Essays and Studies (Swinburne)/Notes on the Text of Shelley
NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
[1869.]
It is seldom that the work of a scholiast is so soon wanted as in Shelley's case it has been. The first collected edition of his works had many gaps and errors patent and palpable to any serious reader. His text is already matter for debate and comment, as though he were a classic newly unearthed. Certain passages begin to be famous as crucial subjects for emendation; and the master-singer of our modern poets shares with his own masters and models the least enviable proof of fame—that given by corrupt readings and diverse commentaries. Awaiting the appearance, now long looked for, of a surer and carefuller text, I have but a word to say in passing, a hand to lend in this humble service of verbal emendation. One poet only of late times, and that but once, has suffered more than Shelley from the negligence and dullness of those to whose hands the trust of his text was committed. The last relics of Landor came before us distorted and deformed in every page by this shameful neglect; and the value is thus impaired of some among the most precious and wonderful examples extant of great genius untouched by great age, full of the grace, the strength, the clear light and harmony of noon unclouded by the night at hand.
I take at random a few of the disputed or disputable passages in the text of Shelley, keeping before me the comments (issued in Notes and Queries and elsewhere) of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Rossetti, and others. In March and April 1868, the critic last named put forth a series of short papers on proposed or required emendations of passages evidently or apparently defective or corrupt. The first is that crucial verse in the famous "Stanzas written in dejection near Naples—"
"The breath of the moist air is light."
Another reading is "earth" for "air;" which at first sight may seem better, though the "unexpanded buds" in the next line might be called things of air as well as of earth, without more of literal laxity or inaccuracy than Shelley allows himself elsewhere. As to the question whether "light" (adjective) be legitimate as a rhyme to "light" (substantive), it may be at once dismissed. The license, if license it be, of perfection in the echo of a rhyme is forbidden only, and wrongly, by English critics. The emendation "slight" for "light" is absurd.
In the eighteenth stanza of the first part of the "Sensitive Plant" there is a line impossible to reduce to rule, but not obscure in its bearing. The plant, which could not prove by produce of any blossom the love it felt, received more of the light and odour mutually shed upon each other by its neighbour flowers than did any one among these, and thus, though powerless to show it, yet
"Loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver:”
in other words, felt more love than the flower which gave it gifts of light and odour could feel, having nothing to give back, as the others had, in return; all the more thankful and loving for the very barrenness and impotence of requital which made the gift a charity instead of an exchange. This license of implication, this inaccuracy of structure, which would include or involve a noun in its cognate verb (the words "loved more" being used as exactly equivalent to the words "felt more love"), is certainly not imitable by others, even if defensible in Shelley; but the change proposed in punctuation and construction makes the passage dissonant and tortuous, throws the sense out of keeping and the sound out of tune. In the eighth stanza of the third part the following line seems to me right as it stands—
"Leaf after leaf, day by day—"
if the weight and fall of the sound be properly given. Mr. Rossetti would slip in the word "and;" were it there, I should rather wish to excise it.
In the twenty-second stanza of the "Adonais" I may remark that in Shelley's own Pisan edition the reading of the fourth line runs as it should, thus—
"A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."
I do not understand wherein can be the objection to the "magic mantles" of the thirteenth stanza. It is the best word, the word most wanted to convey, by one such light and great touch as only a great workman can give, the real office and rank of the divine "shepherds," to distinguish Apollo from the run of Admetus's herdsmen. The reading "tragic" would be by comparison insignificant, even were there any ground of proof or likelihood to sustain it. In the fourth stanza of this poem Shelley calls Milton "the third among the sons of light." It has been asked who were the two first: it has been objected that there were at least three—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. I should be slow to doubt that Shelley had in view the first and the last names only. To him Dante could scarcely have seemed a type of spiritual illumination, a son of light elect above other poets; of this we might be sure without the evidence we have. No man, not even Landor, has laid upon the shrine of Dante a thank-offering of more delicate and passionate praise, has set a deeper brand of abhorrence upon the religion which stained his genius. Compare the twenty-second of Shelley's collected letters with the "Pentameron" of Landor—who has surely said enough, and said it with all the matchless force and charm of his most pure and perfect eloquence, in honour of Dante, to weigh against the bitterness of his blame. Had I the right or the strength to defend the name of one great man from the charge of another, to vindicate with all reverence the fame of Landor even against the verdict of Mazzini, I would appeal to all fellow-students whether Landor has indeed spoken as one "infirm in mind" or tainted with injustice—as one slow of speech or dull of sense to appreciate the divine qualities of the founder of all modern poetry. He has exalted his name above wellnigh every name on record, in the very work which taxes him with the infection of a ferocity caught from contact with the plague-sores of religion. It is now hoped and suggested that a spirit and a sense wholly unlike their outer habit may underlie the written words of Dante and of Milton.[1] That may be; but the outer habit remains, the most hateful creed in all history; uglier than the faith of Moloch or of Kali, by the hideous mansuetude, the devilish loving-kindness of its elections and damnations. Herein perhaps only do these two great poets fall below the greater, below Homer and Æschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare; the very skirts of whose thought, the very hems of whose garments, are clean from the pollution of this pestilence. Their words as well as their meanings, their sound not less than their sense, we can accept as wise and sweet, fruitful and fresh to all time; but the others have assumed the accent with the raiment of Dominic and Calvin—mighty men too, it may be, after their kind, but surely rather sons of fire than sons of light. At the same time it may be plausibly if not reasonably alleged that Shelley and Landor were both in some measure disqualified by their exquisite Hellenism of spirit to relish duly the tone and savour of Dante's imagination.
There are at least two passages in the "Ode to Liberty" where either the meaning or the reading is dubious and debateable. In the thirteenth stanza, having described, under the splendid symbol of a summons sent from Vesuvius to Etna across the volcanic islets of Stromboli (the "Æolian isles" of old), how Spain calls England, by example of revolution, to rivalry of resurrection (in 1820, be it observed), the poet bids the two nations, "twins of a single destiny," appeal to the years to come. So far all is plain sailing. Then we run upon what seems a sudden shoal or hidden reef. What does this mean?
"Impress us from a seal,
All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal."
The construction is at once loose and intricate; the sentence indeed limps on both feet; but I am not sure that here is not rather oversight than corruption. The sense at starting is clearly—"Impress us with all ye have thought or done, which time cannot dare conceal;" or, "Let all ye have thought and done impress us," and so forth. The construction runs wild and falls to pieces; we found and we must leave it patchwork; for no violence of alteration, were such permissible, could force it into coherence. When Shelley's grammar slips or trips, as it seems to do at times, the fault is a fault of hasty laxity, not of ignorance, of error, of defective sense or taste such as Byron's; venial at worst, not mortal.
We start our next question in the fifteenth stanza. Whose or what is "the impious name" so long and so closely veiled under the discreet and suggestive decency of asterisks? It was at once assumed and alleged to be the name of which Shelley had already said, through the lips of Prometheus, that "it had become a curse:" the name of Christ.[2] I for one could hardly bring myself to doubt that the reviewer of the moment had read aright. No other word indeed will give so adequate a sense, fit in so fairly with the context. It should surely be a creed, a form of faith, upon which the writer here sets his foot. What otherwise shall we take to be "the snaky knot of this foul gordian word"—a word which, "weak itself as stubble," serves yet the turn of tyrants to bind together the rods and axes of their rule? If this does not mean a faith of some kind, and a living faith to this day, then it would seem at first sight that words have no meaning—that the whole divine fabric of that intense and majestic stanza crumbles into sparkling dust, dissolves into sonorous jargon. Any such vaguer substitute as "priest" or "king" weakens not one verse only, but makes the rest comparatively feeble and pointless, even if it can be said to leave them any meaning at all; and why any such word should be struck out upon revision of the text by any fool or coward who might so dare, none surely can guess; for such words recur at every turn as terms of reproach. Then comes the question whether Shelley in 1820 would have used so bitter and violent a phrase to express his horror and hatred of the evil wrought in the world by the working of the Christian religion. It may help us to decide if we take into account with how terrible and memorable a name he had already branded it in the eighth stanza of this very poem. That he did to the last regard it as by all historical evidence the invariable accomplice of tyranny—as at once the constant shield and the ready spear of force and of fraud—his latest letters show as clearly as that he did no injustice to "the sublime human character" of its founder. The word "Christ," if received as the true reading, would stand merely as equivalent to the word "Christianity;" the blow aimed at the creed would imply nothing of insult or outrage to the person. Next year indeed Shelley wrote that famous chorus in the "Hellas" which hails the rising of "the folding star of Bethlehem," as with angelic salutation, in sweeter and more splendid words than ever fell from any Christian lyrist. But when that chorus was written Shelley had not changed or softened his views of history and theology. His defence of Grecian cross against Turkish crescent did not imply that he took for a symbol of liberty the ensign of the Christian faith, the banner of Constantine and of Torquemada, under which had fought and conquered such recruits, and with such arms, as the "paramour"[3] of Dante's Church, who begot on the body of that bride no less hopeful and helpful an offspring than the Holy Inquisition. Such workings of the creed, such developments of the faith, were before Shelley's eyes when he wrote; he had also about him the reek of as foul an incense going up from the priests of that day to their Ferdinand or their George as those of ours have ever sent up to Bonaparte or to Bourbon of their own, mixing with the smell of battle-smoke and blood the more fetid fumes of prayer and praise; and wide as is the gap between his first and his last manner, great as is the leap from "Queen Mab" to "Hellas," the passage of five years had not transformed or worn out the "philanthropist, democrat, and atheist" of 1816. For thus he signed himself in the Swiss album, not merely as ; and the cause or provocation is clear enough; for on the same leaf there appears just above his signature an entry by some one who saw fit here to give vent to an outbreak of overflowing foolery, flagrant and fervid with the godly grease and rancid religion of a conventicle; some folly about the Alps, God, glory, beneficence, witness of nature to this or that divine thing or person, and such-like matter. A little below is the name of Shelley, with this verse attached:—
"εὶμὶ φιλάνθρωπος ἂημωκρἀτικός τ´ ἂθεός τε."
I copy the spelling with all due regret and horror, but not without rejoicing on his account that Shelley was clear of Eton when he committed this verse, and had now for critic or commentator a Gifford only in place of a Keate.[4] The remarks on this entry added by Christian pilgrims who came after are, in the phrase of the archetypal Pecksniff, "very soothing." One of these, I think, observes, with a pleasant pungency of originality, that the fool hath said in his heart—we have seen what.
Most of the emendations or solutions offered by Mr. Rossetti of corrupt or obscure passages in the "Revolt of Islam" seem to me probable and sound; but in this verse—
"Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore,
Which might not be withstood"—
I take the verb to be used in the absolute not the active sense—"bore onward or forward;" this use of the word here is a somewhat ungraceful sign of haste, but makes clear a passage otherwise impracticably dense and chaotic. Before passing from this poem, I have to express a hope that a final edition of Shelley's works will some day, rather sooner than later, restore to it the proper title and the genuine text. Every change made in it was forced upon the author by pressure from without; and every change is for the worse. Has no reader ever asked himself what can be the meaning of the second title? What is the revolt of Islam? Islam is not put forward as the sole creed of the tyrants and slaves who play their parts here with such frank ferocity; Persian and Indian, Christian and Mahometan mythologies are massed together for attack. And certainly Islam is not, as the rules of language would imply, the creed of the insurgents.[5] Could the phrase "revolt of the Christians" be taken to signify a revolt against the Christians? There is at least meaning in the first title—"Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City." Readers may prefer a text which makes hero and heroine strangers in blood, but the fact remains that Shelley saw fit to make them brother and sister, and to defend their union as essentially innocent even if socially condemnable. The letters printed in the "Shelley Memorials" show with what staunch resolution he clung to this point, when beaten upon by remonstrance from all sides. This most singular of his social and ethical heresies was indeed never quite thrown over. "Incest," he wrote in 1819 to Mrs. Gisborne, with reference to Calderon's tragic treatment of the story of Amnon and Tamar, "is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism; or it may be that cynical rage which, confounding the good and bad in existing opinions, breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness and antipathy;" the one he had painted in "Laon and Cythna," the other in the "Cenci." And in that absurd abortion of a book which would discredit any man's boyhood, not to speak of Shelley's—"St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian "—the unfledged and half-hatched bird of paradise had uttered a weak note to the same tune. The only thing our memory carries away after that rubbish has been handled and sifted is the proof given in one passage that Shelley felt thus early some attraction to this subject; which is indeed suggestive and fruitful enough of possible tragic effect. It is noticeable that he has never cited or referred to the magnificent masterpiece of Ford's genius. Those who please may deplore or may applaud this proclivity; but the student must at any rate accept and take account of it, for the influence permeates much of Shelley's verse with a thin but clear undercurrent of feeling and allusion. The rarity of the cancelled edition of "Laon and Cythna" has been exaggerated by fraudulent or ignorant assertions. Besides my own copy, I have known of others enough at least to refute the fiction that there are but three in the world. I give but one proof among many of the injury done to the poem by minor changes of reading. In the thirtieth stanza of the twelfth canto we now read,
How those who love, yet fear not, dare to die;"
where the languid tautology of this verse impairs the force of a noble passage; the genuine reading is this:
"Therefore ye shall behold
How Atheists and Republicans can die."[6]
Such throughout was the process by which the more outspoken verses of a poem outspoken enough throughout were weakened and disfigured. Remembering by what forcible extortion of assent a reluctant admission of these changes was wrung from the poet, we must hope now to have back his own fresher and clearer words in their first fullness and freedom.
The passage cited from "Alastor" is, I believe, corrupt, but I cannot accept the critic's proposed change of punctuation. Here are the words disputed:-—
"On every side now rose
Rocks which in unimaginable forms
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and its precipice
Obscuring the ravine disclosed above
'Mid toppling stones, black gulfs, and yawning streams," &c.
Mr. Rossetti in evident desperation would rearrange the last lines thus:—
And—its precipice
Obscuring—the ravine disclosed above," &c.
"i.e." (he adds), "the rocks, obscuring the precipice (the precipitous descent) of the ravine, disclosed said ravine overhead."
This I must say is intolerable, and impossible. If the words could be wrenched and racked into such a meaning, we should have here from one of the mightiest masters of language the most monstrous example on record of verbal deformity, of distorted and convulsed inversion or perversion of words. I suspect the word "its" to be wrong, and either a blind slip of the pen or a printer's error. If it is not, and we are to assume that there is any break in the sentence, the parenthesis must surely extend thus far—"its precipice obscuring the ravine"—i.e., the rocks opened or "disclosed" where the precipice above the ravine obscured it. But I take "disclosed" to be the participle; "its precipice darkened the ravine (which was) disclosed above." Then the sentence is left hanging loose and ragged, short by a line at least, and never wound up to any end at all. Such a sentence we too certainly find once at least in the "Prometheus Unbound" (II. 4):—
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one beloved heard in youth alone,
(A line wanting)
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears?" &c.
It is waste of time to attempt any patching or furbishing of this passage by excision or substitution. Perhaps the author never observed what a gap was left in sense and grammar. As it is, we can only note the omission or oversight and pass on; unless we should please or dare to slip in by way of complement some verse of our own devising; which happily no one has done or is like to do.
The "Prometheus Unbound" has this among other and better things in common with its Æschylean models, that we want now and then a scholiast for interpreter, having at times to read it as we might read for instance the "Suppliants," and lacking a critic to "cure the halt and maimed," as Mr. Browning says of that glorious and hapless poem whose godlike grace and heroic beauty so many readers have more or less passed over with half a recognition, for no fault but its misfortune. I shall touch but on one or two points of dispute in the text as we find it; and first on this (II. 4):—
"Till marble grew divine,
And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see
Reflected in their race, behold, and perish."
The simplest explanation here possible is, I believe, the right. Women with child gazing on statues (say on the Venus of Melos) bring forth children like them—children whose features reflect the passion of the gaze and perfection of the sculptured beauty; men, seeing, are consumed with love; "perish" meaning simply "deperire;" compare Virgil's well-worn version, "Ut vidi, ut perii." I do not think there is any hint of contrast between transient flesh and immortal marble.
In another passage Mr. Rossetti, with the touch of true and keen criticism, has given us at least a reasonable reading in place of one barely explicable. As the text has hitherto stood, Prometheus says to the Earth-Spirit (I. 1),
"I only know that thou art moving near
And love. How cursed I him?"
This I always assumed to mean merely—"That thou art moving near, and dost love (me)," finding elsewhere such laxities of remiss writing or printing as that of "love" for "lovest;"[7] nor am I now sure that this was not meant, for the "scorn" of Earth and her sons for Prometheus, of which he has lately complained, is not even in his eyes real; he says only that to refuse his request looks as though they scorned their saviour. But this new reading shows keen critical power and a quick-eyed ingenuity;
"And Jove—how cursed I him?"
though it may be objected that the sentence preceding comes to an abrupt and feeble close with the close of the verse; and this I think is conclusive proof that the suggestion, however ingenious, must be decisively rejected. No conjectural emendation of a great poet's text is admissible which corrects a loose or faulty phrase by the substitution of one more accurate, but also more feeble and prosaic. When in the same act the Furies are described as
"Blackening the air of night with countless wings,
And hollow underneath like death,"
the critic would take the word "hollow" as an epithet of the wings, "with wings countless and hollow;" wrongly, as I think. These Furies of Shelley are "phantasms," hollow and shadowy emanations of "the all-miscreative brain:" quædam simulacra modis pallentia miris.
The difficult passage at the end of the third act I can only explain by some such paraphrase as this: "the thrones, altars, and prisons of the past were now like those barbaric and monumental figures carved or engraved on obelisks, which survive the decay of later structures raised by their conquerors, tombs and prisons built by kings of a dynasty more recent than the race which had reared them; these they see mouldering round them, built since their date in honour of the religion and the pride of past kings and priests, and are themselves now merely looked on as wonders;" thus only, and awkwardly, can I make anything of the involved and long-drawn sentence, unless with Mr. Rossetti we put a full period after the words "mouldering round," and start afresh in this fashion; "those monuments imaged (i.e., did image; but I take imaged to be the participle) a dark faith, to the satisfaction and pride of kings and priests . . . and are now but an astonishment." This again seems to me inadmissible: I fear the passage must be left more or less in confusion, the parenthesis being so long between the two main verbs which prop the sentence ("which look forth . . . and are now," &c.); but in fact these large and stately structures of massive and majestic verse do seem too often to need more help of clamps and girders, if the main stones and joists of the fabric are to hold together.
At the close of that transcendant interlude of antiphonal music in the fourth act, the Earth takes up and gives back the last notes of the Moon's chant before resuming a graver and deeper strain:
("When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow.
The Earth.
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.")
Mr. Rossetti would add these two last short lines to the song of the Moon, and make the Earth's part begin at the words "O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight," &c.: to me there has always seemed to be a sweet and subtle miracle of music in the text as it stands; but how much of this effect may be the mere impression of habit and fancy, the mere fruit of the fondness of years for these verses as I have always known them, I cannot of course judge; though of course, too, I incline to take the verdict of my own delight in them.[8]
It may be worth notice that the earliest editions of Shelley's poems are sometimes accurate in small points where all others have gone wrong; for example, the first line of the speech closing the "Prometheus" runs rightly thus in the first edition:—
"This is the day, which down the void abysm,"
while from every later copy in the collected works the word "is" has dropped off. So in the "Cenci" (II. 1) the Livornese edition of 1819 reads:—
"Then it was I whose inarticulate words
Fell from my lips, and who with tottering steps
Fled from your presence," &c.
The later copies drop the word and, thus breaking down the metre. But this genuine edition reads (IV. 4) with the later text—
"Guilty! who dares talk of guilt? My lord," &c.,
giving no authority for the insertion of "to" before "talk," which indeed rather weakens the force of emphasis in this sudden outbreak of passionate protest. But in the speech of Marzio (V. 2) it again brings us right:—
"Oh, dart
The terrible resentment of those eyes
On the dead earth!"
In the " Works" we find dread printed in place of dead, which Mr. Rossetti knew by instinct for the right reading. Again, at the end of the third act, Shelley's Italian edition runs thus:—
"Orsino.
When next we meet—
Giacomo.
May all be done—and all
Forgotten; Oh, that I had never been!"
Surely a better than the current version—
"Orsino.
When next we meet may all be done!
Giacomo.
And all
Forgotten," &c.
The first English edition alone reads (I. 1)—
"Respited me from hell! So may the devil," &c.
All others, from the Livornese onward, have let fall the word me. These slight things, so tedious to dwell upon, all help us—and they only can help us—towards a true text of our greatest modern poet. In the case of Æschylus or of Shakespeare, such light crumbs and dry husks would be held precious as grains of gold. I have but a few more to glean and reserve or reject as they seem worth.
I would certainly not agree to alter without authority that admirable verse in the fragment on Leonardo's "Medusa;"
"Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;"
the intense effect of sound and accent is too rare a thing to lose or change. To shift the stress of a verse and elongate an elided syllable must prove either a triumph of musical instinct or a dissonant and hateful failure. Here the triumphant skill and subtle sense of Shelley's ear for metre give special charm to the delicate daring of his verse, which would be lost were we to read "the far lands," even did this not make the line otherwise immetrical. In some other cases cited by Mr. Rossetti there may be room and reason for cutting out or slipping in a syllable or so. His corrections of text in the imperfect "Triumph of Life" seem to me worthy of all grateful acceptance: but the suggestion of "mouthless" for "monthless," in the fragment of a stanza rejected from the "Adonais," is somewhat grotesque. "Time's monthless torrent," if these were indeed Shelley's deliberate words, must mean the eternal course of time without end or beginning, which passes without taking account as we do of years or months, days or hours. The last stanza of the "Medusa" is a mere sketch, not ripe for criticism or correction; so is the fragment of a dirge—"Rough wind, that moanest loud."
In the second line of the ninety-seventh stanza of the translated "Hymn to Mercury,"
"Thus King Apollo loved the child of May
In truth, and Jove covered them with love and joy,"
for "covered" we ought evidently to read "clothed."
In the translation of the "Cyclops," the semichorus (v. 495-502 of the Greek text) is confused and inaccurate as we now read it, and the change of "those" and "there" into "thou" is in each case a clear gain as far as the English text is concerned, though it brings us no nearer to the Greek; which runs literally thus:—
"Happy he who shouts his song
To the grape's dear fountain-springs,
For a revel laid along,
Close in arms a loved man grasping,
And on spread couch-coverings
Some soft woman-blossom clasping,
Sleek, with love-locks oiled all o'er,
Who, he cries, will open me her door?"
Shelley, working from an uncorrected text, has taken ξανθόν (the old reading for ἂνθος or κάλλος) as adjective to βόστρυχον, and has washed off from the woman's hair the sweet oil poured over the man's curls. His version, were it admissible in the eyes of more critical editors, would add grace to the charm of a most graceful strophe—that is, up to the last line, here simply misconstrued; but he has strayed again somewhat too far in his rendering of the semichorus antiphonal to this; when Ulysses, hailed by the Cyclops, follows him out with the wine-skin, and the Chorus, secretly reassured and slily hopeful, sings to this ambiguous effect:—
"Fair, with fair looks prosperous,
Comes he from the halls inside;
One good friend is friends with us.
For thy body fair the lamp
Waits alight—come, tender bride—
In the caverns dewy-damp:
And thine head shall soon be bound
Not with single-coloured garlands round."
I translate from Dindorf's text; that given by Mr. Paley might run thus in English:—
"There awaits thy flesh a lamp
Of fierce fire, no tender bride," &c.
The "lamp" would then be, of course, the firebrand prepared to blind Polyphemus, and the two last lines, in the words of the editor (vol. iii. p. 509), "mean that in the place of a crown of myrtle and roses a ring of gory hue shall encircle his brows." In either case I suppose the ironic allusions to the torch of marriage and the marriage-wreath of divers colours must be the same.
There is no gap in the translation at v. 675, and the asterisks inserted after the words "Nowhere, O Cyclops," would be better away. The passage describing the cookery of Polyphemus (vv. 390-395) is difficult and debateable enough, but less hard than the desperate version of Shelley, who in his note "confesses that he does not understand this." The reading "four amphoræ," just above, is a misprint or slip of the pen for "ten;" the next few words are curiously tumbled together and misconstrued. Shelley has not distinguished the drinking-can or cup (σκύφος) wrought of ivy-wood, or carved round with ivy-leaves, from the ninety-gallon bowl (κρατὴρ) into which the Cyclops had just milked his cows. Read:—
"Then he milked the cows,
And, pouring in the white milk, filled a bowl
That might have held ten amphoræ; and by it
He set himself an ivy-carven cup—
Three cubits wide and four in depth it seemed—
[And set a brass pot on the fire to boil][9]
And spits made out of blackthorn shoots, with tips
Burnt hard in fire, and planed in the other parts
Smooth with a pruning-hook; and huge blood-bowls
Ætnæan, set for the axe's edge to fill."
Or if σφαγεῑα can mean the axes themselves, and γνάθους be read for υνάθοις;
"And the under-jaws
Of axes, huge Ætnæan slaughtering-tools."
I do not see the meaning of those asterisks marking omission where omission is none, between the opening speech of Silenus and the parode. Of this Shelley has only translated the strophe and the latter part of the epode. Why the intervening verses were omitted it is impossible to say. In default of the better version he has begrudged us I offer this by way of makeshift, following the exact order and cadence of rhymes observed by Shelley. After the call to the she-goat[10] (which he translates "Get along;" it should rather be "Come," as the shout is not meant to scare, but to reclaim) the song continues—a literal goat-song for once:—
"Ease your udders milk-distent,
Take the young ones to the teat,
Left in yeanlings' penfolds pent;
Now the sleepy midday bleat
Of your sucklings calls you home;
Come to fold then, will you? come
From the full-flowered pasture-grasses
Up in Ætna's rock-strewn passes.
Here no Bacchus, no dance comes
Here, nor Mænads thyrse-bearing,
Nor glad clang of kettledrums,
Nor by well or running spring
Drops of pale bright wine; nor now
With the nymphs on Nysa's brow
An Iacchic melody
To the golden Aphrodite
Do I lift," &c.
Read do for will, which stands in Shelley's text through mere misreading of the passage; it was doubtless wrongly pointed in the copy by which he worked.
There is another omission after verse 165, more accountable than this; whether any part of Shelley's version was struck out or not in the printing we have not been told. Perhaps the passage, essential as it is to the continuity of the scene, may be borne with in this reduced and softened form. After the verse—"I would give All that the Cyclops feed upon their mountains,"—add:
"And pitch into the brine off some white cliff,
Having got once well drunk and cleared my brows.
How mad is he whom drinking makes not glad![11]
For drink means strength renewed for love-making,
******
***; aye, dancing too,
Aye, and forgetfulness of ills. What then,
Shall I not buy me such a drink, and bid
Fool Cyclops with his one mid eye go hang?"
In this laudable frame of mind the Falstaff of Olympus makes off on his sheep-stealing errand; and the Chorus, which hitherto has modestly stood aside and left the talking to him, now first addresses the new-comer:—
"Hear you, Ulysses, we would talk with you.
Ulysses.
Chorus.
Ulysses.
Chorus.
All of you take your sport with her in turn,
Seeing she delights in marrying many men?
The wanton wretch!" &c.
[13] After this discussion of Helen by the satyrs, Silenus returns with his plunder; his speech begins (v. 188) "See, here are sheep," &c. Shelley, following the older editions, puts into his mouth all this last answer of the Chorus to Ulysses, with its exquisite satyric moralising on feminine levity. At the entrance of the Cyclops there is some misconstruction:—
Silenus.
Cyclops.
The line given to Silenus belongs to the Cyclops as he bursts in upon the stage, and might rather be rendered:—
"Hold hard, let's see here, lend a hand; what's this?
What sloth? what rioting?"
At verse 220 there is another break; Silenus has said, "Anything you like, only don't drink me up;" and the Cyclops, as delicate a monster as Caliban, replies:—
"By no means, for you'd be the death of me
Then, tumbling in my belly, with your tricks."
At verse 345, read, to fill up the gap at the end of the Cyclops' speech:—
"So creep in quick, to stand about the shrine
O' the god o' the cave and feast me fairly full."
The god of the cave is explained to be, as above,
"Myself
And this great belly, first of deities."
Half a line is missed at v. 381:—
"Unhappy man!
How was it with you, then, faring like this? "
The next break is at v. 439; if the verses here omitted be spurious, there is no need to retain the asterisks. Anyhow they can only be given thus trimmed for translation and curtailed into decency; the satyrs, though perforce living virtuously in a state of servitude, retain their natural amativeness. Read:—
"And leave for ever
The impious Cyclops: for this long time now
Our poor dear flesh has lived a widower's life
Toward women, as we can't give him the slip."
At v. 585 there is a point of interrogation missed, and the dialogue has not all its original briskness and ease of motion. Here the Cyclops-now in Trinculo's phrase, "a howling monster; a drunken monster"[14]-shows his affection for Silenus, as Caliban in the like case shows his adoration of Stephano. The parallel would be closer if Caliban had met Falstaff, but the humour of the two scenes is much alike. It must be remembered that "the poor monster's in drink; an abominable monster!" Read:—
"No, I'll no kissing; let the Graces tempt me;
I can do well enough with Ganymede here,
Gloriously, by the Graces! where are women
Worth such sweet youths as this now?!
Silenus.
Am I Jove's Ganymede, then?
Cyclops.
And thus I snatch you off from Dardanus.
Silenus.
Chorus.
Silenus.
I know that he who ventures to touch the text of Shelley should keep always before his eyes the fate of Uzza, and the curse denounced on him who adds to or takes from the sacred writings so much as a word; if I too have laid a presumptuous hand upon the ark, tampered rashly with the inspired canon of scripture, I can only put forward the plea found in that former case unavailing, that I meant but to prop the shaken vessel, to clear the blotted records, which contain the divine treasure; putting my trust in judges of more than Jewish or godlike tolerance. Were it for me to pass sentence, I would say of the very rashest of possible commentators that his errors, though they were many, should be forgiven, if he loved much. While revising the version of the "Cyclops" I have felt again, and more keenly, the old delight of wonder at its matchless grace of unapproachable beauty, its strength, ease, delicate simplicity and sufficiency; the birthmark and native quality of all Shelley's translations. I have retouched nothing but one or two confused lines; for who can hope, even though there be here and there a slip in the rendering, to supply anything as good in place of a cancelled verse of his? What I have ventured to retranslate in full, I never designed to supplant the text, but merely to elucidate. These small and slow labours of verbal criticism are the best returns we can make, the best tribute we can pay to a great man's work; and no man need think that a waste of his time, which so often employed the hours and the minds of Milton and of Landor. It is easier to dilate at length on the excellence of a man's genius than to sift and test it by proof of syllable and letter, that so the next student may at least find a clear ang certain text to study, without the trouble of deciphering a faded palimpsest or refitting a broken puzzle. And we have especial need of accuracy and fullness of text when the text is Shelley's. His mark is burnt in more deeply and more durably upon men's minds than that of any among the great poets of his day. Of these, Coleridge and Keats set no such mark on the spirit of their readers;[15] they left simple and perfect examples of work absolutely faultless, visibly unsurpassable, self-resumed and self-content. Byron was first to stamp with his signet the thought and feeling of one kind of men; then Wordsworth in turn set his mark on a different kind. But the one for want of depth and sense and harmony, the other for want of heat and eyesight and lifeblood, and both for want of a truer force and a truer breadth of spirit, failed to impress upon all time any such abiding sign of their passage and their power, any such inevitable and ineffaceable mark to bear witness of their work, as Dante or Milton, Goethe or Shelley, each in his special fashion.
It is no bad way of testing an opinion held vaguely but sincerely to take it up and rub it, as it were, against the: opinion of some one else, who is clearly worth agreeing with or disagreeing. Mr. Arnold, with whose clear and critical spirit it is always good to come in contact, as disciple or as dissenter, has twice spoken of Shelley, each time, as I think, putting forth a brilliant error, shot through and spotted with glimpses of truth. Byron and Shelley, he says, "two members of the aristocratic class," alone in their day, strove "to apply the modern spirit" to English literature. "Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it." To the truth of this he might have cited a third witness; for of the English poets then living, three only were children of the social or political idea, strong enough to breathe and work in the air of revolution, to wrestle with change and hold fast the new liberty, to believe at all in the godhead of people or peoples, in the absolute right and want of the world, equality of justice, of work and truth and life; and these three came all out of the same rank, were all born into one social sect, men of historic blood and name, having nothing to ask of revolution, nothing (as the phrase is now) to gain by freedom, but leave to love and serve the light for the light's sake. Landor, who died last, was eldest, and Shelley, who died first, was youngest of the three. Each stood alike apart from the rest, far unlike as each was to the other two; not, like Coleridge, blind to the things of the time, nor, like Keats, practically alien to all things but art; and leaving to Southey or Wordsworth the official laurels and loyalties of courtly content and satisfied compliance. Out of their rank the Georges could raise no recruits to beat the drum of prose or blow the bagpipes of verse in any royal and constitutional procession towards nuptial or funereal goal.[16]
So far we must go with Mr. Arnold; but I cannot follow him when he adds that Byron and Shelley failed in their attempt; that the best "literary creation" of their time, work "far more solid and complete than theirs," was due to men in whom the new spirit was dead or was unborn; that, therefore, "their names will be greater than their writings." First, I protest against the bracketing of the two names. With all reserve of reverence for the noble genius and memory of Byron, I can no more accept him as a poet equal or even akin to Shelley on any side but one, than I could imagine Shelley endowed with the various, fearless, keen-eyed, and triumphant enerpy which makes the greatest of Byron's works so great. With all his glory of ardour and vigour and humour, Byron was a singer who could not sing; Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time; his depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as nature's, and not sooner exhaustible. He was alone the perfect singing-god; his thoughts, words, deeds, all sang together. This between two singing-men is a distinction of some significance; and must be, until the inarticulate poets and their articulate outriders have put down singing-men altogether as unrealities, inexpedient if not afflictive in the commonwealth of M. Proudhon and Mr. Carlyle. Till the dawn of that "most desired hour, more loved and lovely than all its sisters," these unblessed generations will continue to note the difference, and take some account of it. Again, though in some sense a "child of the idea," Byron is but a foundling or bastard child; Shelley is born heir, and has it by birthright; to Byron it is a charitable nurse, to Shelley a natural mother. All the more praise, it may be said, to Byron for having seen so much as he did and served so loyally. Be it so then; but let not his imperfect and intermittent service, noble and helpful now, and now alloyed with baser temper or broken short through sloth or spite or habit, be set beside the flawless work and perfect service of Shelley. His whole heart and mind, his whole soul and strength, Byron could not give to the idea at all; neither to art, nor freedom, nor any faith whatever. His life's work therefore falls as short of the standard of Shelley's as of Goethe's work. To compare "Cain" with "Prometheus," the "Prophecy of Dante" with the "Ode to Naples," is to compare "Manfred" with "Faust." Shelley was born a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work. Byron, with a noble admixture of brighter and purer blood, had in him a cross of the true Philistine breed.
There is no other word than this yet devised which will carry the exact weight of meaning wanted. The use of it is however, it seems, offensive to certain persons; one writer has actually signed his name to an article in which he asserts that Mr. Matthew Arnold and I after him use or abuse it as a reproachful synonym for the name of Christian. Anonymous fiction of this kind no man will notice who respects the truth or himself; but some exposition of the meaning of words may be permissible and serviceable for the correction of an error or the exposure of a falsehood. It is not the correction of an error that is for the minute my task. This writer, whose article was signed with the name of Peter Bayne, undertakes the defence of his gods in heaven above and on earth beneath against Mr. Arnold and myself with engines and artillery of a somewhat shaky and explosive kind. For myself, it appears that I, "who am refined" (teste Bayne) "in my language, and have quite the manners of a gentleman" (this I fear is the scathing expression of a pungent irony), have denounced the whole race of "Christians" at one fell swoop as "noisome Philistines;" exceeding Mr. Arnold by the addition of an epithet. I am not concerned to dispute the degrees of gentility with a falsifier of the sense of words, to question the breeding or pass sentence on the manners of a public and self-exposed libeller. I would only remark that when the reader is led or driven off the bare highway of truth it is but fair to afford him some morsel of slander so spiced and sauced that it may perhaps slip glibly down some one's gullet without sticking, some palatable and digestible condiment of calumny, some pleasanter pasture, at least, than a twice-cooked and twice-chewed mess of thistles: for it cannot be certain that he will by some divine inborn instinct prefer that diet to any other. Mr. Bayne's calumnies are somewhat dry, a little flat and hard; Crabtree, in this revival of Sheridan's play, moves clumsily in the coarse livery of slander in undress, without the brocade and perfume of Backbite, the genial grace of Mrs. Candour, or the sinewy and flexible facility of Snake. His crude fiction wants breadth, delicacy, sureness of touch; Tartuffe would scarcely have taken him on trial as a fellow-servant with Laurent. In one point he is liker another once famous figure in the drama. The valet in Farquhar's comedy knew when people were talking of him, "they laughed so consumedly." Mr. Peter Bayne has sounded a baser string of humility than the valet. When he does but scent or suspect anywhere a contemptuous allusion, he knows "they must be talking," not of him, but of the gods of his worship. Scrub knew his own place; but Mr. Bayne knows the place of his gods; and indeed, if we judge of a deity by his worshippers, he may be right in thinking that what he adores must be naturally liable to men's contempt. He remarks, with cruelly satirical reference to my alleged heresies and audacities in the choice of guides and teachers not chosen to his mind, that my "years and achievements make it fitting" for me "to point the finger of scorn at" figures enthroned in the pantheon of his moral mythology. What may be the years and what the achievements of Mr. Peter Bayne I know not; but I do know that the years of Nestor and the achievements of Napoleon would not suffice to extenuate fatuity on the one hand and false witness on the other.
A slandered man may, if he please, claim leave to take (though he may not care to make) occasion in passing to set a mark on the calumniator; but he will hardly care to take into his hands the hangman's office of applying the iron or the lash. I have done, and return without apology from mean to higher matters. Of the relation between Shelley and Byron I have here no more to say; but before ending these notes I find yet another point or so to touch upon. Perhaps to every student of any one among the greater poets there seems to be something in his work not yet recognised by other students, some secret power or beauty reserved for his research. I do not think that justice has yet been done to Shelley as to some among his peers, in all details and from every side. Mr. Arnold, in my view, misconceives and misjudges him not less when set against Keats than when bracketed with Byron. Keats has indeed a divine magic of language applied to nature; here he is unapproachable; this is his throne, and he may bid all kings of song come bow to it. But his ground is not Shelley's ground; they do not run in the same race at all. The "Ode to Autumn," among other such poems of Keats, renders nature as no man but Keats ever could. Such poems as the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills" cannot compete with it, But do they compete with it? The poem of Keats, Mr. Arnold says, "renders Nature;" the poem of Shelley "tries to render her." It is this that I deny. What Shelley tries to do he does; and he does not try to do the same thing as Keats. The comparison is as empty and profitless as one between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the sonnets of Milton. Shelley never in his life wrote a poem of that exquisite contraction and completeness, within that round and perfect limit. This poem of the Euganean Hills is no piece of spiritual sculpture or painting after the life of natural things. I do not pretend to assign it a higher or a lower place; I say simply that its place is not the same. It is a rhapsody of thought and feeling coloured by contact with nature, but not born of the contact; and such as it is all Shelley's work is, even when most vague and vast in its elemental scope of labour and of aim. A soul as great as the world lays hold on the things of the world; on all life of plants, and beasts, and men; on all likeness of time, and death, and good things and evil. His aim is rather to render the effect of a thing than a thing itself; the soul and spirit of life rather than the living form, the growth rather than the thing grown. And herein he too is unapproachable.
Other and lesser critics than Mr. Arnold have taxed Shelley with a want of dramatic power upon the characters and passions of men. While writing these notes I have come across the way of such an one, who bids us notice how superior in truth and subtlety is Mr. Browning's study of Guido Franceschini to Shelley's of Count Cenci. Here again a comparison is patched up between two things utterly unamenable to the same rule. The wonderful figure so cunningly drawn and coloured by Mr. Browning is a model of intense and punctilious realism.[17] Every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every vein and joint of the subtle and intricate spirit divided and laid bare. A close and dumb soul compelled into speech by mere struggle and stress of things labours in literal translation and accurate agony at the lips of Guido. This scientific veracity which unbuilds and rebuilds the whole structure of spirit, thought by thought and touch by touch, till the final splendour of solution is achieved, and the consummate labour made perfect from key-stone to coping-stone, is so triumphant a thing that on its own ground it can be matched by no poet; to match it we must look back to Balzac. Shelley worked by other rules to another end: with the sculptor's touch rather than the anatomist's. But his figure of Cenci is not the less accurate for its breadth of handling. We might as well consign Manon Lescaut to a place below Emma Bovary, because Prévost wrought out his immortal study with broader lines and fewer colours than Flaubert. A figure may be ideal and yet accurate, realistic and yet untrue, as a fact not thoroughly fathomed may be in effect a falsehood. There is a far stronger cross of the ideal in the realism of Æschylus or Shakespeare than runs through the work of the great modern realists. What was the latent breadth or depth of Shelley's dramatic genius we cannot say, as he had not time himself to know. It is incomplete in the "Cenci;" for example, in the figure of Orsino the lines are not cut sharp and deep enough; he is drawn too easily and lightly; the picture looks thin and shadowy beside the vivid image we get from the old report of the: Cenci trial. That sketch of Monsignor Guerra, the tall delicate young priest, with long curls and courtly graces, playing on crime as on a lute with fine fingers used to music-making, might have been thrown out in keen relief against the great figure of Cenci; a Caponsacchi turned ignoble instead of noble, and as well worth drawing had the hand been there to draw. As it is, he plays but a poor part, borne up only by the sweet strength of Shelley's verse. But is Cenci himself the mere and monstrous embodiment of evil made flesh, the irrational and soulless mask of lust and cruelty, that critics have called him? Is he in effect as inanimate and unreal as Guido is real and alive? To me, putting aside the difference of handling between the schools of which Shakespeare and Balzac are respectively the heads, the one seems as true as the other. Cenci, as we see him, is the full-blown flower, the accomplished result of a life absolute in its luck, in power and success and energetic enjoyment. His energy is insatiable of emotions, and has few left to make trial of; the conscience of this sharpens and exasperates the temper of his will. Something within him, born as much of the spirit as the flesh, is ravenous and restless as fire. To feel his power by dint of hard use is a need of his nature; "his soul, which is a scourge," must needs smite to know itself alive and taste its strength: too strong for satiety or collapse, while life endures his nature must bite and burn as surely as steel must or flame. What he is, good fortune has made him—"Strength, health, and pride, and lust, and length of days." What Guido Franceschini is, he has been made by ill fortune. Fed with good things from his birth, the evil nature in him might have swollen into the likeness of Cenci's; as Cenci, crossed and cramped at every turn of life, with starved energies and shrivelled lusts, might have shrunk into the shape of Guido, a pained and thwarted spirit of self-suffering evil. The one, though drawn with less detail of growth from seed to fruit, is surely not less conceivable than the other; but Cenci's is the stronger spirit, the more solid and rounded nature: he was not one to struggle or fail. Shelley has made his ruling appetite the lust of strength, of self-conscious and spiritual power: he has not added the fleshly lust of pain and subtle animal relish of the pungent infliction, which was doubtless interfused with Cenci's sensuous cruelty. But the august and horrible figure is painted as naturally as nobly; his rage and his religion, the loathing that underlies his lust, and the lust that inflames his loathing; his hungry abhorrence of his daughter's beauty of body and soul—("Beast that thou art!")—his faith in God and fury against good, his splendid exaltation of spirit into a passionate and winged rapture of ardent hatred or of fiery joy, consummate in that last outbreak as of all the fumes and flames of hell at once, are no more alien from nature or each other than Guido's subtle crossings and windings of soul through backstairs and byways of brute craft and baser pride, of barren anger and greed and pain. This is evidence enough that if Shelley had lived the "Cenci" would not now be the one great play written in the great manner of Shakespeare's men that our literature has seen since the time of these. The proof of power is here as sure and as clear as in Shelley's lyric work; he has shown himself, what the dramatist must needs be, as able to face the light of hell as of heaven, to handle the fires of evil as to brighten the beauties of things. This latter work indeed he preferred, and wrought at it with all the grace and force of thought and word which give to all his lyrics the light of a divine life; but his tragic truth and excellence are as certain and absolute as the sweetness and the glory of his songs. The mark of his hand, the trick of his voice, we can always recognise in their clear character and individual charm; but the range is various from the starry and heavenly heights to the tender and flowering fields of the world wherein he is god and lord: with here such a flower to gather as the spinners' song of Beatrice, and there such a heaven to ascend as the Prologue to Hellas, which the zealous love of Mr. Garnett for Shelley has opened for us to enter and possess for ever; where the pleadings of Christ and Satan alternate as the rising and setting of stars in the abyss of luminous sound and sonorous light. We have now but to await the final gift of a perfect and critical edition of the whole works, the supreme tribute of love and worship yet owing to the master singer of our modern race and age; to the poet beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word—divine.
Note.
Shortly after the publication of these slight and rapid notes, the appearance of the edition whose advent was here hopefully invoked gave a fresh impulse and opened a wider way to the study of Shelley. The ardour and labour expended on his glorious task by Mr. W. M. Rossetti must link his name for ever in honourable association with that of the poet to whom he has done such loyal and noble service. He has lightened the darkness that perplexed us at so many turns of a labyrinth which others had done their best to darken; he has delivered all students from the bondage of Medwin and Hogg: at those muddy springs no future "mental traveller" will ever need again to slake or to cheat his thirst for some dubious drop of information as to how the god of song might have appeared on earth to the shepherds or the swineherds of Admetus. He has done much more than this; he has had the glory of giving to the world fresh verse of Shelley's. Whole poems and priceless fragments, fresh instalments of imperfect but imperishable work, we owe to the labour of his love. Often too he has found means to elucidate and to rectify much that was corrupt and obscure. For all these benefits he deserves all the gratitude that can be given by lovers of Shelley whose love has borne no such fruit and done no such service as his. Outside the precincts of Grubstreet no dullness could ignore and no malignity deny the value of the service done, the greatness of the benefits conferred. On the other hand, I am impelled, however unwillingly, to enter my protest against the general principle on which the text has been recast and rearranged. The very slightest change of reading, though it should be but a change in punctuation, ought never to be offered without necessity, as it can never be received without reluctance. To throw over for some new version, though never so rational or plausible, the text we have by heart, the words which line by line and letter by letter have grown as it were a part of ourselves, have worked their way (so to speak) into the very lifeblood of our thought, the very core and conscience of our memory, cannot but be pain and grief to any faithful and loving student. But in this revision, so far from showing any tenderness or respect for such feelings as he might have been supposed to share, Mr. Rossetti has too often handled Shelley, I will not say as Milton was handled by Bentley, but I must say as Shakespeare was handled by Steevens. The punctilious if not pedantic precision which has reformed the whole scheme of punctuation, doubtless often loose enough in the original editions, compels us to remark that the last state of this text is worse than the first. This edition is beyond praise and beyond price as a book of reference; but no one, I should imagine, will ever read in it for pleasure, while he can procure instead the loosest and most incorrect of those previously printed. Throughout the whole five acts of the "Cenci" the reader is incessantly irritated by such small but significant vexations as the substitution of "you" for "thou" or "thee" for "you," on some rigid system of regulation to which the editor himself does not pretend to suppose that his author ever proposed to conform. Now I cannot but think that a lesser poet than Shelley might reasonably be presumed to know better than his editor what he meant to say, and by what rule or what instinct his hand was guided as he wrote. To me the tact or instinct which even in these small matters directed the hand and determined the choice of Shelley seems so nearly infallible in its exquisite and subtle delicacy, that even if for once my own taste would have rejected the turn of a sentence or a phrase which to his taste has seemed preferable I should undoubtedly consider that he was likelier to be right than I—at least with regard to his own work. Of this readjustment of the words "you" and "thou" six instances are acknowledged and the principle of reformation is vindicated in a note; but for the sentences broken up and recast, the interpolated periods which make two or three curt inharmonious sentences out of one most harmoniously prolonged through natural pauses to its natural end—for these and other vexatious pedantries or petty rigidities of rule, it does not seem that any defence or apology has been thought needful. Yet a skilful and able student or master of language such as Mr. Rossetti cannot surely need to be told that these superfluous breaks and changes in the punctuation deform and destroy the fine perfection of the metre; that the harmony of a whole speech or a whole stanza may be shattered by the intrusion or suppression of a colon or a comma; that a false pointing in English verse is as bad as a false quantity in Latin. There is no man living, in my mind, who might be trusted to correct the metre of Shelley; and among all past poets of his own rank I know of none who might have been so trusted but Milton. And it is no less an enterprise than this that Mr. Rossetti has taken upon himself. Surely, too, his scholarship was somewhat at fault when he likened to the English of Mrs. Gamp the use of an obsolete and doubtless a licentious construction in "Rosalind and Helen"—
"My Lionel, who, as every strain
Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien
Sunk—"
here altered by the excision of the word who and the substitution of a period for a comma, which compels us to begin a fresh sentence with the following words. Even were the original reading a mere solecism, it would be preferable to such drawing and quartering of a poet's text as this. But it is simply a revival—indefensible indeed in my eyes, and probably due to mere haste—of a lax usage permitted to elder writers both in verse and prose. If all texts are to be regulated after this pedagogic fashion, neither Shakespeare nor even Milton will be secure against correction. The poem in which this passage occurs, certainly the least precious example we have of Shelley's mature work, was, as we know, resumed and completed at the desire of Mrs. Shelley after it had been cast aside as not worth completion; and we may well suppose that the task was executed rapidly and with little of the passionate pleasure that impels and informs the execution of work into which the workman can put his whole heart. A much more real and grave solecism in "Julian and Maddalo" has been left not only uncorrected but unnoticed—"One blessing which thou ne'er didst imprecate for on me." Even such a positive blunder as this I should not myself have presumed to correct by any process of suppression and substitution; but it is singular that an editor who has never scrupled to apply this process when he thought fit should have abstained from applying it in this really flagrant instance of bad English. Against another example of this interference I must also protest for the sake of my own and all ears that have been trained on the music of Shelley; I refer to the change made in the last verses of the overture to the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills." If the editor finds the license of such a phrase as
too "annoying" to be endured by a scholastic sense of propriety, the annoyance is far keener which will be inflicted on others by his substituted reading—"Is like a sapless leaflet now." Here again Shelley has indulged in a loose and obsolete construction which may or may not be defensible; I should not at the present day permit it to myself, or condone it in another; and had the editor been engaged in the revision of a schoolboy's theme, he would certainly have done right to correct such a phrase, and as certainly would not have done wrong to add such further correction as he might deem desirable; but the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable to the revision of a schoolboy's theme. Nor are these grammatical castigations the worst examples of the singular freedom with which so true and studious an enthusiast for the fame of Shelley has thought it allowable to handle the text of his greatest poems. Under the pernicious guidance of professors and pedagogues dead and living he has been induced to dismember and disfigure such samples of lyric verse as touch the very highest top of possible perfection—songs that might have been envied by Simonides and praised by Sappho. By one of these blind (and deaf) guides he has been led to deface two stanzas of the "Skylark" after a fashion only to be paralleled, I should hope, in Bentley's Milton; to displace the pause in the second stanza so as at once to deform the meaning and destroy the music; and in the third to supplant "an unbodied" by "an embodied joy"! Even this is not the very worst of all. If there is one verse in Shelley or in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other, it is that in the "Lament"—
The music of this line taken with its context—the melodious effect of its exquisite inequality[18]—I should have thought was a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to the eyes of all men whose ears were not closed against all harmony by some denser and less removable obstruction than shut out the song of the Sirens from the hearing of the crew of Ulysses. Yet in this edition (vol. ii. p. 274) the word "autumn" is actually foisted in after the word "summer." Upon this incredible outrage I really dare not trust myself to comment. The only parallel I know to it within the memory of man is the repainting of Giotto's portrait of Dante by an Italian hireling at the bidding of his Austrian masters, who desired to efface from the poet's berretta the sacred national colours of hope and faith and love. That is irreparable; but the outrage offered to the text of Shelley happily is not. For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of Shelley with this most damnable corruption. To such earless and soulless commentators, strong only in finger-counting and figure-casting, the ghost of their divine victim, whether Shakespeare or Shelley, might say with Paulina—
"Do not repent these things.***
****A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert."
At least we may be assured that no such penance, though multiplied beyond the calculation of all arithmeticians who ever made use of their science as a lead-line to sound the depths of song, as a key to unlock the secrets of harmony, could ever move the righteous judge of Marsyas to look with pity on the son of Midas who had thus abused the text of one so dear to him as Shelley. The race of his old enemy, we perceive, has degenerated since the date of the Phrygian king; the regal and paternal ears are indeed hereditary, but as surely as the touch of the father turned all things to gold, so surely the touch of his children turns all things to lead.
I shall merely notice the single remaining instance of perversion which I feel bound not to pass over in silence; the false pointing of one of the noblest passages in the "Prometheus Unbound"—
"Heap on thy head, by virtue of this curse,
Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good."
I should really have thought it impossible to mistake the simple and obvious meaning of these and the glorious verses which follow; namely, that the curse invoked on the almighty tyrant was to do evil and behold good. The idea is of course not original; few lines have been oftener quoted, and few have better deserved their fame, than the majestic verse in which Persius has invoked upon tyrants a deeper damnation than ever priest conceived—
'Virtutem videant intabescantque relictâ."
What indeed, compared to this, are the gross and brutish threats of theological materialism? what is the ice or fire of Dante, the burning marl of Milton? But by the application of this supreme curse to the supreme oppressor Shelley has transfigured the noble moral thought of the Stoic poet into the splendour of an idea too sublime for the conception of one so much lesser than himself. It is utterly inexplicable to me how an editor of Mr. Rossetti's high and rare intelligence in matters of art and imagination can here for once have failed to follow the track of Shelley's thought, to see with Shelley's eyes this vision of the two infinities of good and evil; of the evil deeds wrought by omnipotence and the good deeds wrought by suffering—both of these infinite as God himself, as the world he torments, as the solitude which is at once the condition and the chastisement of his omnipotence. The sequence of ideas is so natural and logical, so coherent with the whole scheme and subject of the poem, that I cannot understand by what strange aberration the editor should have lost his way through so plain and open a tract of country, and thought it necessary to shatter at once the harmony, the sense, and the grammar of so simple and superb a passage in order to patch up an explanation as forced, unnatural, and improbable as the more obvious interpretation was clear, consistent, and sufficient. I should add that as Mr. Rossetti, with his habitual candour and generous good sense, has since published a note which may be taken as equivalent to a recantation of the error which led him to cast aside the previous text for the dissonant and incongruous version produced by a change of pointing, I should not have given even this passing notice to the matter had the passage been less important, the perversion less flagrant, or the mistake already cancelled. I have now, to adopt a pedagogic formula which might beseem the lips of a commentator in the heat of correction, discharged a painful duty, but one which I felt to be incumbent on me; and I may add, in the same professional style and spirit, that I hope I may never be compelled to undertake it again. It should also be noted by those who may feel most keenly the indignity offered to Shelley by such perversions and corruptions of his meaning and his music as those on which I have here had to remark, that no little service has been done to the text in other places by the simple correction of many such obvious and indubitable misprints as deform the penultimate stanza of "The Revolt of Islam;" where, to take but a single instance, the words "one line" had in all previous editions been allowed to stand in defiance of sense and metre, both of which for more than half a century had been crying aloud for the restoration of the right reading—"on a line."
I have but one other fault to find with this first critical edition of Shelley; and in this instance I am confident of having with me, I had wellnigh said all lovers of his fame, but that this would exclude at least one name which must always be counted among those of his most loving disciples—that of the editor himself. To reprint in an appendix the monstrous mass of doggrel which has been pitilessly preserved by the evil fidelity of Mr. Hogg, and to add even the metrical sweepings of "St. Irvyne," is an offence on which I believe that the verdict of all competent critics has been unanimous. That this wretched rubbish should exist at all in print is vexation enough for those to whom the honour of the greatest poets is dear; but Mr. Hogg's book is a monument likely to prove something less durable than brass, and in its mouldering pages the evidence of Shelley's boyish absurdities and atrocities in the way of rhyme might have been trusted to rot unobserved save of some rare collector of strange and worthless things. But to have them bound up with the ripest work of the first lyric poet of England, tied on as it were to the tail or pinned to the back of a volume which undertakes to give us for the first time a critical text of Shelley, is a thing not to be endured or extenuated.[19] The argument or apology of the editor on behalf of this lamentable act of caprice has not I believe made a single convert, and is I should hope not likely to make one. Those who did most justice to the zealous labour and the strenuous devotion of Mr. Rossetti, those who were the first to recognise with all gratitude what thanks were due to his ardour and ability, were the first to utter their protest against this the most unhappy and perverse example on record of a pernicious exactitude in the collection and preservation of all that an author would desire to efface from his own and all men's memory. The first such protest, if I mistake not, was expressed in earnest and weighty words by Miss Mathilde Blind, whose admirable essay on Shelley was one of the earliest and most notable signs of the impulse given to the critical study of the poet by the appearance of this edition. That essay, full as it was of eloquent commentary and fervent thought, is yet more precious for its many contributions to the pure and perfect text of Shelley which we hope before long to see; no pedagogic emendations or professorial conjectures, but restorations supplied from the poet's own manuscript; and, more than all, for the completion of that faultless poem called "The Question" by one long-lost line of final loveliness.
It would be a pleasanter task than that of fault-finding or protesting, to pass once more through the glorious gallery of Shelley's works in the company of his first critical editor, and note down what points of consent or dissent might occur to us in the process of comparing opinions as to this poem or that. But time and space forbid me to do more than register my own opinion as to the respective value of two among the latest, and to express the surprise which I share with Miss Blind at the station assigned by Mr. Rossetti to the "Witch of Atlas," which he deliberately ranks above the "Epipsychidion." It is indeed an exquisite exercise of sunny and flowery fancy, which probably was designed to cover or convey no such elaborate allegoric significance as the editor seems willing to seek in it; the "lady witch" being simply an incarnation of ideal beauty and beneficence, in her relations to man a spiritual patroness of free thought and free love, in her relations to nature a mistress or an adept of her secret rites or forces. Nor does it seem to me that Mr. Rossetti has touched on the one point where the "Epipsychidion" might be plausibly represented as open to attack. Its impalpable and ethereal philosophy of love and life does not prevent it from being "quite a justifiable sort of poem to write;" the questionable element in it is the apparent introduction of such merely personal allusions as can only perplex and irritate the patience and intelligence of a loyal student, while they may not impossibly afford an opening for preposterous and even offensive interpretations. In all poetry as in all religions, mysteries must have place, but riddles should find none. The high, sweet, mystic doctrine of this poem is apprehensible enough to all who look into it with purged eyes and listen with purged ears; but the passages in which the special experience of the writer is thrust forward under the mask and muffler of allegoric rhapsody are not in any proper sense mysterious; they are simply puzzling; and art should have nothing to do with puzzles. This, and this alone, is the fault which in my opinion may be not unreasonably found with some few passages of the "Epipsychidion;" and a fault so slight and partial as merely to affect some few passages here and there, perceptible only in the byways and outskirts of the poem, can in no degree impair the divine perfection of its charm, the savour of its heavenly quality. By the depth and exaltation of its dominant idea, by the rapture of the music and the glory of the colour which clothe with sound and splendour the subtle and luminous body of its thought, by the harmony of its most passionate notes and the humanity of its most godlike raptures, it holds a foremost place in the works of that poet who has now for two generations ruled and moulded the hearts and minds of all among his countrymen to whom the love of poetry has been more than a fancy or a fashion; who has led them by the light of his faith, by the spell of his hope, by the fire of his love, on the way of thought which he himself had followed in the track of the greatest who had gone before him—of Æschylus, of Lucretius, of Milton; who has been more to us than ever was Byron to the youth of his own brief day, than ever was Wordsworth to the students of the day succeeding; and of whom, whether we class him as second or as third among English poets, it must be in either case conceded that he holds the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry—supreme, and without a second of his race. I would not pit his name against the sacred name of Milton; to wrangle for the precedence of this immortal or of that can be but futile and injurious; it is enough that our country may count among her sons two of the greatest among those great poets who have also been prophets and evangelists of personal and national, social and spiritual freedom; but it is equally certain that of all forms or kinds of poetry the two highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that as clearly as the first place in the one rank is held among us by Shakespeare, the first place in the other is held and will never be resigned by Shelley.
- ↑ Of the poet of the English commonwealth Shelley has elsewhere said, "The sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion;" a passage which may serve as comment on this of the "Adonais." On the other hand, Shelley in the "Defence of Poetry" does certainly place Dante, "the second epic poet," between Homer and Milton; and so far he would seem to be referred to here also as second "among the sons of light." But where then is Shakespeare, who surely had the most "light" in him of all?
- ↑ When this passage was written I was of course not ignorant that in an extant manuscript of this poem Shelley had himself filled up the gap with the word "king;" but this certainly did not appear to me a sufficient assurance that such could have been the original reading, aware as I was of the excisions and alterations to which Shelley was compelled by stress of friends or publishers to submit his yet unpublished or half-published poems. I am now, however, all but convinced that the antithesis intended was between the "king" of this stanza and the "priest" of the next; though I still think that the force and significance of the phrase are grievously impaired if we are to assume that the "foul gordian word" is simply the title of king, and not (as so much of the context would appear to imply) a creed or system of religion which might at the time have appeared to the writer wholly or mainly pernicious. And this, with all his reverence for the divine humanity of Christ, we know that the creed of historical Christianity did always appear to Shelley. In this adoration of the personal Jesus, combined as it was with an equal abhorrence of Christian theology, it is now perhaps superfluous to remark how thoroughly Shelley was at one with Blake—the only poet or thinker then alive with whom he had so much in common.
- ↑ "L'amoroso drudo
Della fede cristiana."Paradiso, xii. 55. - ↑ A reference to the Eton Lists has shown me the truth of what I had long suspected, that the school-days of Shelley must have ended before the beginning of Dr. Keate's reign as Head Master. In effect, I find that Shelley, then a fifth form boy, left in 1808, and that the Head Mastership of Dr. Keate began in 1809. The jocularities, therefore, of Mr. Hogg as to the mutual relations of Shelley and the 'Old Boy" prove to be like most of his other jests—as baseless as they are pointless.
- ↑ It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent population has been delivered by the preaching of Laon and Cythna was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not the doctrine itself, but the mass of men or nations reared in the belief or tradition of that doctrine. This use may doubtless be permissible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later title of the poem; but the original title as well as the original text still seems to me preferable.
- ↑ This reading among others has been restored by Mr. Rossetti in the only critical edition of Shelley which has yet been given to the world; and the gain in every such instance is so manifest that we are more than ever impelled to demand a full and final restoration, of the complete and uncorrupted text as it came from the hands of the author.
- ↑ Landor has noted one instance of this error. Having set a mark against Milton's use of "empowered" for "empoweredst," cast" for "castedst," he adds, "I find the same fault, where I am as much surprised to find it, in Shelley:
'Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.'"
While at work on the text of Milton, he has given us a rule which all editors and commentators would be wise to lay to heart in Shelley's case: "It is safer and more reverential to correct the punctuation of a great poet than his slightest word." Mr. Palgrave's proposal of "sea-girt" for "sun-girt city" ("Lines written among the Euganean Hills") may look plausible, but the new epithet is feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city; it is interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled; pierced through with water, but not ringed about. Seen by noon from the Euganean heights, clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid with the arms of the sun-god. - ↑ Here again I must make some partial recantation of the judgment given in my text. Exquisite as would be the echo of the parting song of the Moon given back by the deeper tone of the music of the Earth, I think now that the fantastic beauty of that single repercussive note would perhaps be out of tune with the supreme and equable harmony of the whole; and there seems full reason to attribute this probable misprint to a misreading of the interpolation of these two lines in the manuscript of Shelley.
- ↑ This line seems misplaced here, and has been marked as such by later editors.
- ↑ Shelley seems to have overlooked the sex of the goat whom the satyrs are calling back to give suck to her young. In his text the words "he of race divine," and "father of the flocks," should be altered to "she" and "mother."
- ↑ Rabelais gives an admirable version of this line (Book iv. ch. 65): " Veritablement, il est escript par vostre beau Euripides, et le dict Silenus, beuveur memorable;
Furieux est, de bon sens ne jouist,
Quiconques boyt et ne s'en resjouist." - ↑ These two lines are in Shelley's text.
- ↑ Or, if we retain the reading οὐ κυνήσομαι instead of admitting this of οὐκ ὠνήσομαι,
"Shall I not worship such a drink," &c.,
for we are told to take κυνεῑν here in the sense of προσκυνεῑν, or I should render it simply,
"Shall I not kiss a drink like this?" - ↑ "A most ridiculous monster! to make a wonder of a poor drunkard."(Tempest, ii. 2.)
But poor old Silenus is now as sober or semi-sober as Trinculo. - ↑ Coleridge's personal influence as preacher or professor of ghostly dialectics and marshlight theosophy (brighter indeed than the bedroom rushlights about it, but no star or sun) was a thing distinct from his doings as a poet. There was no more direct work done by his mere verse than by the mere verse of Keats.
- ↑ The one kindly attempt of Landor to fill Southey's place for him when disabled could scarcely have proved acceptable to his friend's official employers.
"But since thou liest sick at heart
And worn with years, some little part
Of thy hard office let me try,
Tho' inexpert was always I
To toss the litter of Westphalian swine
From under human to above divine."—(Works, vol. ii. p. 654.)"Call you that backing of your friends"—when they happen to be laureates?
- ↑ The word realism has a higher and a baser sense; there is the grand spiritual realism of Balzac or Browning, as well as the crude and facile realism, or vulgarism rather, of writers wanting alike in spirit and in form. It is so often used as a term of reproach on one side, on the other as a boastful watchword, that when taken as a simple term of definition it may perhaps be misconstrued.
- ↑ If any man of human ear can want further evidence than his own sense of harmony in support of the true and hitherto undisputed reading, he may find one instance among others of the subtle and wonderful use to which Shelley would sometimes put a seeming imperfection of this kind in the verses to Emilia Viviani:
"Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?"
Here the same ineffable effect of indefinable sweetness is produced by an exact repetition (but let no aspiring "poet-ape" ever think to reproduce it by imitation) of the same simple means—the suppression, namely, of a single syllable. And I cannot but wonder as well as rejoice that no pedant whose ears are at the ends of his fingers should ever yet have proposed to correct and complete the verse by reading
"Say, is it with thy kisses," &c. - ↑ An edition of Shelley which should give us a final standard of the text would naturally relegate "Queen Mab" to its proper place in an appendix. The strong and sincere protest of Shelley against the piratical reissue of this poem, backed by the frank and reasonable avowal that he was ashamed of the bad poetry contained in it, should have sufficed to exclude it from the station at the head of his works which it has so long been permitted to retain. Full of intellectual power and promise as it is, a poem repudiated by its author as unworthy of his maturer fame should never have been thrust into the place which obviously belongs to "Alastor;" for it is only with this later work that the real career of Shelley as a poet may be properly said to begin.