BOOKS.

A STUDY OF SHELLEY.f -THIS Study of Shelley is devoted to intellectual exposition, rather than to literary criticism pure and simple. Its author has chosen to focus Shelley in such a manner that the highest lights in his picture are cast upon those features which have been moulded by speculative thought, instead of on those which testify to the fine phrenzy of bardio inspiration. He speaks of ,Shelley's message, not of the manner of its delivery, and cares less for the quality of the song, as song, than for the thoughts and aspirations which the singer strove to embody. There is in this volume much panegyric, but Dr. Todhunter is not mainly a panegyrist ; there is some criticism, but he is not mainly a critic ; he is above all things an interpreter, and his object is to expound the philosophy which is, as it were, the body of Shelley's work, and which ho believes, not altogether without reason, the poet himself considered a thing of much greater importance than the cunningly-wrought vesture of verse which has clothed it with immortality. If this, however, were really Shelley's own comparative esti- mate, there can be little doubt that it was a mistaken one; and therefore the first question we feel impelled to ask is whether the task which Dr. Todhunter has set himself to perform is really worth performing, or, at any rate, whether the subject 'demands the elaborate and detailed treatment which it receives in this volume. As a poet, Shelley stands iu the first rank ; as * Note, trailing his ooat.tails, to provoke his adversary to tread upon them, is one of Paddy's commonest wagers of battle,

t d Study of &VW, By John Todhunter. London 0. Kagan Paul and 00.

a thinker, ho can hardly be said to find a place in the second; and we are interested in his philosophy only as we should be interested in anything which served as an intellectual motive

for transcendently beautiful poetry. Still, it is but natural that admiring readers of Shelley should wish to form a clear idea of what he really had to say, of the true im- port of what Dr. Todhunter calls his message ; and to such readers, this volume is sure to be interesting and suggestive. The opening chapter on " The Personality of Shelley " can hardly be said to suggest any thoughts which will be new to those who are fairly well read in Shelley literature; but the young student can hardly fail to find it useful as a starting- point, and he will probably enjoy it all the more for the some- what overstrained rhetoric, of which there is a little, perhaps a great deal, too much for the more mature reader. We can all admire eloquent writing, in its place ; but in a work which is professedly analytical and expository, clearness is the one thing needful, and a combination of perfect clearness with that par- ticular kind of eloquence which Dr. Todhunter affects is one of the rarest things in literature. This, for example, is the manner in which a contrast is instituted between the diverse mani- festations of the revolutionary spirit in the poetry of Byron and Shelley :—

" This essential difference in the spirits of the two men breathes in every line of their poetry. Shelley lives with the winds above the highest mountaintops, above the home of the thunder, where Byron dwells, and whence he descends, with storm of sounding rhetoric and avalanches of lava of icy or fiery sarcasm, to desolate the smiling cornfields of our average morality. Hence, the more immediate effect of Byron's brilliant personality upon the world of men,whioh Shelley's remoter light is but now reaching. The respeot- able public could to a great extent ignore the shrill song of the poet of Prometheus, while the author of Cain and Don Juan made himself distinctly audible, Byron wields terrestrial thunderbolts, which blaze and barn, terrify the shepherds, and do damage to the moral haystacks and thatch of small domestic pieties. He knocks all the domesticities about our ears with a blinding glare; appalling noise, and much smell of sulphur, stalking over the earth with the air of an infernal spirit. Shelley's poetry is like vivid sheet lightning, or the aurora, shedding strange illumination upon this lower world, yet a thing of the upper sky. The superstitious cross themselves in terror, and think that the end of the world has come ; and oven those who are most weatherwise know only that something is being done in the bosom of the ether,—something which betokens change."

Such a "storm of sounding rhetoric" as that which sweeps through these sentences might befit an extemporaneous doge,

but it undoubtedly lacks the restraint, the sobriety, and the lucidity which we naturally look for in a work of expository

criticism. When a writer professes to analyse Shelley's per- sonality, we think that he ought to say something more

definite and readily apprehensible than this. It is impossible to feel that we are being seriously instructed when we read that Shelley lived with the winds above the mountain-tops, or that his poetry is like sheet lightning or the aurora; and as instruc- tion is the thing which this volume aims to impart, writing of this kind is both unedifying and irritating.

We will not, however, be guilty of the unfairness of directing attention only to the weak points of a book which contains much that is not only interesting, but valuable. Even in the chapter from which we have quoted there are numerous pas- sages which, if not markedly original, are thoroughly sound and discriminating. At a time when the members of the " art for art" school have got into a habit of talking about Shelley as if he were their peculiar property, there is something specially opportune in the reminder that " Shelley, while early abandon- ing the self-consciously didactic in poetry, and expressing his abhorrence of it, never, or scarcely ever, becomes academic,— never degenerates from a man into a mere poet. The cant of the present day about art' and the artist ' would have sounded in his ears like the babble of fools." The phrase " a mere poet"

is, perhaps, a little unfortunate ; for the poetic faculty is an

enlargement and quickening, not a limitation, of the normal human capabilities ; but we know what is meant, and nothing can be more certain than that even Shelley's splendid lyrical gift would have been wasted in ineffectual beating of the air, if it had not been guided and directed to definite ends by the semi-intellectual, semi-emotional force, of which it was the instrument.

Still more suggestive are the pages devoted to a comparison between the speculative position of Shelley and that of two such very diverse thinkers and feelers as William Blake and

John Stuart Mill ; but undoubtedly, the portions of the work that are most useful and interesting are those which are devoted to analysis and exposition of the intellectual motifs of single

psems. The chapters which attempt to expound. what Sweden- borgians would call the " spiritual sense" of the Prowthess 'Unbound, testify both to the clear insight and to the patient Labour of their writer. it is impossible to doubt that in the mtin, Dr. Toihnnter's interpretation is the true one ; and even when we feel occasionally tempted to call in question some hypothetical explanation of an obscure detail, we are com- pelled to pause by the consciousness of the inability to provide any better solution of a difficult problem.

The estimate of The Cenci is also a very fine and entirely adequate piece of literary criticism, the style of which is free from either exaggeration or incoherence. The following passage grikes us as being nothing more than a just tribute to Shelley's great gift of dramatic realisation, which has hardly received the amount of appreciation that it really deserves :-

" In the third groat scone, the passion rises to the pitch of tragic horror; the protagonists meet face to face for that final struggle which forms the main subject of the play. Except in the tragedies of Webster, it would be difficult to find a scene more full of the weird horror iu which they delighted, yet so natural and unstrained. Most of them—Ford, for instance—produce their effects by means of nolours strong, but false. The actors are not men and women, but vague, Titanic personages animated with ultra-human passions ; the action takes place not on this earth, hut in some sunless limbo which only such creatures inhabit. bore, for once, Shelley has got his foot upon the solid earth, and proves himself a true modern, in his sense of reality, his grasp of the main facts,of an historical period, and his power of rendering human character. The Elizabethans, as a rule, must rank far below our average novelists in these respects ; and even Webster himself cannot compare with Shelley for delicacy and truth to Nature. Count Cenci is a monster, but he is a monster such as we know and feel has been spawned from the mire of this actual world. We have not here the unnatural and barren horrors of a Revenger's Tragedy or Fatal Dowry ; wo have a page out of the true history of human passion."

This is both well felt and well put, and Dr. Toilhuuter's remarks upon Shelley's dramatic fragments, notably upon the few scenes of the historical drama, Charles which Mr. W. M. Rossetti has so admirably edited, are equally good, and perhaps oven more interesting, from the fact that previous critics have not given to this fine " torso of a play" the amount of attention which it undoubtedly deserves, and that therefore the ground is comparatively untrodden. Of the more popular of the lyrics less is said than might have been expected, probably because the writer felt that

less was left to say ; but among the criticisms that are given, there is one which has at least the merit of novelty. Concern-

ing The Cloud, which ninety-nine out of every hundred readers would mention, if they were asked to name half-a-dozen of the poet's most exquisite and characteristic utterances, we are told that it is,— "Just the kind of poem to be popular in a Golden Treasury, where readers might get it by heart, and fancy they knew Shelley. All Shelley's genius cannot make musical this sing-song metro, with its monotonous recurrence of clashing rhymes. A violinist might as v ell attempt a solo on the banjo. As a piece of natural science, prettily poetised, it is a delicate morsel enough."

This is hard on those bold, bad men," the buyers of Golden Treasuries, who fancy they know Shelley ; but it is still harder upon those who really do know him, but to whom it has never occurred that The Cloud is not as perfectly melodious in treat- ment as it is delicately etherial in conception. "De gustibus non est disputandum," and we cannot argue with Dr. Tod- hunter's tympanum ; we can only say that most of his readers will regard his verdict as an almost ludicrous piece of critical perversity. A single offence may, however, be passed over and forgiven. Want of due appreciation is not one of the writer's besetting sins,—he is more frequently tempted to err in the direction of too undiscriminating enthusiasm ; but this is the weak point of all ardent Shelloyans, and in spite of occasional extravagance both of matter and form, this Study of Shelley provides a considerable amount of both pleasant and instructive reading. If, however, Dr. Todhunter wishes to produce thoroughly satisfying work of this kind, he must abandon the hazardous doctrine that, in any case, " criticism should become poetry." It will never become poetry, but in the attempt it will assuredly lose its value as criticism.