BOOKS.

THE SELECT LETTERS OF SHELLEY.* Tins little volume of select letters from one of the most perfect of letter-writers, is to a man of any experience in literature a

Select Letters ej Percy Etelehe SiteSey. Edited, with an Introduotion, by aledukrd Garnett. London ; Kogan Paul and 0o.

delightful excuse for returning to one of the keenest of the pleasures of his earlier days. Shelley1 letters are not only deeply marked by that quality of " distinction " on which Mr. Arnold discourses so well, but furnish, as Mr. Garnett truly says, a fine picture of the ideal world in which he lived. And the ideal world in which Shelley lived was the world in which be chiefly lived, though much of its magic was derived from his brief but keen glimpses of the real world beyond, which he discerned clearly, if with misgiving, through rifts in the radiant cloud-land of his imagination. If we wanted to cavil with Mr. Garnett, we might write a long essay on the perversity, as it seems to us, of his judg- ment in the comparison of Shelley's letters with those of some of the greater English letter-writers, where he admits,. for instance, that they have not " the frankness of Byron's, the urbanity of Gray's, or the piquandy of „Horace Walpole's."' That "frankness of Byron's" is a most carefully affected frank- ness. Probably, no letter-writer ever was less frank, for, down-. right in manner as his letters are, you always suspect that Byron is both telling a great deal about himself that he only wishes. to startle others with, though he has no great belief in it him- self, and is concealing a good deal that he wishes, perhaps, to con- ceal from himself ; whereas you never suspect Shelley of either the one or the other deviation from true frankness.. He is frankness itself, as compared with Byron. Again, we should never have dreamt of picking out " urbanity " as the specific quality of Gray's letters. Their incisive sarcasm would to us express their most fascinating quality much more vividly. Now,. to his correspondents, Shelley is always and genuinely urbane,— too much so, indeed, for he really believes in the great qualities which his own regard. for them has, if not created, at least greatly exaggerated. As for the "piquancy of Horace Walpole's letters," that, of course, Shelley's letters. have not, but there is absolutely no point of instructive com- parison between the letters of a man of fashion and the letters of a recluse poet. You might almost as well com- pare a Chinese monster to a flower, and remark that the flower has not the piquancy of the Chinese monster. But though we do not understand the drift of Mr. Garnett's com- parisons, we entirely agree with him that Shelley's letters repre- sent perfectly "the manner in which the poet, as such" (or rather say, the particular poet in question, for "the poet as such" is a thousand different beings, while Shelley is only one,. and a very peculiar one, out of that thousand), " contemplates life and nature ; and a very great part of the pleasure to be derived from them [the letters] is the observation of their. intimate correspondence with the deliberate poetical achieve-. ment upon which they arc au' undesigned commentary." That seems to us a most jest account of the value of these letters, and except that we Should like to have had the six crude and rather unmeaning letters to Miss .Flitchener,.

replaced by six of Shelley's maturer letters, and do not admit that these form an " appropriate prologue " to the others, we have nothing but appreciation for the selection made by Mr. Garnett. They have all the peculiar mixture of pride and simplicity which mark Shelley's style,—the eloquence, now and then barely verging on the superfine, though only to start away from it at once with the repulsion of a nature to which its. own simplicity was very dear,—the rapture of profound sensibili- ties, and that keenest kind of insight into which his mind was not unfrequently startled by the very contrast between reality and his own world of dreams. What a variety of glimpses. into Shelley's strangely generous, strangely beautiful, strangely morbid, and strangely defiant mind, these fifty-three letters alone' contain ! Here is the first striking passage we have marked, in a letter written to Peacock from Milan in ISIS:—

" I often revisit Marlow in thought. The curse of this life is that whatever is once known can never be unknown. You inhabit a spot,, which before you inhabit it, is as indifferent to you as any other spot upon earth, and when, persuaded by some necessity, you think to. leave it, you leave it not; it ()Hugs to you, and with memories of things, which in your experience of them, gave no such promise, re- venges your desertion. Time flows on, places are changed ; friends who were with us are no longer with us ; yet what has been seems. yet to be, but barren and stripped of life. See, I have sent you a study for Nightmare Abbey." (pp. 24.5.) That is, indeed, a curious comment on Wordsworth's saying. that the wiser mind,— "Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it loaves behind."

To most of us, we suppose, the memory of places- we have lived in, if it " revenges " our desertion of them at all, does so only in the way of heaping coals of fire on the head, by reanimating them with recollections of more complete enjoyment than any we really experienced. The pangs of memory are comparatively fleeting, while its delights are permanent, though they may grow fainter with time. But Shelley regarded the vision of the past as a sort.of reproachful ghost, stripped of all the true life of past emotion. We have always considered him as the poet of desire, passionately eager to fly onwards to something unattained ; and this passage furnishes a curious illustration of the self.disgust with which he looked back to all emotions which he had, we sup- pose, tried, and found wanting.

Again, how strange is his self-revelation in these letters in relation to Christianity,—a religion so perfectly suited in one of its aspects to have elicited an enthusiasm such as Shelley alone among the poets of England possessed, but which he seems to have hated chiefly for its just dread of man's disposition to yield too easily to the magic of the sweeter emotions, and to make life the plaything of the heart. Here is Shelley's beautiful description of the purely human figures in a " Crucifixion "—Guido's — which he saw at Bologna :—

" There was a Jeans Christ crucified' by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and agonised form for ever exhibited in one proscriptive attitude of torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair, and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate compassion ; his hands clasped, and his fingers twisting themselves together, as it were, with involuntary anguish ; his feet almost writhing up from the ground with the same sympathy ; and the whole of this arrayed in colours of a diviner ,nature, yet most like nature's self—of the contemplation of this one would never weary." (pp. 63-4.) And here, again, is his outbreak of wailing that Greece .did not impose her religion on the world, and frustrate -Christianity :— " I now understand why the Greeks wore such great poets : and, above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence, of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon its forms. Their theatres were all open to the mountains and the sky. Their columns, the ideal types of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind ; the odour and the freshness of the country penetrated the .cities. Their temples were mostly upaithrio; and the flying clouds, 'the stars, or the deep sky were seen above. 0, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of the world ; but for the Christian religion, which put the finishing stroke on the 'ancient system ; but for those changes that conducted Athens to its ruin, —to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived !" (p. 101.)

And again :-

" If the army of Nicias bad not been defeated under the walls of Syracuse; if the Athenians had, acquiring Sicily, held the balance between Rome and Carthage, sent garrisons to the Greek colonies in the south of Italy, Rome might have been all that its intellectual con. .dition entitled it to be, a tributary, not the conqueror of Greece ; the Macedonian power would never have attained to the dictatorship of the civilised States of the world. Who knows whether, under the steady progress which philosophy and social institutions would have made—for, in the age to which I refer, their progress was most tepid snit secure—among a people of the most perfect physical .orgaaisation whether the Christian religion would have arisen, or the Barbarians ;lave overwhelmed the wrecks of civilisation which had survived the conquest and tyranny of the Romans ? What, then, ,ekould we have been ? As it is, all of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in •unlearning the follies, or expiating the mis- takes of our youth. We are stuffed full of prejudices ; and our natural passions are so managed, that if we restrain them we grow intolerant and precise, because we restrain them not according to reason, but according to error; and if we do not restrain them, we do all soda of mischief to ourselves and others," (pp. 132-3.) Perhaps Shelley's " manhood," in this sense, was yet before him, and he might, had he lived to the true maturity of a nature which seemed to be late in its development of the higher qualities of the judgment, have lived to unlearn some of the strange misbeliefs which he cherished to the last. But his defect, if we judge him right, was a singular inward pride and scorn for the natures which he felt to be of commoner clay than his own ; and it need hardly be said 'that these were many. Here is his haughty (though perfectly just) repudiation of the dim-sighted judgments of his own time:- "Ican write nothing; and if Adonais had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can I have to write ? As to reviews,

„ don't give Gifford, or his associate Hazlitt, a stripe the more for my sake. The man must be enviably happy whom reviews can make miserable. I have neither curiosity, interest, pain, nor pleasure in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight dis- gust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.

(pp. 106-7.) What motives have Ito write ? I had motives,

and I thank the god of my own heart they were totally different from those of the other apes of humanity who make mouths in the glass

of the time. (p. 202.) I know what to think of Adonais, but, what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not." (p. 204.) There is something fine and true in the self-knowledge and scornful contempt for misjudgment expressed in these passages. But when we see that same lofty self-confidence animating Shelley in his profound disdain for the noblest element in the noblest life of the human race, we learn how his pride blighted. the beauty of his character, as well as how it added to it a cer- tain spurious, though fascinating, dignity. The following is contained in a letter to Horace Smith, written from Pisa, only a few mouths before Shelley's death, where he actually allows himself to make the monstrous assertion that the vile materialism of the French revolutionary school is better than Christianity, " as anarchy is better than despotism !"— " Lord Byron has read me one or two letters of Moore to him, in which Moore speaks with great kindness of me ; and, of course, I cannot but feel flattered by the approbation of a man my inferiority to whom I am proud to acknowledge. Amongst other things, however, Moore, after giving Lord Byron much good advice about public opinion, duo., seems to deprecate my influence over his mind on the subject of religion, and to attribute the tone assumed in Cain' to my suggestions. Moore cautions him against my influence on this particular, with the most friendly zeal ; and it is plain that his motive springs from a desire of benefiting Lord Byron, without degrading me. I think you know Moore. Pray assure him that I have not the smallest influence over Lord Byron in this particular, and if I had, I certainly should employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which, in spite of his reason, seem per- petually to recur, and to lay in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress. 'Cain' was conceived many years ago, and begun before I saw him last year at Ravenna. How happy should I not be to attri- bute to myself, however indirectly, any participation in that im- mortal work ! I differ with Moore in thinking Christianity useful to the world; no man of sense can think it true ; and the alliance of the monstrous superstitions of the popular worship with the pure doctrines of the theism of such men as Moore, tarns to the profit of the former, and but makes the latter the fountain of its own pollution. I agree with him that the doctrines of tha French and material philosophy are as false as they are per- nicious; but still they are bettor than Christianity, inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism ; for this reason, that the former is for a season, and that the latter is eternal. My admiration of the character, no fess than of the genius of Moore, makes me rather wish that-he should not have an ill opinion of me." (pp. 211-12 )

It is not uninteresting to note the same haughty, self-con- fidence exhibiting itself on much more tangible matters. Here is Shelley's warning to Mr. Gisborne that the British Funds ought to be, and must be, repudiated shortly :- " You see the first blow has been made at funded property ; do you intend to confide and invite a second ? You would already have saved something per cent. if you had invested your property in Tuscan land. The best next thing would be to invest it in English, and reside upon it. I tremble fur the consequences, to you per-. sonally, from a prolonged confidence in the funds. Justice, policy, the hopes of the nation and renewed institutions, demand your ruin, and 3 for one cannot bring myself to desire what is in itself desir- able, till you are free." (p. 208.) We may place this beside Shelley's dogmatic description of the

Christian morality as virtually identical with the "stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals" (p. 130), and marvel that a poet who seemed sometimes so sensible of his own de- ficiencies, should have had, as ho himself' said, so much ethical confidence in his own judgment as to decide ex cathedra,—and against the testimony of the wisdom of centuries,—on the political future of England, and ou the spiritual value of the- world's greatest faith.