"Love itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true.Love is an affection, its display an emotion: love is the air, its display is the wind.An affection may be constant; an emotion can no more be constant than the wind can constantly blow.
All, therefore, that a man can reasonably ask of his wife is that her love should be indeed a well.A well; but a Bethesda-well, into which from time to time the angel of tenderness descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved.Such a love Shelley's second wife appears unquestionably to have given him.Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true; she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his aspirations, and yet--yet, even at the date of Epipsychidion the foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia Viviani's sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain, irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society.Yet few poets were so mated before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.
In truth, his very unhappiness and discontent with life, in so far as it was not the inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can only be ascribed to this same childlike irrationality--though in such a form it is irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley.Pity, if you will, his spiritual ruins and the neglected early training which was largely their cause; but the pity due to his outward circumstances has been strangely exaggerated.The obloquy from which he suffered he deliberately and wantonly courted.For the rest, his lot was one that many a young poet might envy.He had faithful friends, a faithful wife, an income small but assured.Poverty never dictated to his pen; the designs on his bright imagination were never etched by the sharp fumes of necessity.
If, as has chanced to others--as chanced, for example, to Mangan--outcast from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered without self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death.But no such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life.Shelley had competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a tired child and weep away his life of care.Is it ever so with you, sad brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or having it is satisfied?"It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated.Like them, he suffered from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet.But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by want of vogue.Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to tend.Never a bone less dry for all the tears!
A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air.But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude.He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and such support Shelley had:
La gloire Ne compte pas toujours les voix;Elle les pese quelquefois.
Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been needful to him as motive: the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet's singing is that expressed by Keats:
I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies.
Precisely so.The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling the baby-song.No enmity of outward circumstances, therefore, but his own nature, was responsible for Shelley's doom.
A being with so much about it of childlike unreasonableness, and yet withal so much of the beautiful attraction luminous in a child's sweet unreasonableness, would seem fore-fated by its very essence to the transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair.Did some shadow of this destiny bear part in his sadness?
