Returning to Shelley
Shelley and the Romantic Revolution. By F. A. Lea. .(Routledge 12s. bd.) MR. LEA, a professed admirer of Mr. Middleton Murry, has done for Shelley very much what Mr. Murry did for Blake. Presupposing in his readers a considerable familiarity with Shelley's writings— pamphlets, essays, letters and fragmentary pieces as well as poetry —he dives straight for the ideas behind them. "The enterprise to which Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, devoted themselves was nothing less than the re-discovery, or re- creation, of religion." How far Shelley succeeded ; how far his search has value for us to-day—these are the questions that primarily interest Mr. Lea ; and the readers who are likely to get most from
his book are those who, like himself, have come to Shelley when they were in search of a religion, and have used his doubts, divisions and resolutions to help them to a belief by which they could live.
The book starts biographically. In discussing Shelley's early years Mr. Lea shows a commonsense insight into the stresses of the Shelley family life ; he draws a valuable distinction between Shelley's ideals and the priggishness with which he upheld them; and writes with sympathy and understanding of the rupture with Harriet. "It is quite probable that what his friends and bio- graphers understood him to mean by "unfaithfulness," and what he actually meant, were two different things. For the poet, it was enough that his wife demanded a coach and fine clothes, not to speak of a wet nurse, to prove that she was no longer his own."
In view of what Mr. Lea has to say of Shelley's isolation from other people it would have been interesting and valuable to have a similarly full interpretation of the relation between Shelley and Mary; but in the later chapters the biographical treatment is more sketchy, and the main weight is on Godwinism, Platonism, Rousseauism, anarchism. It would be as easy to get bogged in these ideas as in those of Blake's Prophetic Books, but Mr. Lea holds fast to the life- line of the poetry, using it at every stage to illustrate and illuminate his points ; and his readers will turn back again to the Ode to Mont Blanc, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and the West Wind, with a deeper sense of the underlying conflicts, of which in a measure the
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