Concerning Shelley

WHEN FACTS ARE CONCLUSIVE

I HAVE been rather puzzled by a very able article in the Sunday Times (March 1st) in which Mr. Desmond MacCarthy contrasted two recently expressed opinions about the poet Shelley, the one an attack by Mr. T. S. Eliot, and the other a “defence” by Mr. Read. The title of his article, “Shelley as a Religious Poet,” made it clear to which view he personally inclined; but what puzzled me was that so talented an essayist should think it worth his while, in this year 1936, to weigh and balance an attack on Shelley and a defence of Shelley, and even to refer anew to certain things said years ago by learned critics such as Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, and others. Naturally the sticklers for conventional proprieties detested the author of “Prometheus Unbound,” and I guess it will take the literary profession (as a whole) at least another century fully to understand Shelley. They have been compelled, in spite of the mistakes of their leaders, to admit the greatness of his poetry; but what an effort it cost them may be judged from the fact that William Cory, one of the most cultured and distinguished of Eton’s teachers, gravely avowed his conviction that Thomas Campbell (!) would outlive Shelley as a writer. Mr. MacCarthy himself speaks of Shelley as being contemplative rather than philosophic, forgetting, it would seem, that he has influenced modern movements more than all the rest of our English singers put together.

Have we not passed the date when any “defence” of such a prophet is needed? It is becoming little less than an absurdity to progressive-minded thinkers! I need not remind vegetarians how his example has aided our cause; nor is it of diet-reform alone that this can truly be said. It has been my lot (myself in the background) to have met and known many of the pioneers in the various social movements, and I have on countless occasions been impressed by the testimony borne to the greatness of the services that Shelley rendered to one or another of them. My own fifty years of work in the humanitarian cause originated from my reading of him; it was he who made me a vegetarian, and it was a book of mine (if I may be pardoned for so personal a statement) which made Mahatma Gandhi one. Can I be expected to care twopence about anything said in dispraise of him by Mr. T. S. Eliot in his repetition of Matthew Arnold’s pedantry? I once heard Arnold give a lecture at Eton; and I have never forgotten the solemn bowing of his head with the fall of each sentence; so deeply impressed was that “superior person” by the importance of his own utterances! Let us by all means give him his due; but he was born incapable of comprehending such genius as Shelley’s; and when facts are conclusive it seems time that mistaken conceits should be relegated to their proper place in the past.