The Middle-Aged Man’s Shelley

“I have written about him as a middle-aged man for other middle-aged men,” says Mr. Clutton-Brock in is recent book on Shelley*, and the description is a just one. Shelley is the poet of youth—that is, of those whose hearts remain young though their heads may grow grey,—and the typical middle-aged man, who views life from the matter-of-fact standpoint, is temperamentally unable to understand him. Mr. Clutton-Brock is for ever exclaiming about Shelley that “it is strange that he should not have seen,” or that “he did not understand,” this or that : all of which merely means that the Shelleyan philosophy and the middle-aged philosophy do not agree. “He never had kind of religion,” complains Mr. Clutton-Brock, “which makes a man feel that he is in debt, for his own misdoings, to the holy Author of life.” Well, why should he have had that dismal kind of religion? His genius rested largely on the fact that he was so refreshingly free from it. In reading Mr. Clutton-Brock’s comments on Shelley’s life and poetry, on is reminded of William Cory’s lines in “Ionica”:—

“Leave him to us, ye good and sage,
Who stiffen in your middle age.”

Middle-aged indeed must be the critic who, after reading one of the most splendid passages in the “Epipsychidion,” prosaically remarks: “Here he seems to tell us that he is, like many men, naturally polygamous.” There are scores upon scores of such humourless judgments in Mr. Clutton-Brock’s volume—as when he says of Shelley, in regard to the wonderful political poems, including the song To Men of England,” that “he is fluent and sometimes eloquent, but not inspiring”; or of the performance of “The Cenci,” some twenty years back—one of the most thrillingly successful performances ever seen,—“I think it must have been tedious rather than repulsive.” In the unwillingness or inability to see anything romantic in Shelley, even the story of the poet’s death in “the sepulchral sea” has to be made colourless so as to show that there was no “natural fitness” in thi end. “He died by an evil chance, just as much as any city clerk killed in a railway accident.” A middle-aged conclusion, indeed!

Doubtless there are many unimaginative men who like to be told these things; and for such readers Mr. Clutton-Brock’s book will supply a long-felt want. He has every right to express the middle-aged view of Shelley. But when he refers to other writers “those admirers of Shelley who think him perfect,” and remarks that “those who would advance a noble cause, or glorify the memory of a great man, should make it a point to beware of sophistries,” he travels beyond the line of fair discussion. No admirers of Shelley have ever thought him perfect; and everyone should beware of sophistries, whether he is glorifying the memory of a great man or not.

The question is—which is the sophistical view of Shelley? To me it seems that there is much more sophistry in Mr. Clutton-Brock’s middle-aged method of judging a great poet by the very view of life from which he avowedly dissented, than in the attempt o appreciate and interpret Shelley’s actions by regarding them from the Shelleyan standpoint, which has now become the standpoint of a great many thoughtful men. “The indiscriminating admirers of a man of genius,” says Mr. Clutton-Brock, “are his worst enemies, for their open-mouthed wonder soon turns to indifference. . . . I would rather seem unjust to him myself than set others against him by my own partiality.” Mr. Clutton-Brock need not be at all disturbed on this score. Shelley’s reputation has slowly but steadily risen during the past eighty years, and is not the least likely to be further retarded by what Mr. Clutton-Brock, or anyone else, may say, or omit to say, about his character and writings.

Yet Mr. Clutton-Brock has omitted much—much that does not fit in with his middle-aged portrait of Shelley. H has failed to take note of the animating influence which Shelley’s genius has had in the most important reform movements of the past century—in the Chartist movements, for instance, in the free thought movement, in the humanitarian movement, and in several others that might be named. He has said not a word of the way in which Shelley anticipated many of the leading ideas of modern Socialism. If Shelley had been the poor, mistaken, weak, erring creature that Mr. Clutton-Brock depicts him, it would be simply impossible to account for the great hold his name has taken of the minds, no less than the hearts, of men. For “sophistry,” albeit quite unintentional, nothing could surpass this middle-aged criticism of Shelley, which consists in ignoring the essential differences between to rival views of life. There is a youthful view and a middle-aged view; and if Shelley took the one, while some of his critics take the other, it does not necessarily follow that Shelley is the person to be blamed.

“He’s ever young, and they get old:
Poor things, they deem him over-bold:
What wonder, if they stare and scold?”

* “Shelley, the Man and the Poet,” by A. Clutton-Brock, Methuen and Co. 7s. 6d. net.

Henry S. Salt

The Labour Leader, December 10, 1909, p. 787