MR. FORMAN'S SHELLEY.* THERE are many points in Mr. Forman's

method of editorship on which question might be raised, but he Makes his principles

* The Poetical It of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Harry Buxton Forman.

iu 4 vole. London; Reeves and Turner.

clear, and seldom departs from them. This is a great merit in a Shelley editor. It has been so much the habit of late years to alter and amend on no fixed principle, and in the absence of any authority—manuscript or other—that it is refreshing to meet with an editor who errs mostly through dogged adherence to his text. Of the corruptions which have crept into the poems of Shelley some are to he accounted for through the intense streets of imagi- native energy under which he composed, and his aversion to the patient labour of correction of the press when intently occupied with some fresh scheme, as lee often was ; others, to his absence from England, when at least half of his poems were published, and when the correction of the press had to be undertaken by friends ; and others still, to the perverse in- gonuities of later editors, who, if they did not detect the mean- ing at a glance, freely introduced their own emendations. Of all the corruptions, none are so bad as some of these last. One of Mr. Forman's great merits is that he is not thus facile. He will not venture on the slightest emendation without having so far satisfied himself of two things,—(1) how the corruption came there, and (2) how most likely Shelley himself would have dealt with it. Thus,- minute and overlaboured as his work sometimes seems, it has an element of real dramatic interest when closely studied. Mr. Forman reveals much of Shelley's mind and methods by his efforts to get at Shelley's intention ; and as his constant aim is to interpret one passage which is corrupt, or

which may not have been corrected by the author, by Shelley's procedure in the case of one that had come under his eye and been revised in all its stages, we have a fuller insight afforded us into certain characteristics of the poet than anywhere else, save in Mr. Richard Garnett's most valuable Relics of Shelley, where

something of the same process was most intelligently gone through.

It is the easiest matter possible, as has been well said, in the case of a difficulty, to suggest a reading that will look plausible ;

but this dramatic element in editorship has its special value, and is not to be maintained save by such clear conceptions as we have found Mr. Forman to be actuated by. His plan of rele- gating to a concluding section the immature poems—among

which is included " Queen Mab," which Shelley actually wished to withdraw—has our entire approval. On this matter Mr, Forman says well :—

" Of at least one point I have no doubt, namely, that everything distinctly immature should form a separate chronology ; and it is for that reason that the immature Queen Mab,' instead of preceding the mature' Alastor,' in which Shelley's real poetic career begins, is treated as the climax of the juvenile period. Shelley lived to protest against its being published at all, but it has now become an inalienable part of the world's possessions, and all we can do, out of respect to his memory, is to assign to it the position which he assignod,—that of a juvenile work."

The edition therefore commences with " Alastor," the first of the

mature poems, so viewed ; and the poems, with the exception of the translations, which form a section by themselves, follow in the order of their production. One very good instance of Mr Forman's method of dealing with a difficulty is found in " Alastor," where "rippling rivulet," under the hands of Mrs.

Shelley and Mr. Rossetti, took the place of the more expressive " leaping rivulet." He says

" Mr. Rossetti follows Mrs. Shelley's later editions (from 1839 onwards) in printing rippling rivulet for leaping rivulet. Why a critic should elect to credit Shelley with that piece of Verbal mosaic it is not easy to guess, but the means by which Mrs. Shelley arrived at the corruption are not far to seek. In the Posthumous Poems the printer put reaping for leap- ing, and it is to be assumed that Mrs. Shelley using that text for the preparation of the 1889 edition, saw there was a blunder, and attempted to set it right conjecturally, instead of referring to the text of her husband."

We are glad to see that- Mr. Forman thoughtfully recalls a suggested reading of " the " for " one " in that passage of 4 Alastor,"— ",But some inconstant star

Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,"

because we feel sure that Shelley's purpose was to give force to the idea of the solitary stillness of the place, and because the acceptance of this reading has enabled Mr. Forman to illustrate effectively by analogy a difficult passage in the "Prometheus Unbound," where, at page 180, Vol. IL, the Second Spirit clearly uses " between " for "through," in precisely the same way. We hold, too, that Mr. Forman is absolutely right in rejecting the reading of clod for clog, in the last line of stanza vi, of the Dedica- tion of 4 4 Leon and Cythna ;" and we cannot but regard that fatal defect of construction which leads to the nonsense of a boat being cut by its own keel in the last stanza of the third canto of " Laon and Cythna," as being easily remediable by a very simple tranapo-

sition, which, we fancy, is needful only because of a transposition on the part of the printers. It should read :—

" And the swift waves the little boat which boro Wore out by its keen keel, the' slantingly."

We are thoroughly at one with Mr. Forman in his emendation of "hues of flame" for " hues of grace," in the twelfth stanza of the ninth canto, for the fact of a recurrence of the rhyme " flame" is only analogous to a form of licence which Shelley used more and more freely towards the end of the poem, follow- ing Dante and the Spanish poets, as it would appear, in the intentional use of identical words for rhymes, till in the last canto we have no fewer than twelve instances, which could not possibly have escaped the poet's eye, any more than the Cristo of Dante in the Paradiso, not to speak of other and less obtrusive instances, such as gemnze and ingemme. Mr. Swinburne, it is true, has defended this practice and followed it, even in imita- tions of French Ballades, but we do not regard it as other than a licence. Finding, however, that Shelley would have sheltered

himself under it, we prefer an identical rhyme to an absolutely meaningless phrase, such as " hues of grace," with no rhyme whatever,—which Shelley could hardly have been guilty of.

With regard to the point which has been raised of the propriety of printing the "Laon and Cythna," instead of the modified " Revolt of Islam," this has to be said,—that it was a mature pro- duction, and that only the pressure of adventitious circumstances led to the modification of the relationship of the hero and heroine. At all events, in no complete edition of Shelley, such as this professes to be, could the " Revolt of Islam " be given with- out collation of it with the original form, which would necessarily reveal the fact of certain alterations as fully to the unprepared reader, whom alone it could in any way impress as a novelty, as by the process Mr. Buxton Forman has pursued in this instance. As has recently been pointed out with some emphasis, Shelley, both in writing and in correcting proofs, was apt to alter rhymes or words for the sake of rhyme, and to omit to change other words dependent upon these corrections. This is, in some

instances, almost demonstrable. There are at least three instances of it in the 46 Leon and Cythna," and numbers of others through- out the poems. In this way, we should be inclined to explain the word "light," instead of a rhyme for "name" and "frame," in stanza liv. of the fifth canto of the " Leon and Cythna ;" and we are inclined to go with Mr. Rossetti on that point, and

to read " flame," in opposition to Mr. Forman. Then there is that altogether ungrammatical reading of " garbs " for " garb " in the second stanza of canto xii. Here we fully agree with

Mr. Rossetti and others, as against Mr. Forman, in altering the " it seems " to " they seem," since the very presence there of the "it seems" proves, to our mind, that the rhymes originally stood " arrays " and " betrays," and that Shelley altered them, but Omitted to alter the grammatical phrase depending upon them.

The " Rosalind and Helen " affords many instances of Shelley's looseness. It was written in Italy, and was published without his corrections, and he spoke even of errors in the sense having gone uncorrected, some of which it is clear that Mrs. Shelley in her editorial process let slip. The editing of the "Rosalind and Helen " is a fine test for the "amending impulse," and we must say that Mr. Forman comes through it with great credit. The rhymes are most irregular, and are often entirely absent. In one case we are confident " wood " should read " wild," to rhyme with " child," though Mr. Forman does not note the absence of rhyme. In another case, certainly, for rhyme's sake, we should read " wood " for "woods," in order to get a rhyme for " flood," for nothing is gained by the use of the plural here, which is most probably a printer's error. The

doubtful passages in the " Cenci" are less numerous than might have been expected, from the oircumstapces under which it was first printed. A second edition, slightly revised from the first, was, however, issued during Shelley's lifetime. The "Prometheus Unbound " is less free from such errors or bad constructions as give scope for conjectural emendations. But we do not think either Mr. Rossetti or Mr. Forman is very successful in the emendation of that puzzling speech of Asia to Demogorgon in act ii., which we would propose to read thus :—

Who made that sense which—when the winds of spring, In rarest visitation, as [or] the voice

at one bolovid heard in youth alone—

Fills the faint eyes with falling tears, whioh dim The radiant looks of unhewailing flowers, And leaves this earth a peopled solitude When it returns no more ?'

It is very remarkable that Shelley, in one of his prose writings, has given us what is really a paraphrase of this speech, so close that it may even have soiree value in helping to the true reading :—" In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a secret correspondence with our heart that awakens the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the en- thusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. So soon as this want, or power, is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the more wreck of what he was."

We cannot help believing that, for reasons of sense as well as of rhythm, Mr. Forman is right in reading " empery " for " em- pire " in another place. It is quite impossible for us, in our limited space, to follow Mr. Forman even in the more important readings he discusses or proposes, for he is literally indefatigable, and seems to miss little of any worth in Shelley literature, though he has not, apparently, come across the tracks of Mr. Fleay in that field—the more pity 1—but we cannot help expressing some surprise that he should excuse, or it may be, justify, Shelley for rhyming " ruin " with " pursuing," as he does in " Arethusa," and similar words with present participles in " ing," on the ground of his aristocratic birth and habit. But poets who were certainly not aristocrats have fallen into the same licence ; Words- worth, for instance, in a well-known earlier poem, rhymes " ruin " and " doing," and in a later poem " sullen " and " culling," so that Mr. Forman's explanation here is not quite exhaustive or satisfactory.

It is a small matter, but we cannot forgive Mr. Forman for refraining from inserting a comma at " dust," at the end of the third line in stanza xxii. of canto vi. of "Laon and Cythna." Since the want of it so entirely misled both Mrs. Shelley and Mr. Ros- setti, it is clear that it might easily mislead others ; and we can- not hold an editor justified in such punctilious abstinence, where the sense is so clearly parenthetic, and where, to bring out the sense, the comma is so absolutely requisite. There arc many instances where we hold the balancing comma ought to have been inserted, and a mere note made saying that it had been so by the editor, and therein we think would have lain no real violation of Mr. Forman's principles in respect of presenting a pure text. In all such instances the commas ought, in our opinion, to have been supplied, because we cannot imagine Shelley failing to supply them, if the rule and the possibility of obscurity and ambiguity had been once pointed out to him.

We have not allowed ourselves to pass into any general criti- cism on Shelley, or any attempt at characterisation of his genius. Mr. Forman's work does not offer any proper opportunity for such criticism. But opportunities will soon be afforded for the higher line of criticism, for Shelley literature increases so fast as to show effectually how his figure looms only the larger as it recedes into the past, and that his influence, always of a select and a supreme kind, grows, as that of some of his more popular contemporaries appears to wane.

Mr. Forman's appendices and his notes on certain obsolete or peculiar words used by Shelley are likely to be valued by Shelley students. He has spared no pains, his work has clearly been light and a labour of love ; and we cannot but hope that this sumptuous edition may meet with all the favour that it deserves from the book-buying public, as well as from careful students of poetry. Nor should we fail to notice the exquisite portrait of the poet, and the charming etchings by Mr. Evershed and Mr. W. B. Scott, of Shelley's birthplace, the house at Marlow, Beatrice Cenci's portrait, and Shelley's grave, which form beautiful fron- tispieces to the volumes.