Literary and General Lectures and Essays. Charles Kingsley

Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try

      ’Gainst you the question with posterity.

      These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey.  Whether they be altogether just or unjust is not now the question.  It must seem somewhat strange to our young poets that Shelley’s name is not among those who are to try the question of immortality against the Lake School; and yet many of his most beautiful poems had been already written.  Were, then, “The Revolt of Islam” and “Alastor” not destined, it seems, in Byron’s opinion, to live as long as the “Lady of the Lake” and the “Mariners of England?”  Perhaps not.  At least the omission of Shelley’s name is noteworthy.  But still more noteworthy are these words of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819:

      “Read Pope—most of you don’t—but do . . . and the inevitable consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever written, and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain.”

      And here arises a new question—Is Shelley, then, among the Claudians?  It is a hard saying.  The present generation will receive it with shouts of laughter.  Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain the little notice which Byron takes of Shelley’s poetry, and the fact that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in any wise “pull together” during the sojourn in Italy.  Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those who loved them best.  Friendship can only consist with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it.  But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Shelley’s fever was not Byron’s.

      Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley’s form of fever, rather than Byron’s, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.  Since Shelley’s poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, Byron’s fiercer wine has lost favour.  Well—at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation.  And there is an excuse for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and cocculus indicus.  Nevertheless, worse ingredients than œnanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devil’s Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate.  The private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Shelley.  It is not surprising.  Byron’s Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during the thirty years’ peace! and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amusements, and often require a good private fortune—rare among poets.  They have, therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting moustaches and Mazzini hats.  But even among them, and among their betters—rather their more-respectables—nine-tenths of the bad influence which is laid at Byron’s door really is owing to Shelley.  Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horror—he is “so wicked,” forsooth; while poor Shelley, “poor dear Shelley,” is “very wrong, of course,” but “so refined,” “so beautiful,” “so tender”—a fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil.  We boldly deny the verdict.  Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is.  And as for the satyr; the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better.  If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelley’s passions were

      As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

      At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of “pure” humanity.  No—Byron may be brutal; but he never cants.  If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

      The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late has been not his faults but his excellences.  His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible—these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism.  The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and “had no objection to a pot of beer;” and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant English gentleman; while Shelley, if once his intense self-opinion had deserted him, would have probably ended in Rome as an Oratorian or a Passionist.

      We would that it were only for this count that Byron has had to make way for Shelley.  There is, as we said before, a deeper moral difference between the men, which makes the weaker, rather than the stronger, find favour in young men’s eyes.  For Byron has the most intense and awful sense of moral law—of law external to himself.  Shelley has little or none; less, perhaps, than any known writer who has ever meddled with moral questions.  Byron’s cry is, I am miserable because law exists; and I have broken it, broken it so habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it.  I have tried to eradicate the sense of it by speculation, by action; but I cannot—

      The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

      There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very marrow of our life, which punishes and rewards us by no arbitrary external penalties, but by our own consciousness of being what we are:

      The mind which is immortal, makes itself

      Requital for its good or evil thoughts;

      Is its own origin of ill, and end—

      And its own place and time—its innate sense

      When stript of this mortality derives

      No colour from the fleeting things about,

      But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy,

      Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

      This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms of evil—for it was not discovered, but only in the process of discovery—is the one which comes out with greater and greater strength, through all Corsairs, Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in “Cain” and in “Manfred,” of both of which we do boldly say, that if any sceptical poetry at all be right, which we often question, they are right and not wrong; that in “Cain,” as in “Manfred,” the awful problem which, perhaps, had better not have been put at all, is nevertheless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen, fairly confessed; namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists