SHELLEY AS PROPHET.

IT is probably not fair to the Master of University College, Oxford, to accept the report in the Times of Thursday week as adequately representing what he said of the prophetic

character of Shelley. We should be very sorry to deny that Shelley had a true discernment of the character of the sentiment which his own poetry did so much to mould and to inspire. There was plenty of true anticipation in him, if not of that which, in the higher sense, we are accustomed to call prophecy. His aspirations after uni- versal beauty, his yearnings for diffused love and loveliness, his intolerance of a slow and patient providence, his eager- ness to promote a rapture of humanity at large into a more vivid world, have unquestionably proved contagious in the highest degree. Vague as were his visions, no man has done more to thrill the world with the ardours of his own heart, with the insatiable cravings, and quick, fitful anguish, of his own hopes and griefs. But we should decline entirely to declare with Dr. Bright that Shelley delivered either any effective rebuke to our pessimism, or any effective augury of good omen to the human race. If the noble concluding lines of "Prometheus Unbound" be relied on as proving that Shelley was really a prophet of the triumph of good over evil, we should cite the concluding lines of " Hellas,"—a later poem, and one that was not forced by the very nature of its subject to paint Shelley's conception of what such a triumph should be, if it ever came at all,—to prove that the former passage was rather dramatic than prophetic, and that what Shelley really con- ceived as his own forecast of the future was something like an alternation of good and evil of which he did not venture to face the ultimate issue :—

"Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers.

0 e,ease Must hate and death return?

Cease ! must men kill and. die ? Cease ! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, 0 might it die and rest at last !"

That seems to us much the nearest approach Shelley ever made to expressing his own view of the future of our world. And, clearly, he regarded that future as too full of bitterness to admit of anything like steady contemplation. His eye shrank from the vision, and his voice could only utter a musical wail of plaintive dread. Dr. Bright's conception of Shelley as prophesying "good things, and not bad,"—as a prophet whom it is " cheerful " to encounter,—seems to us exceedingly ill. justifiedby anything which Shelley has written. Indeed,

even at the close of "Prometheus Unbound," there is the same indication of a belief in the eternal alternation of evil and good, though as Shelley was writing expressly on the unbinding of the divine friend of man, he is more or less compelled to let the wean of triumph rise highest and be heard last in the scale :—

" Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts, and hours, should free The serpent which should clasp her with its length, These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled doom."

Moreover, Shelley took care in the notes with which he accompanied "Hellas," his latest considerable work, to let the world know distinctly not only what be thought of the superiority of "Saturn and Love,"—the deities who repre- sented " the imaginary state of innocence and happiness," as he called it, which preceded Christianity,—to Christ, but of the superiority of Christ himself to the power which sent him

Into the world. Shelley was no prophet who augured the victory of Christ from the infinite power of him who so loved the world that he gave bie only-begotten Son that the world through him might be saved. On the contrary, he affixed this remarkable note to the verses in which he described the temporary return of a golden age before that fatal swinging-

back of the pendulum which he saw in vision, and which made him cry out in anguish : "Oh, cease ! Must hate and death return?" Here is Shelley's own comment on his last

poetic prophecy, a prophecy which certainly does not seem to us to be a cheerful prophecy of "good things, and not bad ":—

" Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. All those who fell, or the Gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt ; the One who rose, or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan World were amerced of their worship ; and the many unsubdued, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the under- standings of men in conjunction or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the arts, perpetually in- creasing activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said, that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a power, who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of men, has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of tor- ture. The horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known."

Assuredly, that does not seem to us at all the comment of one who, if Dr. Bright is rightly reported, was to his mind a great prophet "of good things and not bad." Shelley seems to have held Christ to be one who stood in the same relation to the ultimate power behind the world as that in which his own Prometheus stood to Zeus, who, as Dr. Bright says, still "in some degree reigned" "as the emblem of what was false and conventional." And holding such a creed as that, we

can scarcely understand how any Christian teacher could regard it as a creed in any way better than the modern

fatalism and pessimism. Shelley's vision was the vision of a swooning spirit which sometimes, indeed, exhorted us- " To suffer woes which Hope thinks Infinite ; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night ; To defy Power which seems omnipotent To love and bear to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent —but oftener sank back again into the nightmare-dream of a world that is "weary of the past," and yet cannot so much as find courage to believe that it will either " die " or " rest "

at last.

But though we should certainly deny to Shelley the great claim which Dr. Bright makes for him as the opponent of our modern pessimism, we should maintain that he anticipated that etherealised form of modern pessimism which melo- diously bewails the evil with which it has not strength to combat. Shelley had no belief at all in the evil within him, and therefore he laid the evil without him at the doors of the great Power to which the constitution of the world is due.

Christ, he thought, was "deformed by an imputed identifica- tion with a power who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will." He had no trust in the righteous will behind all our evil thoughts and passions, no confidence in the everlasting arms, no loathing for those miserable cravings and failures which defeat in us all the promptings of divine grace. No wonder he thought the destiny of man a sort of shuttlecock which was to be constantly driven to and fro between good and evil, for good and evil were to him mere alternating sentiments, equally deeply rooted in the foundations of the world, which ebbed and flowed like the tides. And in so believing, he certainly anticipated a good deal of the most characteristic features of the modern sentimentalism, while penetrating it with a savour of sweetness and beauty with which only a great poet could have managed to pervade it. The modern notion that all pain is a positive wrong inflicted on those who suffer it,—a wrong that ought to be remedied at any cost, though the cost itself at which alone it can be reme- died is a new wrong,—is of the very essence of Shelley's gospel, if gospel it can be called. No doubt he held willing suffering to be the greatest of all healing influences ; but then he thought the mere existence of willing suffering a great blot on the holiness of the ultimate Power by which it is permitted. Martyrdom was to him the great redeeming power, but then it was also the great arraignment of the Creative spirit. Shelley's mind vibrated between passionate admiration of him who could suffer to save others, and passionate resentment that suffering to save others should ever be needful at all. He never even admitted for a moment the idea of a suffering God, and therefore he never admitted for a moment the root-idea of the Christian revelation and of all true prophecy. The prevalent optimism and the pre- valent pessimism of the present day are alike reflected in the music of Shelley's wonderful 2Eolian harp. He took a great deal more credit than was deserved, for the amiable wishes of the human heart for the well-being of the human race ; and he felt a great deal less shame than was deserved, for the eager and imperious self-will of the various spontaneous affections of human nature. His was an Antinomian worship of sweet emotion, and he anticipated, therefore, that Antinomian wor- ship of sweet emotion, that "passionate tumult of a clinging hope" which is inspired neither by reason nor by conscience, but only by a credulous belief in the divinity of desire. To our minds, Shelley is no prophet in any true sense of the word.

What he is, Mr. Watson has told us in language hardly less lovely, and much more chastened, than his own :—

"And power is his, if nought besides, In that thin ether where he rides Above the roar of human tides To ascend afar,

Lost in a storm of light that hides His dizzy ear.

Below the unhasting world toils on, And here and there are victories won, Some dragon slain, some justice done, While through the skies, A meteor rushing on the sun, He flares and dies."