the case of many Christian communions, which have hitherto had little or no external connection with one another. But this subject is far too wide and general to be dealt with on the present occasion. We restrict ourselves to the Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, and plead once more that they should no longer continue in a state of unnatural and unscriptural separation. It is, we fear, true that the nearer Churches come to each other, while still remaining disunited, the greater is the danger of envious or malevolent feelings springing up between them. On every ground, then, should the Scottish Churches resolve on a cordial incorporating uniona union which will be widely tolerant of diversities of opinion on subordinate points, while it conserves and upholds all that is essential in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. ALEXANDER ROBERTS. ART. II-The Poetry of Shelley. SHELLEY has been termed the most poetical of poets, and with some reason. He more seldom probably than any poet, except Shakespeare, lapses into prose. A living original poetic diction seems to flow perennially from him; metaphor and imagery never fail him; his ear for melody and harmony of measure, not too obtrusive and artificial, but spontaneous, varied, and charming, was unsurpassed; he is one of the great modern brotherhood of prophets, or interpreters of nature, and the substance of his message to us as seer concerning truth and life is of high value, whatever may be its error and limitation. Mr. Matthew Arnold indeed has lately pronounced a severe judgment on Shelley, even venturing to affirm that he will be remembered by his prose rather than by his poetry. In an essay, with which otherwise I often gravely disagreed, Mr. Swinburne replied that few critical reputations could survive such a judgment. But Mr. Arnold appeared to found his indictment against Shelley on the fact that he was the poet of clouds and sunsets rather than of men. Considering Shelley's ardent aspirations for human good, and for a more ideal condition of society in which the majority should enjoy more opportunities of developing our common humanity, to say nothing of one of the most intense dramas of modern days, the Cenci, that assertion is very questionable. Man indeed, not men, Shelley cared for. His men and women are mostly thin shadows, apparitions of dream or reverie, somewhat hectic and hysterical; they are usually idealized self-portraitures. His was a recluse and solitary soul. No doubt Shelley is the poet of clouds and sunsets the poet of nature more distinctively. But does not he who makes this a reproach to a poet fail to comprehend a characteristic note of all the best and most moving modern poetry? Certainly man has always been a great subject-matter for the muse, but what if a new field has been added to her triumphs, a new realm reclaimed from chaos for her achievements? That, I believe, is the fact. This is an age of material science, as former ages were not. It is also the age of nature-poetry. That is indeed the note of all great recent verse of Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson, quite as much as of Shelley. Indeed, it is the right and duty of modern men to interrogate and interpret nature. Science has furnished much material, but her own province as interpreter of nature is quite distinct. She is minister for abstract knowledge and practical utility, whereas poetry communes with Nature as living, and in living fellowship with humanity, as spiritual symybol, the key to which lies hidden in the heart and imagination of man, in the analogies that bind and fuse the twin spheres of thought and sense. But the poetic soul is not more needed thus to find the clue to external nature than is external nature needed to reverberate light (with a new measure and manner of it added) upon the inmost recesses of intellect and emotion. 'Stone him with hardened hearts harder than stones,' sings Shakespeare in Lucrece.' How is the hardness of the callous heart understood a thousandfold by that image of the lesser hardness, the derived, the merely phantasmal hardness in the stone! I look upon a few lines in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' as some of the finest he ever wrote. Thou hast a voice, great mountain! to repeal This is the outcome of a deep penetration into the very heart and essence of that magnificent calm of the snow-spirit communing with eternal constellations, that journey ohne Hast, und ohne Rast. The pageant of imagery is but as avenues of sounding glory whereby we approach the King. As I have said elsewhere, the phrase, indolent foam,' in Keats characterizes the very motion of spent, shredding foam on the back of a wave with a truth which were unattainable without the epithet drawn from human feeling. Nor can I sympathize The with Mr. Ruskin's chapter on what he terms The Pathetic Fallacy' in his Modern Painters,' in which he seeks to distinguish the representation of Nature as she is, which he ascribes to Homer, and to Scott among ourselves, and the representation of her as she only appears to our distorting emotions. That seems to me a misleading distinction, because what Nature in herself apart from our minds is we do not accurately know we can see her only as she appears to us by virtue of the constitution of our faculties, senses, understanding, emotion, and imagination. Therefore I cannot admit that there is a true nature, which the man of science and the land-surveyor see, but a false nature which the person of delicate susceptibilities and the poet suppose themselves to see. The yellow primrose that was only a yellow primrose and nothing more' to Peter Bell was, as I believe, less truly seen by Peter Bell than by Wordsworth, to whom it was also a yellow primrose, more accurately perceived indeed by more delicate and cultivated senses, but also a very infinitude beyond, only to be realized by emotion, thought, and imagination. There is no more reason that I can discover why those higher faculties should be excluded from their share and function in the revelation of truth than there is why the senses and the understanding should be so excluded. man of science, the practical agriculturalist, the engineer have to tell us one thing, very good in its way; but the poet has to tell us something quite different, and also good in its way. Hence I cannot enter into Mr. Ruskin's preference of Scott over Shelley as a poet, which is founded on this distinction between them. Scott (our great humanist and romancewriter, as such next to Shakespeare) certainly had the eye of a painter, an eye for picturesque presentation of the externals of a landscape; but to him, as to most of the elder poets, it was a background and no more; while even Thomson fails to spiritualize it, that is, to feel and make us feel its spirituality through the material veil, which is also a symbol, as do Wordsworth and Shelley. Railroads and machines, and the goods they manufacture, are well certainly; but mental and emotional furniture is perhaps worth even a little more than the decorative furniture of drawing-rooms. Emotion may help us to discern in nature features, analogies, and moods that are indeed hers, though not all can discern them; though, of course, I fully admit that such characteristics may be more superficial and transitory, or more essential, vital, and abiding. The imagination, as admirably distinguished by Ruskin himself, will take hold of the heart of things, while the fancy will glance from one surface similitude to the other, may even distort truth by seizing only on these, leading away from profounder analogies, and structural homologues more essential. But he who uses the so-called poetic diction which he has picked up by reading without personal feeling, who deals moreover in frigid conceits and artifices that attract attention only to his own technical skill, has touched the lowest deep, and is no seer, but a mere clever writer of verses. With respect to the value of this modern poetry of nature as a revelation, not of nature only, but also of man, consider a moment what Wordsworth's leechgatherer would be without the lonely moor, and the lonely moor without the leechgatherer; they form together one vital unity. The leechgatherer is no common old man, but a very messenger of God to the poet, revealing to him the beauty of resignation and contentment. But he is disembodied, as it were, in the poet's meditative imagination; he becomes a spiritual being of high order. That is not the way Shakespeare, or Molière, or Homer would have represented him; but it may be a true, and not a false way notwithstanding; it may illuminate to the depths of him as no other method could do, and show him as he essentially is. What would Margaret in the Excursion' be without the cottage on the moor? and her neglected garden, once so trim and tidy? What would Shelley's Alastor' be without the magnificent scenery of mountain and stream amid which he moves onward to the close? They are one. They have joined hands, and interpret one another. The result of the poet's meditation is neither man alone, nor nature alone, but some fair spiritual child of their espousals. This, I maintain, is somewhat distinctively new and precious added to our intellectual and emotional treasure; we cannot afford to lose it; we are ungrateful not to thank the poet who procures it. 6 The imaginative abstractions of Shelley are often grand, worthy of a poet of the first order, to be placed beside Milton's magnificent abstraction, Far off His coming shone.' What can be finer in this line than the periphrasis for, and personification of, earthquake in Mont Blanc' Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake Demon taught her young Ruin? How wonderful is the personification of heavenly Love, 'Urania,' in Adonais!'. a passage worthy to be placed beside the 'Stone him with hardened hearts,' which I quoted from Shakespeare. Could dissertations or sermons say so well how love is wounded by want of love, and the spectacle of hard indifference or cruelty? Out of her secret paradise she sped, Through camps and cities rough with stone and steel, Yielding not, wounded the invisible Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell. And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they, But yet we have to note something on the other side that may be justly urged against Shelley as poet. His perennial affluence of imagery, metaphor, beautiful phrase, and lovely rhythm sometimes prevails to the injury of his substance, which is in danger of vanishing in a mere spray of verbal effects. His meaning is apt to be beaten out very thin. A peculiarity in him is that, whereas his power of interpreting and making us feel the life in nature, often through personifications, is so remarkable (as in 'The Cloud,' the 'Ode to the West Wind,' and the 'Hymn to Pan'), he sometimes endeavours to give a semblance of independent vitality to abstractions, which do not lend themselves readily to such endeavour. Thus, greatly as I admire 'Adonais; an Elegy on the Death of Keats,' I do think there is a certain frigidity and unreality in parts; I will not say a want of sincerity, because there is an atmosphere of true poetry in the very subtlest and most impalpable of the Shelleyan abstractions. He breathed in rare atmospheres where none but himself could breathe; he delighted in disporting himself in a region between heaven and earth, in what occultism terms the astral region, or ether, among the phantasmal shadows, or more refined volatilizations of mundane solidities. At such times, as in the Witch of Atlas' (which is an exquisite iridescence of the fancy and no more), he did not penetrate to the heart of things, but played, as it were, with the ghosts or wraiths of them only, more beautiful indeed, or as beautiful as any earthly appearance to sense, but not more spirit-sustaining or substantial. He dwells often in some nebulous region of rainbows which corresponds not to the laws of nature as known by sense or understanding, nor to the deeper spiritual laws in which these have their being. Thus when he sings of Dawn— On the brink of the night and the morning |
