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Page 34
Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Oude gar allelois symphona_
_physiologousis_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call 'Science'! But if any
man says to the learned: 'Best of men, you are erudite, and laborious and
witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your opinions cannot be styled
knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no avail whereon to found any doctrine
concerning the Gods'--that man is railed at for his 'mean' and 'weak'
arguments.
*Transliterated from Greek.
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must still
believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented 'when
man's life was yet brutish and wandering' (as is the life of many tribes that
even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour of the later Greeks
'because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his ancestors.' Farewell,
Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy well-wisher and thy disciple.
XVII.
To Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Sir,--In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as to
what was said by 'the herd of mankind,' if I may quote your own phrase. It was
that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his less enthusiastic
moments overestimate their virtues and their discretion. Removed so far away
from our hubbub, and that world where, as you say, we 'pursue our serious
folly as of old,' you are, one may guess, but moderately concerned about the
fate of your writings and your reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere
said, in one of your letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet
is in the hands of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be 'Guilty,'
and the sentence 'Death.' Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or
frequent in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and
steadier flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury
and a merciful. The verdict is 'Well done,' and the sentence Immortality of
Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be less
and less heard as the years go on.
One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true province,
and that your letters will outlive your lays. I know not whether it was the
same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of your most perfect lyrics
(so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats) as 'a gallery of your
failures.' But the general voice does not echo these utterances of a too
subtle intellect. At a famous University (not your own) once existed a band of
men known as 'The Trinity Sniffers.' Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may
still inspire some of the jurors who from time to time make themselves heard
in your case. The 'Quarterly Review', I fear, is still unreconciled. It
regards your attempts as tainted by the spirit of 'The Liberal Movement in
English Literature;' and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success
that you were a Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old
rooms where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once
guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious pilgrims.
But Conservatives, 't is rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and are
believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed,
of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems, like the
affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are still 'in the mouths of all,
and chiefly on the lips of the young.' It is in your lyrics that you live, and
I do not mean that every one could pass an examination in the plot of
"Prometheus Unbound" Talking of this piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic
finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life in a cave--doubtless an
unconsciously inherited memory from cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me
that you once spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of
the moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we
now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
Fortunately you gave us 'Adonai, and 'Hellas' instead of this treatise, and
we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for ourselves.
Science tells us that before becoming cave-dweller he was a brute; Experience
daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his original condition.
_L'homme est un me'chant animal_, in spite of your boyish efforts to add
pretty girls 'to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free.'
Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were
'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the
reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and
the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue
where light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley! 'To ask you
for anything human,' you said, 'was like asking for a leg of mutton at a
gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes,
to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he
has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted
wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes
of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One,
like Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on
the common works of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind with
excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but Shelley!
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