THE LAST MONUMENT TO SHELLEY
Vol. VIII. of The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In ten volumes. Newly edited with Introduction and Critical and Bibliographical Notes. By Roger Ingpon and Walter E. Peck. (Bean. The Julian Editions. 3 guineas a volume.) Fr is astonishing that imtil tb-day no complete edition- of Shelley's verse, prose, and correspondence has existed. No
doubt the restrictions; due to family sensitiveness, imposed by Shelley's father, Sir Timothy, on Mary Shelley have been responsible for this delay. The longer the task is deferred after an author's death, the more certainty there is of his unpublished fragments being dispersed into the various holes and corners of the house of literature.
Until Sir-Timothy's death in 1844---twenty-two years after the poet-was drowned—Mary was prohibited from publishing any memoir of the poet, or any complete edition of his letters.
The despotic old gentleman relaxed a little in 1839, when the
widow•was able to-give to the world her valuable edition of the poems with- her warm-hearted and intimate annotations. ' And
again in the following year She was able tci print his Essayi, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.
She did no more, and it fell to the lot of Thornas Jefferson Hogg to write the first Life. He had already prepared fOr it by contributing a series of articles in 1882-8 describing Shelley's early life. In 1855, therefore, he was commissioned by the
family to write the Life. When the first two volumes appeared, however, the commissioners so far disapproved of his work as to withhold all further material. In Mr. Ingpen's words, "it might be described with certain reservations as the confessions of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, with recollections of his friend P. B. S." Hogg certainly had no sense of respon- sibility. He was evidently a shy, self-centred creature, living in a fantastic world of his own, triple-barricaded Ly his smoky -scholarship and worldly cynicism.
• Nothing more was done until 1880, when Mr. Buxton Forman. published a collected edition. This included some additional letters. Then in 1886 Edward Dowden published a Life which incorporated still more of the poet's correspondence.
Following up all this work has been the patient and persis- tent Mr. Ingpen: He seems to be the perfect scholar ; a man religiously devoted to his subject for its own sake, yet one who never loses his sense of proportion in a desire either to shine personally or to give undue publicity to his subject. . We have already known what to expect, by his edition of the Shelley letters which appeared in 1909. That was excellent ; but now he is able to add to that some hundred more, many of them hitherto unprinted. Dr. Peck, acting for him across the Atlantic, has routed out all the rich owners of autograph letters and fragments, and the final result of their efforts is that we shall shortly have, in three volumes of this edition; the majority of the poet's correspondence from the time he was a boy at Eton to the hour of his death.
Volume VIII., the first to appear, covers the early years up to the middle of 1812, when the young genius of 20, with his girl wife, was proposing to introduce into their household the pseudo-sibylline Elizabeth Hitchener, in the capacity of " soul-mate."
These were the years in which one's faith in Shelley is put to the test. He was floundering in theories, and groping in a most uncomely series of gestures after some means of putting those theories into practice. He plunged into politics, ethics, religion, and poetry with all the confidence of a young giant papped on the milk of Plato. But the early effort made the immature voice a little shrill, and the heart a little cruel in its self-conscious leaping after freedom, the freedom for self and for the human race.
There is an enormous amount to be said on this period of the poet's life, but here our duty is to give our space to praising this superb edition. Remembering the poet at this un- gainly time of growing pains, we can solace ourselves with the following impression of him five years later, given by a hard-headed old Dundee merchant named Baxter. "As to Shelley, I confess to you I was very much deceived by the preconceived estimate I had formed of him, and very agreeably disappointed in the man I found him to be. I had soinehow or other imagined him to be an ignorant, silly, half-witted enthusiast, with intellect scarcely sufficient to keep him out of a madhouse, and morals that fitted him only for a brothel ; how much then was I surprised and delighted to find Iiiin a being of rare genius and talent, of truly republican frugality and plainness of manners, and of a soundness of principle and delicacy of moral tact that might put to shame (if shame they had) many of his detractors, and with all this so amiable that you have only to be half an hour in his company to convince you that there is not an atom of malevolence in his whole composition. Is there any wonder that I should become attached to such a man, holding out the hand of kindness and friendship towards me ? Certainly not." Shelley was then only twenty-five. • This Julian Edition is a beautiful thing, the type is a joy to behold, and the cover design is just right ; strong, not "arty," but in the ripe tradition of book production. The very *mill of this .volume carries one away to the workshops Of the binders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, There are no illustrations, and I believe are to be none. It is just as well, for nothing has perpetuated the false idea of
Shelley so much as the various exophthalmic-looking portraits, • . The remaining nine volumes are to appear at intervals of about six weeks, and we hope to be able to say something more of them later.
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