuation, ought never to be offered without necessity, as it can never be received
without reluctance. To throw over for some new version, though never so rational or
plausible, the text we have by heart, the words which line by line and letter by letter
have grown as it were a part of ourselves, have worked their way (so to speak) into
the very lifeblood of our thought, the very core and conscience of our memory, cannot
but be pain and grief to any faithful and loving student. But in this revision, so
far from showing any tenderness or respect for such feelings as he might have been
supposed to share, Mr. Rossetti has too often handled Shelley, I will not say as Milton was handled by Bentley, but
I must say as Shakespeare was handled by Steevens. The punctilious if not pedantic precision which has reformed the whole scheme of
punctuation, doubtless often loose enough in the original editions, compels us to
remark that the last state of this text is worse than the first. This edition is beyond
praise and beyond price as a book of reference; but no one, I should imagine, will
ever read in it for pleasure, while he can procure instead the loosest and most incorrect
of those previously printed. Throughout the whole five acts of the “Cenci” the reader is incessantly irritated by such small but significant vexations as the
substitution of “you” for “thou” or “thee” for “you,” on some rigid system of regulation
to which the editor himself
does not pretend to suppose that his author ever proposed to conform. Now I cannot
but think that a lesser poet than Shelley might reasonably be presumed to know better
than his editor what he meant to say, and by what rule or what instinct his hand was
guided as he wrote. To me the tact or instinct which even in these small matters directed
the hand and determined the choice of Shelley seems so nearly infallible in its exquisite
and subtle delicacy, that even if for once my own taste would have rejected the turn
of a sentence or a phrase which to his taste has seemed preferable I should undoubtedly
consider that he was likelier to be right than I—at least with regard to his own work.
Of this readjustment of the words “you” and “thou” six instances are acknowledged
and the principle of reformation is vindicated in a note; but for the sentences broken
up and recast, the interpolated periods which make two or three curt inharmonious
sentences out of one most harmoniously prolonged through natural pauses to its natural
end—for these and other vexatious pedantries or petty rigidities of rule, it does
not seem that any defence or apology has been thought needfull. Yet a skilful and
able student or master of language such as Mr. Rossetti cannot surely need to be told that these superfluous breaks and changes in the punctuation
deform and destroy the fine perfection of the metre; that the harmony of a whole speech
or a whole stanza may be shattered by the intrusion or suppression of a colon or a
comma; that a false pointing in English verse is as bad as a false quantity in Latin.
There is no man living, in my mind, who might be trusted to correct the metre of
Shelley; and
among all past poets of his own rank I know of none who might have been so trusted
but Milton. And it is no less an enterprise than this that Mr. Rossetti has taken
upon himself. Surely, too, his scholarship was somewhat at fault when he likened to
the English of Mrs. Gamp the use of an obsolete and doubtless a licentious construction in “Rosalind and Helen”—
“My Lionel, who, as every strainGrew fainter but more sweet, his mienSunk—”
here altered by the excision of the word who and the substitution of a period for a comma, which compels us to begin a fresh sentence
with the following words. Even were the original reading a mere solecism, it would
be preferable to such drawing and quartering of a poet’s text as this. But it is simply
a revival—indefensible indeed in my eyes, and probably due to mere haste—of a lax
usage permitted to elder writers both in verse and prose. If all texts are to be regulated
after this pedagogic fashion, neither Shakespeare nor even Milton will be secure against
correction. The poem in which this passage occurs, certainly the least precious example
we have of Shelley’s mature work, was, as we know, resumed and completed at the desire
of Mrs. Shelley after it had been cast aside as not worth completion; and we may well
suppose that the task was executed rapidly and with little of the passionate pleasure
that impels and informs the execution of work into which the workman can put his
whole heart. A much more real and grave solecism in “Julian and Maddalo” has been left not only uncorrected but unnoticed—“One blessing which thou ne’er
didst imprecate for on me.” Even such a positive blunder as this I should not myself have presumed to
correct by any process of suppression and substitution; but it is singular that an
editor who has never scrupled to apply this process when he thought fit should have
abstained from applying it in this really flagrant instance of bad English. Against
another example of this interference I must also protest for the sake of my own and
all ears that have been trained on the music of Shelley; I refer to the change made
in the last verses of the overture to the “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills.” If the editor finds the license of such a phrase as
“Every little living nerve* * * * * *Are like sapless leaflets now”
too “annoying” to be endured by a scholastic sense of propriety, the annoyance is
far keener which will be inflicted on others by his substituted reading—“Is like a
sapless leaflet now.” Here again Shelley has indulged in a loose and obsolete construction
which may or may not be defensible; I should not at the present day permit it to myself,
or condone it in another; and had the editor been engaged in the revision of a schoolboy’s
theme, he would certainly have done right to correct such a phrase, and as certainly
would not have done wrong to add such further correction as he might deem desirable;but
the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable to the revision of a schoolboy’s
theme. Nor are these grammatical castigations the
worst examples of the singular freedom with which so true and studious an enthusiast
for the fame of Shelley has thought it allowable to handle the text of his greatest
poems. Under the pernicious guidance of professors and pedagogues dead and living
he has been induced to dismember and disfigure such samples of lyric verse as touch
the very highest top of possible perfection—songs that might have been envied by Simonides and praised by Sappho. By one of these blind (and deaf) guides he has been led to deface two stanzas of
the “Skylark” after a fashion only to be paralleled, I should hope, in Bentley’s Milton; to displace
the pause in the second stanza so as at once to deform the meaning and destroy the
music; and in the third to supplant “an unbodied” by “an embodied joy”! Even this is not the very worst of all. If there is one verse in Shelley or
in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other, it is that in the
“Lament”—
“Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar.”
The music of this line taken with its context—the melodious effect of its exquisite
inequality
Note
If any man of human ear can want further evidence than his own sense of harmony in
support of the true and hitherto undisputed reading, he may find one instance among
others of the subtle and wonderful use to which Shelley would sometimes put a seeming
imperfection of this kind in the verses to Emilia Viviani:
“Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?”
Here the same ineffable effect of indefinable sweetness is produced by an exact repetition
(but let no aspiring “poet-ape” ever think to reproduce it by imitation) of the same
simple means—the suppression, namely, of a single syllable. And I cannot but wonder
as well as rejoice that no pedant whose ears are at the ends of his fingers should
ever yet have proposed to correct and complete the verse by reading
“Say is it with thy kisses,” &c.
—I should have
thought was a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to the eyes of all men whose
ears were not closed against all harmony by some denser and less removable obstruction
than shut out the song of the Sirens from the hearing of the crew of Ulysses. Yet
in this edition (vol. ii. p. 274) the word “autmnn” is actually foisted in after the
word “summer.” Upon this incredible outrage I really dare not trust myself to comment.
The only parallel I know to it within the memory of man is the repainting of Giotto’s
portrait of Dante by an Italian hireling at the bidding of his Austrian masters, who
desired to efface from the poet’s berretta the sacred national colours of hope and
faith and love. That is irreparable; but the outrage offered to the text of Shelley
happily is not. For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible;
for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient
expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate head must rest the original
guilt of defacing the text of Shelley with this most damnable corruption. To such
earless and soulless commentators, strong only in fingercounting and figure-casting,
the ghost of their divine victim, whether Shakespeare or Shelley, might say with Paulina—
“Do not repent these things. * * ** * * * A thousand kneesTen thousand years togther, naked, fasting,Upon a barren mountain, and still winter In storm perpetual, could not move the godsTo look that way thou wert.”
At least we may be assured that no such penance, though multiplied beyond the calculation
of all arithmeticians who ever made use of their science as a leadline to sound the
depths of song, as a key to unlock the secrets of harmony, could ever move the righteous
judge of Marsyas to look with pity on the son of Midas who had thus abused the text
of one so dear to him as Shelley. The race of his old enemy, we perceive, has degenerated
since the date of the Phrygian king; the regal and paternal ears are indeed hereditary,
but as surely as the touch of the father turned all things to gold, so surely the
touch of his children turns all things to lead.
I shall merely notice the single remaining instance of perversion which I feel bound
not to pass over in silence; the false pointing of one of the noblest passages in
the “Prometheus Unbound”—
“Heap on thy head, by virtue of this curse,Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good.”
I should really have thought it impossible to mistake the simple and obvious meaning
of these and the glorious verses which follow; namely, that the curse invoked on the
almighty tyrant was to do evil and behold good. The idea is of course not original;
few lines have been oftener quoted, and few have better deserved their fame, than
the majestic verse in which Persius has invoked upon tyrants a deeper damnation than ever priest conceived —
“Virtutem videant intabescantque relictâ.”
What indeed, compared to this, are the gross and brutish threats of theological materialism?
what is the ice or fire of Dante, the burning marl of Milton? But by the application of this supreme curse to the
supreme oppressor Shelley has transfigured the noble moral thought of the Stoic poet
into the splendour of an idea too sublime for the conception of one so much lesser
than himself. It is utterly inexplicable to me how an editor of Mr. Rossetti’s high and rare intelligence in matters of art and imagination can here for once
have failed to follow the track of Shelley’s thought, to see with Shelley’s eyes this
vision of the two infinities of good and evil; of the evil deeds wrought by omnipotence
and the good deeds wrought by suffering—both of these infinite as God himself, as
the world he torments, as the solitude which is at once the condition and the chastisement
of his omnipotence. The sequence of ideas is so natural and logical, so coherent with
the whole scheme and subject of the poem, that I cannot understand by what strange
aberration the editor should have lost his way through so plain and open a tract of
country, and thought it necessary to shatter at once the harmony, the sense, and the
grammar of so simple and superb a passage in order to patch up an explanation as forced,
unnatural, and improbable as the more obvious interpretation was clear, consistent,
and sufficient I should add that as Mr. Rossetti, with his habitual candour and generous
good sense, has since published a note which may be taken as equivalent to a recantation
of the error which led him to cast aside the previous text for the dissonant and incongruous
version produced by a change of pointing. I should not have given even this passing
notice to the matter had the passage been
less important, the perversion less flagrant, or the mistake already cancelled. I
have now, to adopt a pedagogic formula which might beseem the lips of a commentator
in the heat of correction, discharged a painful duty, but one which I felt to be incumbent
on me; and I may add, in the same professional style and spirit, that I hope I may
never be compelled to undertake it again. It should also be noted by those who may
feel most keenly the indignity offered to Shelley by such perversions and corruptions
of his meaning and his music as those on which I have here had to remark, that no
little service has been done to the text in other places by the simple correction
of many such obvious and indubitable misprints as deform the penultimate stanza of
“The Revolt of Islam;” where, to take but a single instance, the words “one line” had in all previous
editions been allowed to stand in defiance of sense and metre, both of which for more
than half a century had been crying aloud for the restoration of the right reading—“on
a line.”
I have but one other fault to find with this first critical edition of Shelley; and
in this instance I am confident of having with me, I had wellnigh said all lovers
of his fame, but that this would exclude at least one name which must always be counted
among those of his most loving disciples—that of the editor himself. To reprint in
an appendix the monstrous mass of doggrel which has been pitilessly preserved by the
evil fidelity of Mr. Hogg, and to add even the metrical sweepings of “St. Irvyne,” is an offence on which I believe that the verdict of all competent critics has
been unanimous. That this wretched rubbish should
exist at all in print is vexation enough for those to whom the honour of the greatest
poets is dear; but Mr. Hogg’s book is a monument likely to prove something less durable than brass, and in its
mouldering pages the evidence of Shelley’s boyish absurdities and atrocities in the
way of rhyme might have been trusted to rot unobserved save of some rare collector
of strange and worthless things. But to have them bound up with the ripest work of
the first lyric poet of England, tied on as it were to the tail or pinned to the back
of a volume which undertakes to give us for the first time a critical text of Shelley,
is a thing not to be endured or extenuated.
Note
An edition of Shelley which should give us a final standard of the text would naturally
relegate “Queen Mab” to its proper place in an appendix. The strong and sincere protest of Shelley against
the piratical reissue of this poem, backed by the frank and reasonable avowal that
he was ashamed of the bad poetry contained in it, should have sufficed to exclude
it from the station at the head of his works which it has so long been permitted to
retain. Full of intellectual power and promise as it is, a poem repudiated by its
author as unworthy of his maturer fame should never have been thrust into the place
which obviously belongs to “Alastor;” for it is only with this later work that the real career of Shelley as a poet may
be properly said to begin.
The argument or apology of the editor on behalf of this lamentable act of caprice
has not I believe made a single convert, and is I should hope not likely to make one.
Those who did most justice to the zealous labour and the strenuous devotion of Mr.
Rossetti, those who were the first to recognise with all gratitude what thanks were
due to his ardour and ability, were the first to utter their protest against this
the most unhappy and perverse example on record of a pernicious exactitude
in the collection and preservation of all that an author would desire to efface from
his own and all men’s memory. The first such protest, if I mistake not, was expressed
in earnest and weighty words by Miss Mathilde Blind, whose admirable essay on Shelley was one of the earliest and most notable signs
of the impulse given to the critical study of the poet by the appearance of this edition.
That essay, full as it was of eloquent commentary and fervent thought, is yet more
precious for its many contributions to the pure and perfect text of Shelley which
we hope before long to see; no pedagogic emendations or professorial conjectures,
but restorations supplied from the poet’s own manuscript; and, more than all, for
the completion of that faultless poem called “The Question” by one long-lost line of final loveliness.
It would be a pleasanter task than that of fault-finding or protesting, to pass once
more through the glorious gallery of Shelley’s works in the company of his first critical
editor, and note down what points of consent or dissent might occur to us in the process
of comparing opinions as to this poem or that. But time and space forbid me to do
more than register my own opinion as to the respective value of two among the latest,
and to express the surprise which I share with Miss Blind at the station assigned by Mr. Rossetti to the “Witch of Atlas,” which he deliberately ranks above the “Epipsychidion.” It is indeed an exquisite
exercise of sunny and flowery fancy, which probably was designed to cover or convey
no such elaborate allegoric significance as the editor seems willing to seek in it;
the “lady witch” being simply an incarnation
of ideal beauty and beneficence, in her relations to man a spiritual patroness of
free thought and free love, in her relations to nature a mistress or an adept of her
secret rites or forces. Nor does it seem to me that Mr. Rossetti has touched on the one point where the “Epipsychidion” might be plausibly represented as open to attack. Its impalpable and ethereal philosophy
of love and life does not prevent it from being “quite a justifiable sort of poem
to write;” the questionable element in it is the apparent introduction of such merely
personal allusions as can only perplex and irritate the patience and intelligence
of a loyal student, while they may not impossibly afford an opening for preposterous
and even offensive interpretations. In all poetry as in all religions, mysteries must
have place, but riddles should find none. The high, sweet, mystic doctrine of this
poem is apprehensible enough to all who look into it with purged eyes and listen with
purged ears; but the passages in which the special experience of the writer is thrust
forward under the mask and muffler of allegoric rhapsody are not in any proper sense
mysterious; they are simply puzzling; and art should have nothing to do with puzzles.
This, and this alone, is the fault which in my opinion may be not unreasonably found
with some few passages of the “Epipsychidion;” and a fault so slight and partial as merely to affect some few passages here and
there, perceptible only in the byways and outskirts of the poem, can in no degree
impair the divine perfection of its charm the savour of its heavenly quality. By the
depth and exaltation of its dominant idea, by the rapture of the music and the glory
of the colour which do the with sound
and splendour the subtle and luminous body of its thought, by the harmony of its most
passionate notes and the humanity of its most godlike raptures, it holds a foremost
place in the works of that poet who has now for two generations ruled and moulded
the hearts and minds of all among his countrymen to whom the love of poetry has been
more than a fancy or a fashion; who has led them by the light of his faith, by the
spell of his hope, by the fire of his love, on the way of thought which he himself
had followed in the track of the greatest who had gone before him—of Æschylus, of Lucretius, of Milton; who has been more to us than ever was Byron to the youth of his own brief day, than ever was Wordsworth to the students of the day succeeding; and of whom, whether we class him as second
or as third among English poets, it must be in either case conceded that he holds
the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry—supreme, and without a second of his race. I would not pit his
name against the sacred name of Milton; to wrangle for the precedence of this immortal or of that can be but futile and
injurious; it is enough that our country may count among her sons two of the greatest
among those great poets who have also been prophets and evangelists of personal and
national, social and spiritual freedom; but it is equally certain that of all forms
or kinds of poetry the two highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that as clearly
as the first place in the one rank is held among; us by Shakespeare, the first place
in the other is held and will never be resigned by Shelley.