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Page 35
Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things
didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will
disappoint you, who had 'a passion for reforming it.' Kings and priests are
very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails them, at
large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never, like 'kind
Hunt,' been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of treason. Moreover,
chemical science has discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying
principalities and powers. You would be interested in the methods, but your
peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, would regret their
application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and we
still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and described.
We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence somewhat resemble those
you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas! he is a youth of more than
seventy summers; and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and
pass a peaceful millennium in twining buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been carried.
Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else she can ask for.
I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds unstanched, her wrongs
unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most
happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are 'our own flesh and blood,'
and, as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is
it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a
Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic
Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political happiness
which we have sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still
unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr. Bradlaugh. You
should have known our Charles while you were in the 'Queen Mab' stage. I fear
you wandered, later, from his robust condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much of
it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of _ducdame_ to
bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This curious fascination
has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators, biographers,
anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They swarm round you like carrion-flies
round a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense
and taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now
disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and most
troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These
biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of
'old unhappy far-off things, and _sorrows_ long ago.' Let us leave them and
their squabbles over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and
old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has
produced two heavy volumes, styled by him 'The Real Shelley.' The real
Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so
prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I
wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology.
He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman
who called you 'a damned Atheist' in the post-office at Pisa. He finds that
you had 'a little turned-up nose,' a feature no less important in his system
than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the
world. To be in harmony with your nose, you were a 'phenomenal' liar, an
ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, a
self-righteous person, full of self-approbation--in fact you were the Beast of
this pious Apocalypse. Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous
apothecary, 'a bad old man.' But enough of this inopportune brawler. For
Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in
a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly--as slowly as doom came on
Jupiter in your 'Prometheus,' but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled,
perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read.
by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of
Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived
of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth
enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the
gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse, he will be face to face,
in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the
illimitable azure of the heavens. In Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all
those will survive; for your 'voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and
perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the
perishing of the human spirit.
XVIII.
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