BOOKS.

1111. STOPFORD BROOKE'S SELECTIONS FROM 511 ELLEY.*

THE lovers of Shelley owe much to Mr. Stopford ]]route for the preliminary essay to this little volume of Felectious,—an essay

full of power and true appreciation of Shelley's poetry. We say " appreciation," rather than " criticism," because while Mr.

Brooke performs that greatest of all services for students of any poet, the helping us to understand Shelley's poems better, we doubt whether, on the whole, he does help much to define Shelley's relation to other English poets aa•1 other English literature,—whether, in fact, he does discern what Shelley and Shelley's poetry are not, as well as he discerns many of the positive elements in both. Nothing can be better than what Mr. Brooke says of Shelley's passion for indefinite- ness, and of his passion for changefulness. Both were curiously powerful in Shelley and both were expressed with a curious felicity, so that characteristics which, if we only knew them by name, we should suppose to express mere deficiency of imaginative power, because all indefiniteness and changeful- ness would appear calculated to exaggerate the natural in-

adequacy and inconstancy of human nature rather than to increase the strength of its intellectual or spiritual grasp, really do express very high imaginative power of a pet:ulies kind. The central point of Mr. Brooke's criticism of Shelley, and the best piece of writing in his " preface," as he calls this fine

preliminary essay, is contained in the following passage —

" The truth is, the indefinite was a beloved element of la life..

Lift not the painted veil,' he cries, which those who live call Life.' Ills worst pain was when he thought he had lifted it, and seemed to know the reality. But he did not always believe that he had done so, or he preferred to deny his conclusion. Not as a thinker in prose, but as a poet, he frequently loved the vague with an intensity which raised it almost into an object of worship. The speech of the Third • Pomo from Shelley. kclected and Mranged by Stopfurd A. Brutal). Lou- don: litu:millao.

Spirit, in the Ode to Ilearen, is a wonderful instance of what I may call the rapture in indefiniteness. But this rapture had its other side, and when lie was depressed by ill-health, the sense of a voice- less, boundless abyss, which for ever held its secret, and in which he floated, deepened his depression. The horror of a homeless and centrelcss heart which then beset him, is passionately expressed in the Cenci.' Beatrice is speaking

Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts, if there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world ; The wide, grey, lampless, deep, napeupled.

But, on the whole, whether it brought him pain or joy, ho preferred to be without a fixed belief with regard to a source of Nature. Could be have done otherwise, could he have given continuous sub- stance in his thoughts to the great conception of ideal Pantheism in which Wordsworth rested, Shelley's whole work on Nature and his description of her would have been more direct, palpable, and homely. He would have loved Nature more, and made us love it Snore. The result of all this is that a great deal of his poetry of Nature has no ground in thought, and consequently wants power. It is not that he could not have had this foundation and its strength. Both are his when he chooses. But, for the most part, lie did not choose. Such was his temperament, that he liked better to live with Nature and be without a centre for her. He would be

'Dizzy, lost—but unbewailing.* But I am not sure whether the love of the undefined did not, in the first instance, arise out of his love of the constantly changing, and that itself out of the very character of his intellect, and the temper of his heart. His intellect, incessantly shaken into movement by his imagination, continually threw into new shapes the constant ideas he possessed. His heart, out of which are the issues of imagination, loved deeply a few great conceptions, but wearied almost immediately of any special form in which he embodied them, and changed it for another. In the matter of human love, he was uncontent with all the earthly:images he formed of the ideal he had loved and continued to love in his own soul, and he could not but tend to change the images. In the ordinary life of feeling, the moment any emotion arose in his heart, a hundred others came rushing from every quarter into the original feeling, and mingled with it, and changed its out- ward expression. Sometimes they all clamoured for expression, and we see that Shelley often tried to answer their call. It is when he does this that he is most obscure—obscure through abundance of feelings and their forms. His intellect, heart, and imagination wore in a kind of Heraclitean flux, perpetually evolving fresh images, and the new, in swift succession, clouding the old ; and, then, impa- tient weariness of rest or of any one thing whatever, driving forward within him this incessant movement, ho sank, at last and for the time, exhausted= As summer clouds disburtheued of their rain.' There is no need to illustrate this from his poetry. The huddling rush of images, the changeful crowd of thoughts are found on almost every page. It is often only the oneness of the larger underlying emotion or idea which makes the work clear. We strive to grasp a Protons as wo road. In an instant the thought or the feeling Shelley is ex- pressing becomes impalpable, vanishes, reappears in another form, and then in a multitude of other forms, each in turn eluding the grasp of the intellect, until at last we seize the god himself, and know what Shelley meant, or Shelley felt. In all this he resembles, at a great distance, Shakspere ; and has, at that distance, and in this aspect of his art, a strength and a weakness similar to, but not iden- tical with, that which Shakspere possessed, — the strength of changeful activity of imagination, the weakness of being unable, through eagerness, to omit, to select, to coordinate his images. Yet, at his highest, when the full force of genius is urged by full and dominant emotion, what poetry it is ! How magnificent is the impas- sioned unity of the whole in spite of the diversity of the parts ! But this lofty height is reached iu only a few of Shelley's lyrics, and in a few passages in his longer poems. At almost every point, the scenery of the sky he drew so fondly images this temper of Shelley's mind, this incessant building and unbuilding, this cloud-changefulness of his imagination.

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbnild it again.'

That is a picture of Shelley himself at work on a feeling or on a thought. ' I change, but I cannot die.' "

We greatly doubt Mr. Brooke's assertion that Shelley could, if he would, have given to his poetry of Nature the founda- tion and strength of absolute reality. We know of nothing to bear out this assertion. We have searched Shelley in vain for one picture which would supply the place of Nature's realities to our imagination. He gives us plenty of visions which Nature never gives, plenty of images drawn from Nature which are adapted to kindle or damp desire, to light up hope, to awaken the ardour of expectation, to oppress us with melan- choly, to overwhelm us with despair. But even in what Mr. Brooke rightly calls his greatest nature-poetry, even iu paint- ing the scenery of the clouds, the growth of the morning, the falling of the night, even in pictures of dawn and sunset, he never gives us anything approaching to a substitute for the reality it- self, only a rush of floating images which to him who has seen the reality calls up a throng of associated memories, and excites still more even of that hurry of the spirits, that breathlessness of won- der with which such sights are seen by such as Shelley, but never anything like the equivalent in words of what the eye and ear would discern. Shelley's imagination was too swift and eager

for firm drawing of any kind. He was, as Mr. Brooke finely says, a true disciple of Heraclitus ; he loved to catch Nature in the very moment of change, and to render the change itself

even more amazing and more overwhelming than it would be in reality, by accumulating upon it the thick-coming fancies sug- gested to a spirit always panting for something fresh, and always more than sated with its own experience. Of course, to such a mind it was impossible to give us what Nature gives. if we took our conceptions of Nature from Shelley's poetry alone, we should have no sense of solidity, none of steadfastness, none of the eternal sameness at the roots of life, none of the amazing perseverance, and patience, and constancy in detail, and substantiality, without which we could hardly take in the meaning of external Nature at all. Shelley's universe is a universe which changes with every flickering of his own soul. Now, a universe which changed with every flickering of one's own soul would not be a real universe at all, but an ideal one. The very thing which dis- criminates reality from ideality, is this solemn persistency with which qualities and attributes force themselves on us quite out of keeping with the momentary attitudes of our own feeling, —and not only out of keeping with them, but in complete in- dependence of them. In Shelley's universe, nothing is ever independent of his own soul. If he does not paint the essence of what he loves, he paints the essence of what he fears or hates ; he is ever in chase of some object of desire, or in flight from some object of dread ; he is always, like the " spirit of the hour " in one of his own poems, " drinking the wind of his own speed ;" and though that is a phase of Nature, it is not a phase that, if we had nothing else to teach us, could convince us of its independence of ourselves. Without experiencing year after year and age after age the steady commonplaceness of Nature, we might imagine, as Shelley's poems make us imagine, that the universe was one vast mutability, reflecting nothing

but the infinite changes of a half-impersonal spirit of desire

or dread.

What Mr. Stopford Brooke seems to us to fail in realising, is the very great defect which this characteristic of Shelley imparts to his work as a whole. Mr. Brooke says, for example, of Shelley's influence on theology :—

" Still greater is the unrecognised work he did in the same way for theology in England. That theology was no better than all theology had become under the influence of the imperial and feudal ideas of Europe. Its notion of God, and of man in relation to God, partly Hebraic, and therefore sacerdotal and sacrificial, partly deeply dyed with asceticism and other elements derived from the Oriental notion of the evil of matter, was further modified by the political views of the Roman Empire, transferred to God by the Roman Church. And when the universal ideas regarding mankind, and a return to nature, were put forth by France, they clashed instantly with this limited, sacerdotal, ascetic, aristocratic, and feudal theology. The sovereign right of God, because he was omnipotent, to destroy the greater part of his subjects, the right of a caste of priests to impose their doctrines on all, and to exile from religion all who did not agree with them ; the view that whatever God was represented to do was right, though it might directly contradict the nature, the conscience, and the heart of Man ; these and other related views had been brought to the bar of humanity, and condemned from the intellectual point of view by a whole tribe of thinkers. But if a veteran theology is to be disarmed and slain, it needs to be brought not only into the arena of thought and argument, but into the arena of poetic emotion. A great part of that latter work was done in England by Shelley. He indirectly made, as time went on, an ever-increasing number of men feel that the will of God could not be in antagonism to the universal ideas concerning Man, that his character could not be in contradiction to the moralities of the heart, and that the destiny he willed for man- kind must be as universal and as just and loving as himself. There are more clergymen, and more religious laymen than we imagine, who trace to the emotion Shelley awakened in them when they were young, their wider and better views of God. Many men, also, who were quite careless of religion, yet cared for poetry, were led, and are still led, to think concerning the grounds of a true worship, by the moral enthusiasm which Shelley applied to theology. He made emotion burn around it, and we owe to him .a great deal of its nearer advance to the teaching of Christ."

Now, we should say that Shelley's poetry had done at least as much harm as good in this direction,—perhaps more harm than good. No doubt, he made it necessary to all who read him to feel that love is the essence of God, but no one helped more than Shelley to confuse the true nature of divine love. Which of Shelley's readers can say how he distinguished, or whether he did distinguish, what the object of love ought to be ? how love was to conquer evil ? whether evil should be loved or hated ? what sacrifice implies ? whether sacrifice be of the essence of all true worship, or of the essence of the perversion of worship, and a hundred other questions of this sort, which lie at the very roots of all religious life. Shelley

was so eager and passionate, so impatient of the permanent limits of all righteousness, so forgetful that the difference between good and evil is often the difference between restraining your desires so that they shall not pass a given limit, and allowing them to over- leap that limit, that his poetry wholly misrepresents the case against theology, as, indeed, all the disciples of a religion of changeful desire must misrepresent it. Eternal laws, before which the spirit of desire must learn to quail, were almost as abhorrent to Shelley as coldness and selfishness themselves. And there- fore his poetry, so far as it touches theology, is always overdone, and sometimes impotently and frantically irreverent. Aud so, too, with morality. He has no awe in him. There is nothing his poetry will not try to delineate, however unnatural it may be to break through the sacred reserves of human nature. And on this side of his poetry Mr. Stopford Brooke seems to us not only not to paint him adequately, but to misrepresent him.

Mr. Stopford Brooke seems wholly insensible to that element in Shelley which made even so poetic a nature as Charles Kingsley's shrink from a certain vein in Shelley's poetry as an abuse of Nature, and made him denounce it,—and here, no doubt, he was guilty of Kingsleyan exaggeration,—as much more tainting than the worst poems of Byron.

These, then, are, to our minds, the great defects of Shelley's poetry,---want of reality, which makes him bewildering ; want of self-restraint, which makes him occasionally unmanly ; want of moral and spiritual awe, which makes him now and then revolting ; and on all these points, Mr. Stopford Brooke says nothing at all. He rightly attributes to Shelley, we think,

"the lyrical cry" in its highest form,—at least, so far as the highest form of the lyrical cry is possible without any very strong grasp on any-reality outside the soul. There is nothing

in all our literature like the cry of Shelley's despair, when a poignant emotion assures him that something has escaped him which he can never recover. We do not know where to find,

whether in Shakespeare or any other poet, the equal, for in- stance, of the following lines:— "When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead—

When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed.

When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not ; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute :- No song but sad dirges,

Like the wind through a ruined cell,

Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled Love first leaves the well-built nest, The weak one is singled To endure what is once possest.

O Love ! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier ?

Its passions will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high : Bright reason will mock thee, Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter,

When leaves fall and cold winds come."

In a selection like this, Mr. Brooke could hardly fail, and he has not failed. But why, when he bestows as it seems to us, praise so much too high on the too rarified and sublimated poetry of Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound," does he omit to quote the most exquisite of the verses it contains ? We cannot find anywhere in Mr. Brooke's selection Shelley's wonderful de- scription,—put, of course, into the month of one of his innumer- able and indistinguishable "spirits,"—of the inextricable inter- lacing in the Universe between pain and love :—

" Ali, sister, Desolation is a delicate thing !

It walks not on the earth, it floats not in the air, But treads with silent footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear ; Who, soothed to false repose, by the nodding plumes above, And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aerial joy and call the monster Love,

And wake to find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet."

Surely that is a great deal finer and more wonderful than those wearisome and unreal dialogues between the phantoms of the Earth and the Moon, from which Mr. Brooke has given us such unnecessarily copious extracts.