Pioneer and Prophet: The Shelley Centenary

If anyone had foretold at the moment of Shelley’s untimely death that his name would be remembered and honoured a hundred years later, such prophecy would have seemed sheer madness. It is difficult for us now to realise in what deep disrepute he was held by those of his countrymen who knew of him at all; it was, in fact, only by Leigh Hunt and one or two other intimate friends that his genius was understood. His poetry was ridiculed by the Quarterly Review as “drivelling prose run mad,” and by the Literary Gazette as “The stupid trash of a delirious dreamer.” As for his personal character, he was described in the latter journal as “one of the darkest of the fiends, clothed with a human body to enable him to gratify his enmity against the human race.” It is this driveller, this fiend, who centenary is now being celebrated. Surely never did time bring such a reversal of judgment”

The change of opinion concerning Shelley’s poetry was not long delayed, and by 1887 the Quarterly Review had found that the drivelling prose was “a dizzy summit of lyrical inspiration, where no foot but Shelley’s ever trod”; but it took longer to discover his greatness as pioneer, and Matthew Arnold’s foolish epigram, in which he was depicted as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel,” was hailed as a masterpiece of criticism. We do not think him ineffectual now.

There is hardly a breach of social or moral reform of which he is not regarded as a prophet and forerunner; and it is in that light that the readers of the Daily Herald will view him today. Space would fail me were I to try to enumerate the many democratic causes which his genius has heartened and inspired; but there are two subjects on which a special word must here be said. First, on the question of warfare: this is what Shelley wrote in his “Philosophical View of Reform”:

“War is a kind of superstition. . . . Visit in imagination the scene of a field of battle, or a city taken by assault. Collect into one group the groans and distortions of the innumerable dying, the inconsolable grief and horror of their sorrowing friends, the hellish exultation and unnatural drunkenness of destruction of the conquerors. . . . War, waged from whatever motives, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.”

We need not ask whether, on this point, time has vindicated Shelley’s creed.

Then, as regards the Socialist question, Shelley was denounced as a “dreamer,” but there were few writers in his time, and no other poets, who perceived as clearly as he did the cardinal fact in the relations of Labour and Capital.

“I put the thing in its simplest and most intelligible shape. The labourer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the man who has to provide, out of what he would bring home to his wife and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those whose claims are represented by an annuity of 44 millions a year levied upon the English nation.”

That is a truth which is brought forcibly to our notice in larger figures to-day. Nowhere in English poetry is the connection between luxury and poverty so unerringly stated as in a passage of Shelley’s dramatic fragment, “Charles the First,” which every reformer should know by heart. He is describing a Court pageant, with a troop of beggars and outcasts in the rear.

“Ay, there they are—
Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,
Monopolists and stewards of this poor farm
On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows.
Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphans,
Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart.
. . . . Here is health
Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,
Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,
And England’s sin by England’s punishment.”

It is because he knew and felt these things, to which the mass of his contemporaries were blind, and because no more inspired poet, no more lovable character than his, has appeared on earth, that we do honour to Shelley to-day, when his many critics and detractors are forgotten.