Part 8 (1/2)

Death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in _Adonais_:

'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

and again:

The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s.

Heaven's light for ever s.h.i.+nes, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

In all the musical and visionary glory of _h.e.l.las_ we seem to hear a subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a prayer. At one moment Sh.e.l.ley toys with the dreary sublimity of the Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the _Dies irae_.

And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity.

That nightmare haunts Sh.e.l.ley in _h.e.l.las_:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the ”motto” of a symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn.

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most spontaneous stanzas in our language:

A brighter h.e.l.las rears its mountains From waves serener far.

He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:

O write no more the tale of Troy If earth Death's scroll must be, Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free.

He has turned from the empty abstraction of the G.o.dwinian vision of perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had driven history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole, complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future; but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it.

That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:

Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind.

The foul cubs like their parents are, Their den is in their guilty mind, And conscience feeds them with despair.

Some end there must be to the _perpetuum mobile_ of wrong and revenge.

And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion.

He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?

O cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?