Part 9 (1/2)
Sh.e.l.ley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical, pessimistic sense of ”eating and drinking” before we die, which one is so familiar with just now.
It is precisely this fact that those who reprobate Sh.e.l.ley's ”immorality” should remember. With him ”love” was truly a mystical initiation, a religious sacrament, a means of getting into touch with the cosmic secret, a path--and perhaps the only path--to the Beatific Vision.
It is not wise to turn away from Sh.e.l.ley because of his lack of ”humour,” of his lack of a ”sense of proportion.” The mystery of the world, whatever it may be, shows itself sometimes quite as indifferent as Sh.e.l.ley to these little nuances. We hear it crying aloud in the night with no humorous cry; and it is too often to stop our ears to what we hear, that we jest so lightly! It is doubtful whether Nature cares greatly for our ”sense of proportion.”
To return to his poetry, as poetry. The remarkable thing about Sh.e.l.ley's verse is the manner in which his whole physical and psychic temperament has pa.s.sed into it. This is so in a measure with all poets, but it is so especially with him. His beautiful epicene face, his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read his lines. They allure and baffle us, as the smile on the lips of the Mona Lisa. One has the impression of listening to a being who has really traversed the ways of the sea and returned with its secret. How else could those indescribable pearly s.h.i.+mmerings, those opal tints and rosy shadows, be communicated to our poor language? The very purity of his nature, that ethereal quality in it that strikes a chill into the heart of ”normal humanity,” lends a magic, like the reflection of moonlight upon ice, to these inter-lunar melodies. The same ethereal transparency of pa.s.sion which excites, by reason of its sublime ”immorality,” the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond ”the shadow of our night,” to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean ”music of the spheres” audible at last again. Such sounds has the _silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Sh.e.l.ley from the turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to bathe our foreheads in the ”dew of the morning” and cool our hands in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us underlies and overlooks this mad procession of ”births and forgettings;” whatever in us ”beacons from the abode where the Eternal are” rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the ”muddy vesture” that would ”grossly close it in.” What separates Sh.e.l.ley from all other poets is that with them ”art” is the paramount concern, and, after ”art,” morality.
With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of any material ”teaching;” one is simply transported into the high, cold regions where the creative G.o.ds build, like children, domes of ”many-coloured gla.s.s,” wherewith to ”stain the white radiance of eternity.” And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life, we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter with the old too-human zest, and let the ”ineffectual” madman pa.s.s and be forgotten!
I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Sh.e.l.ley's verse is precisely what dreams of the trans.m.u.tation of ”man” into ”beyond-man.”
That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food of the immortals.
And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something, sometimes, that responds to such strains as ”When the lamp is shattered” and ”One word is too often profaned.” Perhaps only those who have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hope with the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can enter completely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful, sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are made.
And the artless simplicity of Sh.e.l.ley's technique--much more really simple than the conscious ”childishness” exquisite though that is, of a Blake or Verlaine--lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the ”dying fall” of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are so naturally chosen, his images and metaphors! Even when they seem most remote, they are such as frail young hearts cannot help happening upon, as they soothe their ”love-laden souls” in ”secret hour.”
The infallible test of genuine poetry is that it forces us to recall emotions that we ourselves have had, with the very form and circ.u.mstance of their pa.s.sion. And who can read the verses of Sh.e.l.ley without recalling such? That peculiar poignancy of memory, like a sharp spear, which arrests us at the smell of certain plants or mosses, or nameless earth-mould, or ”growths by the margins of pond-waters;” that poignancy which brings back the indescribable balm of Spring and the bitter-sweetness of irremediable loss; who can communicate it like Sh.e.l.ley?
There are lovely touches of foreign scenery in his poems, particularly of the vineyards and olive gardens and clear-cut hill towns of Italy; but for English readers it will always be the rosemary ”that is for remembrance” and the pansies that ”are for thoughts” that give their perfume to the feelings he excites.
Other poets may be remembered at other times, but it is when the sun-warmed woods smell of the first primroses, and the daffodils, coming ”before the swallow dares,” lift up their heads above the gra.s.s, that the sting of this sweetness, too exquisite to last beyond a moment, brings its intolerable hope and its intolerable regret.
KEATS
It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beauty alone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to follow that terrible G.o.ddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The ”white implacable Aphrodite” cries aloud for blood--for the blood of our dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet we follow her--to the bitter end!
Beauty hath her Martyrs, as the rest; and of these Keats is the Protagonist; the youngest and the fairest; the most enamoured victim.
From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love, we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a born ”Pluralist” to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World, there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothing but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!
His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event in life, was ”pluralistic.” He did not ask that things should come in upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One he followed.
Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less _moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!
If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word ”materialistic”; but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too pa.s.sionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should have been driven by the phantom-flame of s.e.x-illusion to find all the magic and wonder of the Mystery he wors.h.i.+ped, caught, imprisoned, enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated, with a furious hatred, any b.a.s.t.a.r.d claims and privileges that insolently intruded themselves between the G.o.dlike senses of Man and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral Opinion? Intellectual Fas.h.i.+on? The manners and customs of the Upper Cla.s.ses? What were all these but vain impertinences, interrupting his desperate Pursuit? ”Every gentleman” he cried ”is my natural enemy!”
The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits.
His cry day and night was for ”new sensations”; and such ”sensation,” a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a l.u.s.t, a madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rus.h.i.+ng upon death, to him.
How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born, jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him bleeding to the ground!
But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening, drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very philtre of Sun-poison. ”A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever”! A Joy?
Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow.
We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!
What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing s.p.a.ces of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood the torment of the Wood-G.o.d and his mad joy, as the author of Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less ”vermeil-tinctured” moods, which might have prolonged his days, had he never met ”that girl.”
”The Pot of Basil” expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking, it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.
St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not quote a line of it, in a mere ”critical essay,” for fear of breaking such a spell!
The long-drawn solemn harmonies of ”Hyperion”--Miltonian, and yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is only increased when in that other ”Version,” the influence of Dante becomes evident. ”La Belle Dame Sans Merci!” Ah, there we find him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the psychic plane!