We of the minority feel assured that of such a poet, or of a poet so long as he continued to write in this strain, Plato would have said as he did of the other poets who were excluded from the ideal commonwealth, 'When one of these makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that there is no place for such as he is in our statethe law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our soul's health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only.'

Carlyle said of De Quincey that it was a miserable thing for a man to make a literary reputation out of his vices. There is something about the lyric poetry of Shelley that suggests a somewhat similar idea. Putting it simply, I think he may be said to have made the most of his sorrows. 'His cry,' said Carlyle, 'is like the infinite, inarticulate wailing of forsaken infants.' It is all abandonment; we never seem to catch a note that nerves the soul, rather we are unnerved; and how can we remain faithful to poetry that has no nerving power? Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.'* In the utterances of Shelley's most inspired words there is frequently, as a critic says of Mr Swinburne, 'nothing to hold or to keep in all the meteor-like shower of words upon words, thoughts upon thoughts, similes upon similes.' There is, indeed, in Shelley little to have or to hold, and poetry in which there is little memorable is poetry in which there is little

* Emerson.

available for life. The supreme thing in poetry is to preserve intellectual precision amid emotional excitement. Passion is usually inarticulate. But the greatness of the best tragic art of Greece, of the art of Dante, of the art of Shakespere, its conspicuous nobility, is that these artists, as Hamlet says to the players, 'in the very torrent, tempest and, as I may say, whirlwind of their passion acquire and beget a temperance that give it smoothness.' But Shelley's eloquence, his flame of emotion, like his passion for reform, burns hot, without moderation, and leads nowhither. How the keen steel of a sentence like this cuts sheer through the mass of shallow worship of Shelley as a philosophic poet, 'The reader is fatigued with admiration, but is not yet master of his subject.'*

I cannot but feel that into what I have said on Shelley has entered the spirit of controversy, a spirit which is not, or should not be welcome among the members of a great brotherhood like that of the lovers of literature. What object is gained by speaking in dispraise of Shelley, in confessing dissatisfaction with him, and in so doing laying myself open to the easy reply

'Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive'?

I have not spoken of Shelley's great and enduring qualities as a poet, because pre-eminently in his case these have been, and are so well and ardently dwelt upon by his admirers that an exposition of them gave place, rightly, I think, to a protest against meaningless idolatry — to a plea for sanity in literary judgments. By speaking of

* Emerson, of Milton's prose works,

Shelley as the fellow of Shakespere we go near losing all standard of criticism altogether; we do wrong, not only to the poets with whom he is mentioned in the same breath, but we do wrong to Shelley also. Sanity before all things in criticism, no less than sanity before all things in life. We of the minority do not desire that criticism should be a matter of praising or blaming, but we say we do not find in Shelley what above all else we seek in art -spiritual succour, or spiritual peace.

But when that has been said, what remains? What, indeed, but to be reconverted to Shelley? to be reconverted to him in order that we may take in him a more temperate and a wiser joy. And as Professor Dowden truly said, when speaking lately in conversation about him, to be reconverted to Shelley, one only needs to read the 'Ode to the West Wind.' When its swift splendour meets our eyes, we forget the unreality of Shelley's world, his metaphysics, and all his 'gossamery affectation.' We are borne by verse like this to the verge of recantation of all our words :

'Make me thy lyre even as the forest is ;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth !
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

L

This, too, may be said, that some minds there are of a type not common, indeed, but not rare, to whom Shelley will always be more stimulating than poets of less ethereal genius. We bid them hail, for they are pilgrims, though their way is not our way, on the same journey that we ourselves would make to the country of a truer freedom and a fuller light.

I cannot more fittingly close what I have space to say than by a quotation from Mr F. W. H. Myers, who pleads eloquently for Shelley while he admits that all is not well with him. If I have made a petty attempt to practise the trade of the poisoner, here is the antidote.

In answer to the case, as he himself well states it, against Shelley, Mr Myers pleads wisely Shelley's youth and immaturity, and concludes thus :

'The common religion of all the world advances by many kinds of prophecy, and is spread abroad by the flying flames of pure emotion as well as by the solid incandescence of eternal truth. Some few souls indeed there are -a Plato, a Dante, a Wordsworth-whom we may without extravagance call stars of the spiritual firmament, so sure and lasting seems their testimony to those realities which life hides from us as sunlight hides the depth of heaven. But we affirm that in Shelley, too, there is a testimony of like kind, though it has less of substance and definition, and seems to float diffused in an ethereal loveliness. We may rather liken him to the dew-drop of his own song, which

"Becomes a winged mist,

And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the moon, and in the sun's last ray
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst."

For the hues of sunset also have for us their revelation. We look, and the conviction steals over us that such a spectacle can be no accident in the scheme of things; that the whole universe is tending to beauty, and that the apocalypse of that crimsoned heaven may not be the less authentic because it is so fugitive-not the less real because it comes to us in a phantasy wrought out of light and air.'

With such a sane and eloquent advocate we cannot but sympathise more than a little.