Volume I Part 6 (1/2)
On another occasion Sh.e.l.ley said to Trelawny--”The knaves are the cleverest; they profess to know everything; the fools believe them, and so they govern the world.” Which is a most sagacious observation. He said that ”Atheist!” in the mouth of orthodoxy was ”a word of abuse to stop discussion, a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to intimidate the wise and good.”
Mr. Gosse may reply that Sh.e.l.ley's conversations with Trelawny are not absolute evidence; that they were written down long afterwards, and that we cannot be sure of Sh.e.l.ley's using the precise words attributed to him. Very well then; be it so. Mr. Gosse has appealed to Sh.e.l.ley's ”writings,” and to Sh.e.l.ley's writings we will go. True, the epithet ”best” is inserted by Mr. Gosse as a saving qualification; but we shall disregard it, partly because ”best” is a disputable adjective, but more because _all_ Sh.e.l.ley's writings attest his Atheism.
Let us first go to Sh.e.l.ley's prose, not because it is his ”best” work (though some parts of it are exquisitely beautiful, often very powerful, and always chaste), but because prose is less open than verse to false conception and interpretation. In the fine fragment ”On Life” he acutely observes that ”Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive.” And he concludes ”It is infinitely improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind.” Be it observed, however, that Sh.e.l.ley does not dogmatise. He simply cannot conceive that mind is the _basis_ of all things. The cause of life is still obscure. ”All recorded generations of mankind,” Sh.e.l.ley says, ”have wearily-busied themselves in inventing answers to this question; and the result has been--Religion.”
Sh.e.l.ley's essay ”On a Future State” follows the same line of reasoning as his essay ”On Life.” He considers it highly probable that _thought_ is ”no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied ma.s.s, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their positions with regard to each other.” His conclusion is that ”the desire to be for ever as we are, the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change,” which is common to man and other living beings, is the ”secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.”
If we turn to Sh.e.l.ley's published letters we shall find abundant expressions of hostility to and contempt for religion. Those letters may deserve the praise of Matthew Arnold or the censure of Mr. Swinburne; but, in either case, they may be taken as honest doc.u.ments, written to all sorts of private friends, and never intended for publication.
Byron's letters were pa.s.sed about freely, and largely written for effect; Sh.e.l.ley's were written under ordinary conditions, and he unbosomed himself with freedom and sincerity.
From one of his early letters we find that he contemplated a translation of the _System of Nature_, which is frequently quoted in the notes to _Queen Mob_. He couples Jehovah and Mammon together as fit for the wors.h.i.+p of ”those who delight in wickedness and slavery.” In a letter to Henry Reveley he pictures G.o.d as delighted with his creation of the earth, and seeing it spin round the sun; and imagines him taking out ”patents to supply all the suns in s.p.a.ce with the same manufacture.”
When the poet was informed by Oilier that a certain gentleman (it was Archdeacon Hare) hoped he would humble his soul and ”receive the spirit into him,” Sh.e.l.ley replied: ”if you know him personally, pray ask him from me what he means by receiving the _spirit into me_; and (if really it is any good) how one is to get at it.” He goes on to say: ”I was immeasurably amused by the quotation from Schlegel about the way in which the popular faith is destroyed--first the Devil, then the Holy Ghost, then G.o.d the Father. I had written a Lucianic essay to prove the same thing.” In the very year of his death, writing to John Gisborne, he girds at the popular faith in G.o.d, and with reference to one of its most abhorrent doctrines he exclaims--”As if, after sixty years' suffering here, we were to be roasted alive for sixty million more in h.e.l.l, or charitably annihilated by a _coup de grace_ of the bungler who brought us into existence at first.”--A dozen other quotations from Sh.e.l.ley's letters might be given, all to pretty much the same effect, but the foregoing must suffice.
A thorough a.n.a.lysis of Sh.e.l.ley's poetry, showing the essential Atheism which runs through it from beginning to end, would require more s.p.a.ce than we have at our command. We shall therefore simply point out, by means of instances, how indignantly or contemptuously he always refers to religion as the great despot and impostor of mankind.
The _Revolt of Islam_ stigmatises ”Faith” as ”an obscene worm.” The sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte concludes with a reference to ”b.l.o.o.d.y Faith, the foulest birth of time.” Sh.e.l.ley frequently conceives Faith as serpentine and disgusting. In _Rosalind and Helen_ he writes--
Grey Power was seated Safely on her ancestral throne; And Faith, the Python, undefeated, Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on Her foul and wounded train.
In the great and splendid _Ode to Liberty_ the image undergoes a Miltonic sublimation.
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves Hung tyranny; beneath, sat deified The sister-pest, congregator of slaves.
Invariably does the poet cla.s.s religion and oppression together--”Religion veils her eyes: Oppression shrinks aghast.”--”Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred brood.”--”And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne.”
Mr. Herbert Spencer writes with learning and eloquence about the Power of the Universe and the Unknowable. Sh.e.l.ley p.r.i.c.ked this bubble of speculation in the following pa.s.sage:
What is that Power?
Some moonstruck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and wors.h.i.+pped was his own, His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown.
In one verse of the _Ode to Liberty_ the poet exclaims:
O that the free would stamp the impious name Of ------ into the dust or write it there.
What is the omitted word? Mr. Swinburne says the only possible word is--G.o.d. We agree with him. Anything else would be a ridiculous anti-climax, and quite inconsistent with the powerful description of--
This foul gordian word, Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind Into a ma.s.s, irrefragably firm, The axes and the rods that awe mankind.
”Pope” and ”Christ” are alike impossible. With respect to ”mankind” they are but local designations. The word must be universal. It is _G.o.d_.
The glorious speech of the Spirit of the Hour, which terminates the third Act of _Prometheus Unbound_--that superb drama of emanc.i.p.ate Humanity--lumps together ”Thrones, altars, judgment seats, and prisons,”
as parts of one gigantic system of spiritual and temporal misrule. Man, when redeemed from falsehood and evil, rejects his books ”of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance”; and the veil is torn aside from all ”believed and hoped.” And what is the result? Let the Spirit of the Hour answer.
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncirc.u.mscribed, but man Equal, uncla.s.sed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, wors.h.i.+p, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise; but man Pa.s.sionless? no, yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them; Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
What a triumphant flight! The poet springs from earth and is speedily away beyond sight--almost beyond conception--like an elemental thing.
But his starting-point is definite enough. Man is exempt from awe and wors.h.i.+p; from spiritual as well as political and social slavery; king over himself, ruling the anarchy of his own pa.s.sions. And the same idea is sung by Demogorgon at the close of the fifth Act. The ”Earth-born's spell yawns for heaven's despotism,” and ”Conquest is dragged captive through the deep.”