Part 7 (1/2)
Sh.e.l.ley was an atheist because Christians used the name of G.o.d to sanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. His mythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. His creed was an ardent dualism, in which a G.o.d and an anti-G.o.d contend and make history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse the names and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate G.o.ds in his Pantheon are always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and the Jupiter of his _Prometheus_ is morally a temporarily omnipotent devil. Like G.o.dwin he felt that the G.o.d of orthodoxy was a ”tyrant,” and he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He had made.
The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is stated with a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in _Queen Mab_. The first Canto of the _Revolt of Islam_ puts the position of dualism without reserve:
Know, then, that from the depths of ages old Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold, Ruling the world with a divided lot, Immortal, all-pervading, manifold, Twin Genii, equal G.o.ds--when life and thought Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.
The good principle was the Morning Star (as though to remind us of Lucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. The anti-G.o.d, whom men wors.h.i.+p blindly as G.o.d, holds sway over our world.
Terror, madness, crime, and pain are his creation, and Asia in _Prometheus_ cries aloud--
Utter his name: a world pining in pain Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
In the sublime mythology of _Prometheus_ the war of G.o.d and anti-G.o.d is seen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rend the heart of the merciful t.i.tan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murders and crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical cruelties in the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they are also the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven with the tragedy on earth; we suffer from the malignity of the World's Ruler, and triumph by the endurance of Man's Saviour.
Nothing could be more absurd than to call Sh.e.l.ley a Pantheist. Pantheism is the creed of conservatism and resignation. Sh.e.l.ley felt the world as struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain.
Certainly for Sh.e.l.ley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. G.o.dwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and a.s.sures the victory of life (see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend Thing, in Sh.e.l.ley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in the clerical error of some mediaeval copyist, fumbling with the scholia of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to Sh.e.l.ley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound.
Sh.e.l.ley can describe It only as G.o.dwin describes his principle by a series of negatives.
I see a mighty darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb, Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is A living spirit.
It is the eternal =X= which the human spirit always a.s.sumes when it is at a loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not, our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-note that promised triumph. Sh.e.l.ley, turning amid his singing to the supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his G.o.d very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe with a G.o.d of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a n.i.g.g.e.r clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.
If Sh.e.l.ley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind G.o.dwin, and G.o.dwin hated vagueness. His intellect had a.s.similated all the steps in the argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic form. Inst.i.tutions make us what we are, and to free us from their shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in the preface to _Prometheus_ to a.s.sure us that, if England were divided into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected intellectualism of the G.o.dwinian psychology. ”Revenge and retaliation,”
he remarks in the preface to _The Cenci_ ”are pernicious _mistakes_.”
But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout as Sh.e.l.ley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these abstractions. G.o.dwin's ”universal benevolence” was with him an ardent affectionate love for his kind. G.o.dwin's cold precept that it was the duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.
One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early escapades of the married boy--the visit to Dublin at the height of the agitation for Catholic emanc.i.p.ation, the printing of his Address to the Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his balcony at pa.s.sers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic n.o.blemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an a.s.sociation for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish amus.e.m.e.nt of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of pamphlets sealed up in bottles. Sh.e.l.ley at this age perpetrated ”rags”
upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows'
rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which G.o.dwin, complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Sh.e.l.ley that he is much too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicarious maturity by reading history, and refers him to _Political Justice pa.s.sim_ for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt to improve mankind by forming political a.s.sociations.
It is questionable how far the world has to thank G.o.dwin for dissuading ardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. It is just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophet had been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands in an almost superst.i.tious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, there might have arisen under educated leaders some movement less cla.s.s-bound than Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and more intelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by G.o.dwin's quietism, literature gained. It was G.o.dwin's mission in life to save poets from Botany Bay; he rescued Sh.e.l.ley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge.
It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creature around him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity, while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Sh.e.l.ley followed in action the principles of universal benevolence. G.o.dwin omitted the beasts; but Sh.e.l.ley, practising vegetarianism and buying crayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the ”boast” of the poet in _Alastor_:--
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred--
We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, and meet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given his boots to a poor woman.
Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Sh.e.l.ley is Leigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poor woman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Sh.e.l.ley carries her in his arms to the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. The householder slams it in his face, with an ”impostors swarm everywhere,”
and a ”Sir, your conduct is extraordinary.”
”Sir,” cried Sh.e.l.ley, ”I am sorry to say that _your_ conduct is not extraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. You will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head.”
It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen) decided that the Sh.e.l.ley who carried this poor stranger into shelter, fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need, was unfit to bring up his own children.
If Sh.e.l.ley allowed himself to be persuaded by G.o.dwin to abandon his missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves half-consciously from the G.o.dwinian notion that mankind are to be reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. ”My purpose,” he writes in the preface to _Prometheus_, ”has been ... to familiarise ...