Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 8

Death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in _Adonais_:

'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

and again:

The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s.

Heaven's light for ever s.h.i.+nes, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

In all the musical and visionary glory of _h.e.l.las_ we seem to hear a subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a prayer. At one moment Sh.e.l.ley toys with the dreary sublimity of the Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the _Dies irae_.

And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity.

That nightmare haunts Sh.e.l.ley in _h.e.l.las_:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of a symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn.

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most spontaneous stanzas in our language:

A brighter h.e.l.las rears its mountains From waves serener far.

He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:

O write no more the tale of Troy If earth Death's scroll must be, Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free.

He has turned from the empty abstraction of the G.o.dwinian vision of perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had driven history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole, complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future; but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it.

That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:

Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind.

The foul cubs like their parents are, Their den is in their guilty mind, And conscience feeds them with despair.

Some end there must be to the _perpetuum mobile_ of wrong and revenge.

And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion.

He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?

O cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?

Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past O might it die, or rest at last.

Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold man who would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Sh.e.l.ley is not sure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. For a moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For one fleeting instant--how ironical the vision seems to us--he conceives that she may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt than this in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see the Golden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is a pattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase by familiarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republic exists firmly founded in the human mind itself:

But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.

Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the New Athens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" s.h.i.+ne in no common day, beside no earthly sea:

If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments rea.s.semble, And build themselves impregnably In a diviner clime, To Amphionic music on some cape sublime Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautiful words, we know not why, as the chords that make the "full close" in music content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Where any mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves and defies, there is the ideal Republic.

We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Sh.e.l.ley's chorus. The eloquent old man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the new time, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day of tyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on his grave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolished war. A generation pa.s.sed, and the winged victory is now a struggling hope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled with the rumour of ma.s.sacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the diviner climes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to its predestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought in indictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away the past with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned and the past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed the mother, and marvelled that the child should die.

The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere a.s.surance that sooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is in itself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are to regain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution is itself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated with that thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the future seems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau's myth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that our ideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or G.o.dwin or William Morris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Long before the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have been unfolded before the imagination of mankind.

What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding of ideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in inst.i.tutions, and still more the developing sense of comrades.h.i.+p and sympathy which links us in relations of justice and love with every creature that feels. We are old enough to pa.s.s lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxes that intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth that outworn inst.i.tutions fetter and dwarf the mind of man. It is also a truth that inst.i.tutions have moulded and formed that mind. To condemn the past is in the same breath to blast the future. The true basis for that piety towards our venerable inheritance which Burke preached, is that it has made for us the possibility of advance.

But our strivings would be languid, our march would be slow, were it not for the revolutionary leaven which G.o.dwin's generation set fermenting.

They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw that by a resolute effort to change the environment of inst.i.tutions and customs which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us not so much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of the belief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innate character which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is a tonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that among the forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of the understanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. From much that is iconoclastic and destructive in their ideal we may turn away unconvinced. There remain its ardent statement of the duty of humanity, which shames our practice after a century of progress, and its faith in the efficacy of unregimented opinion to supersede brute force. They taught a lesson which posterity has but half learned. We shall be the richer for returning to them, as much by what we reject as by what we embrace.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL

LECKY. _History of England in the 18th Century._

LESLIE STEPHEN.--_History of English Thought in the 18th Century._

OLIVER ELTON..--_A Survey of English Literature._

EDWARD DOWDEN--_The French Revolution and English Literature._

The most vivid impression of the period from the standpoint of G.o.dwin's Circle is conveyed in the _Memoirs_ of Thomas Holcroft edited by Hazlitt, and in Hazlitt's portraits of G.o.dwin, Malthus and Mackintosh in _The Spirit of the Age_ (Everyman's Library).

Of the opposite way of thinking the one immortal record is Burke's _Reflections on the French Revolution_. Lord Morley's _Burke_ (English Men of Letters) should be read, and the eloquent exposition by Lord Hugh Cecil (_Conservatism_) in this (H.U.L.) series.

The main works of the French revolutionary thinkers have been issued in Dent's series of French cla.s.sics. For study and pleasure consult Lord Morley's books on Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot.

The details given in the first chapter concerning the London Corresponding Society are based on its pamphlets in the British Museum.

THOMAS PAINE

Paine's writings are published in cheap editions by the Rationalist Press, and may be had bound in one volume. The same press issues a cheap edition of the admirable _Life_ by Dr. Moncure D. Conway.