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Some such doctrines would be verbally accepted by most men; and I cannot here ask whether they really require the teaching with which Kingsley associated them. The demagogues and the obstructives were both, according to him, on a wrong tack; and he could point out the one true method of reuniting development with order. Whatever the value of his theories, the sentiment associated with them was substantially healthy, vigorous, and elevated. That part of his fictions in which it is embodied is probably his most valuable work. Nobody can read the descriptions of the agricultural labourers or of the London artisan in 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke' without recognising both the strength of his sympathies and the vigour of his perceptive faculties. He was drawing from the life, and expressing his deepest emotions. 'What is the use of preaching to hungry paupers about heaven?' he asks. 'Sir, as my clerk said to me yesterday, there is a weight on their hearts, and they call for no change, for they know they can be no worse off than they are.' The phrase explains what was the curse which rested upon Kingsley's parishioners, and in what sense he had to 'redeem it from barbarism.' He did his work like a man. He was daily with his people 'in their cottages, and made a point of talking to the men and boys at their fieldwork till he was personally intimate with every soul, from the women at their washtubs to the babies in the cradle, for whom he had always a loving word and look.' Whatever we may think of his 'socialism' or 'democracy,' there was at least no want of depth or sincerity in his sympathy for the poor, and therefore there is no false ring in his description of their condition. He writes with his heart--not to serve any political purpose or to gain credit for a cheap display of charitable feeling.

No books can show more forcibly the dark side of English society of the time. The aspect in which Kingsley views the evil is characteristic. The root of all that is good in man lies in the purity and vigour of the domestic affections. A condition of things in which the stability and health of the family become impossible is one in which the very foundations of society are being sapped. Nobody could be more alive to the countless mischiefs implied in the statement that the poor man has nothing deserving the name of home. The verses given to Tregarva in 'Yeast' sum up his diagnosis of the social disease with admirable vigour. Many scenes in that rather chaotic story are equally vivid in their presentation of the facts. The description of the village feast is a bit of startlingly impressive realism. The poor sodden, hopeless, spiritless peasantry consoling themselves with strong drink and brutal songs, open to no impressions of beauty, with no sense of the romantic except in lawless passion, and too beaten down to have even a thought of rebellion except in the shape of agrarian outrage, are described with singular force. Poor Crawy, the poacher, scarcely elevated above the beasts, looking to the gaol and workhouse for his only refuge, so degraded that pity is almost lost in disgust, is the significant product of the general decay. The race is deteriorating. It has fallen vastly below the standard of the last generation. All the lads are 'smaller, clumsier, lower-brained, and weaker-jawed than their elders.' Such higher feeling as remains takes the form of the dog-like fidelity of Harry Verney, the gamekeeper. Kingsley never wrote a better scene than the death of the old man from a wound received in a poaching affray; when he suddenly springs upright in bed, holds out 'his withered paw with a kind of wild majesty,' and shouts 'There ain't such a head of hares on any manor in the country! And them's the last words of Harry Verney.'

'Alton Locke' is a more ambitious and coherent effort; and the descriptions of the London population, and of the futile attempt at a rising in the country, are in the same vigorous vein. Perhaps a more remarkable success is the old Scotchman, Mackaye, who seems to be the best of Kingsley's characters. He has some real humour, a quality in which Kingsley was for the most part curiously deficient; but one must expect that in this case he was drawing from an original. It is interesting to read Carlyle's criticism of this part of the book. 'Saunders Mackaye,' he says, 'my invaluable countryman in this book, is nearly perfect; indeed, I greatly wonder how you did contrive to manage him. His very dialect is as if a native had done it, and the whole existence of the rugged old hero is a wonderfully splendid and coherent piece of Scotch bravura.' Perhaps an explanation of the wonder might be suggested to other people more easily than to Carlyle; but, at any rate, Mackaye is a very felicitous centre for the various groups who play their parts in the story; and not the less efficient as a chorus because he is chiefly critical and confines himself to shrewd demonstrations of the folly of everybody concerned.

Carlyle gives as his final verdict that his impression is of 'a fervid creation still left half chaotic.' In fact, with all the genuine force of 'Alton Locke'--and no living novelist has excelled the vividness of certain passages--there is an unsatisfactory side to the whole performance. It is marred by the feverishness which inspires most of his work. There is an attempt to crowd too much into the space, and the emphasis sometimes remains when the power is flagging. Greater reserve of power and more attention to unity of effect would have been required to make it a really great book. But the most unsatisfactory part is where the author forgets to be a novelist and becomes a preacher and a pamphleteer. The admirable heroine is forced to deliver what is to all purposes a commonplace tract of two or three chapters at the end of the story, when her thoughts, to be effective, should really have been embedded in the structure of the story. Anybody can preach a sermon when no contradiction is allowed; but the novelist ought to show the thought translated into action, and not given in a raw shape of downright comment. As it is, Lady Ellerton is a mere lay-figure who can talk very edifying phrases, but is really tacked on to the outside of the narrative. The moral should have been evolved by the natural course of events; for when it is presented in this point-blank fashion we begin to cavil, and wish that the Chartist or Mackaye might be allowed to show cause against the sentence pronounced. As they can't, we do it for ourselves.

The historical novels which followed indicate a remarkable change. When he published 'Two Years Ago,' Kingsley had become reconciled to the world. There is an apparent and decidedly unpleasant inconsistency between the denouncer of social wrongs and the novelist who sings the praises of squires, patrons, and guardsmen, with a placid conviction that they sufficiently represent his ideal. The explanation is partly that, as I have said, Kingsley never accepted the revolutionary remedy for the grievances which he described. He was quite consistent in regarding the old creed as expressing the true mode of cure. But one must still ask whether the facts had changed. Was the world regenerated between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed, and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely settled or in the way to settlement? That appears to have been Kingsley's own view, if we may judge from the prefaces to later editions of his book; and the great agency to which he assigns the strange improvement was the outbreak of the Crimean war. That crisis, it seems, had taught the higher classes a deeper sense of their responsibility, and roused us from the dangerous slumber of peace and growing wealth. Mr. Herbert Spencer has lately expounded a very different theory as to the results of an increased intensity of the military spirit. Without discussing so wide a question, it may, I fancy, be pretty safely assumed that the future historian will not take quite this view of recent affairs, and will attribute any improvement that may have taken place to some deeper cause than that assigned. When a whole social order is rotting, as the author of 'Yeast' supposed ours to have been, it is not often cured by a little splutter of fighting; nor does the belief in the efficacy of such a remedy seem to fit in very well with a spiritual Christianity. Perhaps we may further assume, therefore, that the change was rather in the spectator than in the spectacle. If so, Kingsley was not the first man to account for an alteration in his personal outlook by a movement of the rest of the universe. His parish had been got into better order; his combative instinct had grown weaker; and, like other men who grow in years and domestic comfort, he had become more content with things in general. Fathers of families are capable, we know, of everything, and, amongst other things, of softening the fervour of their early enthusiasms. There is nothing at all strange in the process; but it must be taken to illustrate the fact that, if Kingsley's sympathies were keen, his intellectual insight was not very deep. A man who holds that a social disease is so easily suppressed, has not measured very accurately the constitutional disorder which it revealed.

'Two Years Ago,' the book in which this conclusion is plainly announced, is in many respects a painful performance. It contains, indeed, some admirable descriptions of scenery; but the sentiment is poor and fretful. Tom Thurnall, intended to be an embodiment of masculine vigour, has no real stuff in him. He is a bragging, excitable, and at bottom sentimental person. All his swagger fails to convince us that he is a true man. Put beside a really simple and masculine nature like Dandie Dinmont, or even beside Kingsley's own Amyas Leigh, one sees his hollowness. The whole story leads up to a distribution of poetical justice in Kingsley's worst manner. He has a lamentable weakness for taking upon himself the part of Providence. 'After all,' he once wrote in 'Yeast,' 'your "Rake's Progress" and "Atheist's Deathbed" do no more good than noble George Cruikshank's "Bottle" will, because everyone knows that they are the exception and not the rule; that the atheist generally dies with a conscience as comfortably callous as a rhinoceros-hide; and the rake, when age stops his power of sinning, becomes generally rather more respectable than his neighbours.' It is a pity that Kingsley could not remember this true saying in later years. He seems to have grown too impatient to leave room for the natural evolution of events. He gives the machinery a jerk, and is fidgety because the wheels grind so slowly, though they 'grind exceeding small.'

Between 'Alton Locke' and 'Two Years Ago' there luckily intervened 'Hypatia' and 'Westward Ho!' They are brilliant and almost solitary exceptions to the general dreariness of the historical novel. To criticise them either from the historical or the artistic point of view would indeed be easy enough; but they have a vivacity which defies criticism. I have no doubt that 'Hypatia' is fundamentally and hopelessly inaccurate, and that a sound historian would shudder at innumerable anachronisms and pick holes in every paragraph. I don't believe that men like the Goths ever existed in this world, and am prepared to give up the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews, and fathers of the Church. If 'Westward Ho!' is less inaccurate because dealing with less distant ages, it is still too much of a party pamphlet to be taken for history. The Jesuits are probably caricatures, and Miss Ayacanora is a bit of rather silly melodrama. But it is difficult to say too much in favour of the singular animation and movement of both books. There is a want of repose, if you insist upon applying the highest canons of art; but the brilliance of description, the energy and rapidity of the action, simply disarm the reader. I rejoice in the Amal and Wulf and Raphael Aben Ezra, as I love Ivanhoe, and Front de Boeuf, and Wamba the Witless. The fight between 'English mastiffs and Spanish bloodhounds' is as stirring as the skirmish of Drumclog in 'Old Mortality.' 'Hypatia,' according to Kingsley himself, was written with his heart's blood. Like other phrases of his, that requires a little dilution. But, at any rate, both books stand out for vividness, for a happy audacity and quickness of perception, above all modern attempts in the same direction.

The problems discussed in these historical novels and the solutions suggested are of course substantially the same as in his earlier books. The period of 'Hypatia' bears a striking analogy to the present. In the heroes described in 'Westward Ho!' he supposed himself to recognise the fullest realisation of the fundamental doctrines of his own creed. Much might be said, were it worth saying, as to the accuracy of these assumptions. Kingsley's method is in any case too much tainted by the obvious tendency to see facts by the light of preconceived theories. In the earlier writings he may be one-sided and exaggerated; but his imagination is at least guided by reference to actual observation. It seems as if in this later period he had instinctively turned away to distant periods where men and events might be more easily moulded into conformity with his prejudices. However skilful a man may be in accommodating fact to fancy, he is apt to find difficulties when he paints from the life around him. But when nobody can contradict you except a few prosaic antiquaries, the outside world becomes delightfully malleable. You do not find any fragments of rigid material in the clay which shapes itself so easily in your fingers. Kingsley has faith enough in his teaching to give a genuine glow to these hybrid beings begotten half of fancy, half of the external world. But we feel too plainly that the work will not stand the test of close examination, either by the historian or the literary critic. Such a nemesis naturally overtakes men who admit too easily an appeal from fact to sentiment. They begin to lose the sense of reality, and their artistic work shows signs of flimsiness as their theories of arbitrary assumption. The great writer pierces to the true life of a period because he recognises the necessity of conforming his beliefs to realities. The inferior writer uses his knowledge only to give colouring to his dreams, and his work tries to represent what he would like to be the truth instead of showing genuine insight into what is actually true.

Whatever else in Kingsley may have been affected or half-hearted, his appreciation of nature remained true and healthy to the end. If anything it became more intense as he seemed to grow weary of abstract discussions, and turned for relief to natural scenes. Nobody has ever shown a greater power of investing with a romantic charm the descriptions of bird, beast, and insect. There are no more delightful books than those which express the naturalist's delight in country sights, from the days of Izaak Walton to White of Selborne, or Waterton, or our most recent discovery, the Scotch naturalist Edward. Amongst such writers, Kingsley is in the front rank; and his taste is combined with a power of catching wider aspects of scenery, such as few of our professional describers can rival. It would be interesting to lay bare the secret of his power. He has done for Devon and Cornwall, for the heaths and chalk-streams of the southern counties, and even for the much-depreciated fens, what Scott did for the Highlands. One secret is of course the terseness and directness of his descriptions. He never lays himself out for a bit of deliberate bombast, and deals always with first-hand impressions. The writing is all alive. There is no dead matter of conventional phrases and imitative ecstasies. And again, his descriptions are always dramatic. There is a human being in the foreground with whom we sympathise. We do not lose ourselves in mystic meditations, or surrender ourselves to mere sensuous dreaming. We are in active, strenuous enjoyment; beguiling the trout of his favourite chalk-streams, sailing under the storm-beaten cliffs of Lundy, and drinking in the rich sea-breeze that sweeps over Dartmoor, or galloping with clenched teeth through the fir-woods of Eversley. One characteristic picture--to take one at random from a hundred--is the evening ride of Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen as he rides slowly homeward after Naseby fight along one of the fen-droves. One could swear that one had been with him, as Kingsley no doubt was merely embodying the vivid recollection of some old Cambridge expedition into the Bedford Level, a scenery which has a singular and mysterious charm, though few besides Kingsley have succeeded in putting it on paper.

Some wonder has been wasted on Kingsley's descriptions of the tropical scenery which he had never seen. Even men of genius do not work miracles; and so far as I know they always blunder in such attempts. Johnson showed his usual sense in regard to a similar criticism upon the blind poet, Blacklock. If, he said, you found that a paralytic man had left his room, you would explain the wonder by supposing that he had been carried. Similarly, the explanation of Kingsley and of Blacklock is that they described not what they had seen, but what they had read. The description in 'Westward Ho!' may easily be traced to Humboldt and other sources where they are not explicable by a visit to Kew Gardens. A minute criticism would show that they are little more than catalogues of gorgeous plants and strange beasts, and show none of those vivid touches, so striking from their fidelity, which give animation to his descriptions of English scenery. In his pictures of Devonshire we can tell the time of the day and night and the state of the weather as clearly as if he were a meteorologist. In South America he leaves us to generalities. The true secret of his success is different. He describes vividly not the outward fact, but the inward enjoyment. One need not go to the tropics to imagine the charm of luxurious indolence. Perhaps we enjoy it the more because we have not really been exposed to its inconveniences. The dazzling of the eye by blazing sunlight and brilliant colours, the relief given by the cool deep streams under luxuriant foliage, the vague consciousness of wondrous forms of life lurking in the forest depths, can be realised without any special accuracy of portraiture. The contagion to which we are really exposed is that of the enthusiasm with which Kingsley had read his favourite books of travel. But of downright description there is little, and that little not very remarkable. If anybody doubts it, he may read the passage of river scenery which concludes with a quotation from Humboldt, and observe how vividly the fragment of actual observation stands out from the mere catalogue of curiosities; or, again, with any of Kingsley's own Devonshire scenes, where every touch shows loving familiarity with details and a consequent power of selecting just the most speaking incidents.

We may put two passages beside each other which will illustrate the difference. Describing, after Humboldt, the mid-day calm of the forest, he says, 'The birds' notes died out one by one; the very butterflies ceased their flitting over the treetops, and slept with outspread wings upon the glossy leaves, undistinguishable from the flowers around them. Now and then a colibri whirred downwards towards the water, hummed for a moment round some pendent flower, and then the living gem was lost in the deep darkness of the inner wood, among tree trunks as huge and dark as the pillars of some Hindoo shrine; or a parrot swung and screamed at them from an overhanging bough; or a thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana to the surface of the stream, dipped up the water in his tiny hand, and started chattering back, as his eyes met those of some foul alligator peering upward through the clear depths below.' This and more is good enough, but there is nothing which would not suggest itself to a visitor to the British Museum or the Zoological Gardens. It is a catalogue, and rather too full a catalogue of curiosities, without one of those vivid touches which reveal actual observation. At the end of the same volume we have a real sketch from nature. Amyas and his friends walk to the cliffs of Lundy: 'As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and sank down the abysses of the cliff, as if he had scented the corpses beneath the surge. Below them, from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and filled the air with sound, the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed, the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and a single falcon, with an angry bark, darted out from beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung slowly round and round below.' That gives the atmospheric effect, and what we may call the dramatic character. Every phrase suggests a picture, and the whole description, of which I have quoted a bit, has real unity of effect, instead of being a simple enumeration of details.

When one reads some passages inspired by this hearty and simple-minded love of nature, one is sometimes half tempted to wish that Kingsley could have put aside his preachings, social, theological, and philosophical, and have been content with a function for which he was so admirably adapted. The men who can feel and make others feel the charms of beautiful scenery and stimulate the love for natural history do us a service which, if not the highest, is perhaps the most unalloyed by any mixture of evil. Kingsley would have avoided many errors and the utterance of much unsatisfactory dogmatism if he could have limited himself to such a duty. But to do so he must have been a man of narrower sympathies, less generous temper, and less hearty hatred of all evil influences. We could hardly wish him to have been other than he was, though we may wish that he had developed under more favourable circumstances. The weaknesses which marred his work and led to the exhaustion of his faculties were to be regretted, but were not such as to diminish the affection deserved by so cordial a nature. He is more or less responsible for those offensive persons, the Viking and the muscular Christian. The Viking, I suppose, must have been partly a humbug like other products of graphic history, and too much has been made of his supposed share in our ancestry. Kingsley had a feminine tenderness and an impatient excitability indicative of a different ancestry. He admires the huge, full-blooded barbarians, but only belongs to them on one side. He is as near to his delicate as to his muscular heroes, to Francis as to Amyas Leigh, and to the morbid poet, Vavasour, as to the more vigorous Tom Thurnall. In these days, when the Viking or Berserker element seems to be dying out of our literature, even this qualified and external worship of masculine vigour is valuable. There is something hectic and spasmodic about it, though it implies a homage to more healthy ideals. Kingsley, at any rate, hated the namby-pamby, and he tried, with too obvious an effort, to be simple and unaffected. His aims were thoroughly noble, though marred by his want of reserve and of intellectual stamina. He was too timid or too impatient to work out consistent theories or acquire much depth of conviction. But with all his shortcomings he succeeded in giving forcible utterance to truths of vital importance, and brought vividly before our minds problems which most urgently press for a solution more satisfactory than he was able to reach.

FOOTNOTES:

The poetic and the metaphysical temperaments are generally held to be in some sense incompatible. Poets, indeed, have often shown the highest speculative acuteness, and philosophy often implies a really poetical imagination. But the necessary conditions of successful achievement in the two cases are so different that the combination of the two kinds of excellence in one man must be of excessive rarity. No man can be great as a philosopher who is incapable of brooding intensely and perseveringly over an abstract problem, absolutely unmoved by the emotion which is always seeking to bias his judgment; whilst a poet is great in virtue of the keenness of his sensibility to the emotional aspect of every decision of the intellect. For the one purpose, it is essential to keep the passions apart from the intellect: for the other, to transfuse intellect with passion. A few of our metaphysicians have ventured into poetical utterance. Berkeley wrote a really fine copy of verses, and Hobbes struck out one famous couplet--

And like a star upon her bosom lay His beautiful and shining golden head--

in a translation of Homer, otherwise not easily readable. Scott proposed to publish the whole poetical works of David Hume, consisting of a remarkable quatrain composed in an inn at Carlisle.

Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl, Here godless boys God's glories squall, Here Scotchmen's heads do guard the wall, But Corby's walks atone for all.

The only exception to this rule in our literature seems to be Coleridge. Coleridge undoubtedly exercised a vast influence upon the speculation of his countrymen, whilst his poems possess merits of the rarest order. It is more worthy of remark that his poetry is most successful where it is most independent of his philosophy. In 'Christabel,' the 'Ancient Mariner,' or 'Kubla Khan,' we can only discover the philosopher by the evidence of a mind richly stored with associations, and by the tendency to discover a mystical significance in natural objects. Some people would urge that his philosophy would have been improved if it had been equally free from poetical elements. In any case, Coleridge is an example of a combination of diverse excellence not easily to be paralleled. Another poet was supposed by some of his admirers to have similar claims upon our respect. Shelley seems to have thought himself as well fitted for abstract speculation as for poetry; and his widow declared that, had he lived longer, he might have 'presented to the world a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of those writers.' The phrase is by itself enough to prove Mrs. Shelley's incompetence to form any opinion as to her husband's qualifications for this stupendous task. It is not by forming a patchwork of Berkeley, Kant, and Coleridge that a 'complete theory of mind' is likely to be evolved; nor does it appear that Shelley really knew much about either of the latter writers; certainly, he has not given the smallest proof of a power of original speculation in such matters. And yet, though it would be absurd to treat Shelley seriously as an originator of philosophic thought or even as a moderately profound student of philosophy, there is no doubt that his poetry contains a philosophical element which deserves consideration, if only to facilitate the comprehension of his poetry.

Enough has been written by the competent and the incompetent, the prosaic and the poetical, the hyperbolical panegyrists and the calm analytical critics, of Shelley considered primarily as a poet. Nobody, as it seems to me, is entitled to add anything who has not himself a very unusual share, if not of Shelley's own peculiar genius, at least of receptivity for its products; and after all that has been written by the ablest writers, one can learn more of Shelley by getting, say, the 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the Skylark' by heart than by studying volumes of talk about his works. At any rate, I feel no vocation to add to the mass of imperfectly appreciative disquisition. Recent discussions, however, seem to show both that some interest is still taken in the other aspect of Shelley's writings, and that an obvious remark or two still remains to be made. People are in doubt whether to classify Shelley as atheist, pantheist, or theist; they dispute as to whether his writings represent the destructive spirit which undermines all that is good amongst men, or, on the contrary, are the fullest expression yet reached by any human being of the divinest element of religion. Were it not that some parallel phenomena might be very easily suggested, it would be surprising that the meaning of a writer, who had extraordinary powers of expressing himself clearly and an almost morbid hatred of anything like reticence, should be seriously doubtful. The explanation of the wonder is not, I think, very far to seek. For one thing, people have not yet made up their minds as to the true bearing of some opinions which Shelley undoubtedly held. The question whether they were of good or evil import is mixed up with the question as to whether they were true or false. Upon that problem I shall not touch; but a few pages may be occupied by an attempt to indicate what, as a matter of fact, Shelley actually held, or rather what was his general attitude as to certain important questions. One result will probably be that it matters very little what he held so far as his influence upon our own conclusions is concerned. For, to say nothing of Shelley's incapacity to deal satisfactorily with the great controversies of his own time, our point of view has so much shifted that we can consider his opinions almost as calmly as those of the Eleatics or the Pythagoreans. They are matters of history which need affect nobody at the present day.

The volume of essays by the late Mr. Bagehot, recently published, contains one upon Shelley, which deals very clearly and satisfactorily, as far as it goes, with this part of Shelley's work. Mr. Bagehot showed with his usual acuteness how Shelley's philosophy reflected the abnormal peculiarities of his character. He speaks less, however, of certain extraneous influences which must have materially affected Shelley's intellectual developments, and, indeed, seems to have partly overlooked them. He tells us, for example, that Shelley's poems show an 'extreme suspicion of aged persons.' Undoubtedly a youthful enthusiast is apt to be shocked by the dogged conservatism of older men who have been hammered into a more accurate measure of the immovable weight of superincumbent prejudice in the human mind. Shelley could not revolt against things in general without contracting some dislike to the forces against which he inevitably ran his head at starting. Even here, indeed, the charm of Shelley's unworldly simplicity for men of an opposite type, for cynics like Hogg, and Peacock, and Byron, is one of the pleasantest indications of his character. He attracted, and doubtless because he was attracted by, many who had nothing but contempt for his favourite enthusiasms, and it is still more evident that, however wayward was his career in some relations of life, he had a full measure of the young man's capacity for reverence. Dr. Lind seems to have been his earliest idol; but a far more important connection was that with Godwin. Godwin was in his fifty-sixth, and Shelley in his twentieth year, when their correspondence began, and Godwin's most remarkable book was published when Shelley was in the cradle. Young gentlemen of nineteen, even though they belong to the immortals, consider a man of fifty-six to be tottering upon the verge of the grave. Books published before we could spell appear to have been composed before the invention of letters. To Shelley, in short, Godwin was to all intents and purposes a venerable sage, and a fitting embodiment of hoary wisdom. A guide, philosopher, and friend--an oracle who can sanction his aspirations and direct him to the most promising paths--is almost a necessity to every youthful enthusiast; the more necessary in proportion as he has more emphatically broken with the established order. What J. S. Mill was to men who were in their early youth some twenty or thirty years ago, or Newman to young men of different views at a slightly earlier period, that Godwin was to Shelley in the years of his most impetuous speculation. A lad of genius reads old books with eager appetite and learns something from them; but to get the full influence of ideas he must feel that they come from a living mouth, clothed in modern dialect, and applied to the exciting topics of the day. Perhaps neither Mill nor Newman said anything which might not be found implicitly contained in the writings of their spiritual ancestors. Much of Mill is already to be found in Locke, and Newman is at times the interpreter of Butler. But then Butler and Locke have been dead for a long time; and what the impatient youth requires is the direct evidence that the ancient principles are still alive and efficient. The old key has probably become rusty, and is more or less obsolete in form. The youth cannot wait to oil and repair it for himself. He wants the last new invention spick and span, and ready to be applied at once to open the obstinate lock. Shelley read Helvetius and Holbach, and Berkeley and Hume; but, though they supplied him with a tolerably modern version of some ancient theories, they could not tell him by anticipation what precise form of argument would best crush Paley, or what specific policy would regenerate Ireland out of hand. For such purposes a young man wants the very last new teacher, and the chances are that he will read even the older philosophers through the spectacles which such a teacher is kind enough to provide.

Thus, when looking about in this dark world, given over, as he thought, to antiquated prejudice embodied in cruel injustice, Shelley greeted the writings of Godwin as the lost traveller greets a beacon-fire on a stormy night. They seemed to contain a new gospel. When he discovered the author to be a real human being, not one of the fixed stars that have been already guiding us from the upper firmament, he threw himself at the philosopher's feet with the rapt fervour of a religious neophyte. In his first letters to Godwin he pours out his heart: 'Considering these feelings' , 'you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the lists of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so; you still live and, I firmly believe, are still planning the welfare of human kind.' A letter written soon afterwards from Dublin is still more significant. It begins with a kind of invocation, as to a saint. 'Guide thou and direct me,' exclaims the young gentleman; 'in all the weakness of my inconsistencies bear with me; ... when you reprove me, reason speaks; I acquiesce in her decisions.' He presently defends the impatience which Godwin has blamed by an argument which evidently struck even Godwin as having an absurd side. The 'Political Justice,' he says, was first published nearly twenty years before , but yet what has resulted from the general diffusion of its doctrines? 'Have men ceased to fight? Have woe and misery vanished from the earth?' Far from it! Obviously something must be done, and that at once. Do I not well to be impatient, he says, when such reasonable expectations have been so cruelly disappointed?

It must be a most delightful sensation to have so ardent a disciple; but it must also be a trifle provoking when the ardour is of a kind to justify some misgiving as to the sanity of the proselyte. Even the vanity of a philosopher could hardly blind him to the fact that such extravagance tended to throw ridicule upon its object. Godwin, however, kept his countenance--a little too easily perhaps--and gave very sensible advice to his proselyte. He pointed out in substance that it was not altogether amazing that vice and misery had survived the publication of his wonderful book, and still recommended patience and acceptance of the strange stupidity of mankind. We are aware that in later years Shelley's reverence lost a little of its warmth: he came to know Godwin personally. Moreover, among his other tenets, the calm philosopher held the comfortable doctrine that philosophers might and ought to receive pecuniary assistance from the rich without any loss of dignity. His practical application of this theory is described by Professor Dowden. It no doubt soon convinced Shelley that Godwin was not altogether free from earthly stains, and in fact not so indifferent as he ought to have been to the possible advantages of a connection with the heir to a baronetcy and a good estate.

For the present, however, Shelley sat humbly at Godwin's feet He declared that from the 'Political Justice' he had learnt 'all that was valuable in knowledge and virtue.' He mixed with the queer little clique of vegetarians and crotchet-mongers who shared his reverence for Godwin and excited the bitter contempt of Hogg. It is, therefore, not surprising that we find Shelley's doctrines to present a curiously close coincidence with Godwin's. Partly, no doubt, it was simply a coincidence. Shelley's temperament predisposed him to accept conclusions which were in the air of the time, and which were to be found more or less represented in many of his other authorities. But, at any rate, we may fairly assume not only that he, as he was eager to proclaim, learnt much from Godwin, but also that his whole course of thought was guided to a great degree by this living representative of his favourite theories. He studied the 'Political Justice,' pondered its words of wisdom, and examined its minutest details. One trifling indication may be mentioned. Amongst Shelley's fragmentary essays is one upon 'A System of Government by Juries'--a 'singular speculation,' as Mr. Rossetti naturally remarks. But the explanation is simply that Godwin's theory, worked out in the 'Political Justice,' sets forth government by these so-called juries as the ultimate or penultimate stage of human society. Shelley, like a faithful disciple, was writing an incipient commentary upon one of his teacher's texts. The fragmentary 'Essay on Christianity,' of about the same date , is virtually an attempt to show that the valuable part of the Christian religion is its supposed anticipation of Godwin's characteristic tenets. But the coincidence does not consist in any minute points of external resemblance. Godwin's poetical writings seem to have been pretty well forgotten, though some interest in him is maintained by 'Caleb Williams' and by his relationship to Shelley. Hogg is evidently anxious to sink as much as possible the intellectual obligations of the disciple to so second-rate a teacher; and later writers upon Shelley are content to speak vaguely of Godwin as a man who had some philosophic reputation in his day, and some influence upon the poet. A full exposition of Godwin's theories would display the closeness of the mental affinity. That may be found elsewhere; but a brief indication of his main tendencies will be sufficient for the present purpose.

Godwin appeared to many youthful contemporaries--as may be seen from the brilliant sketch in Hazlitt's 'Spirit of the Age'--as a very incarnation of philosophy. 'No work in our time,' says Hazlitt, 'gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated "Enquiry concerning Political Justice." Tom Paine was considered for the time a Tom fool to him, Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode, and these were the oracles of thought.' Hazlitt is not given to measuring his words, and he was probably wishing to please the decaying old gentleman. But doubtless there is some truth in the statement. Godwin was admirably fitted to be an apostle of reason, so far as a man can be fitted for that high post, by the negative qualifications of a placid temper and singular frigidity of disposition. He works out the most startling and subversive conclusions with all the calmness of a mathematician manipulating a set of algebraical symbols. He lays down doctrines which shock not only the religious reverence, but the ordinary conscience of mankind, as quietly as if he were stating a proposition of Euclid. An entire absence of even a rudimentary sense of humour is of course implied in this placid enunciation of paradoxes without the slightest perception of their apparent enormity. But then a sense of humour is just the quality which we do not desiderate in a revered philosopher.

Godwin was familiar with the recent school of French materialists, and with the writings of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He worked out by their help a system which curiously combines opposite modes of thought. He was, in one sense, a thoroughgoing sceptic. Nobody could set aside more completely the whole body of theological speculation. He assumes that all the old religions are exploded superstitions. He did not argue against Theism, like Shelley; and, indeed, arguments that might lead him into personal difficulty were not much to his taste. But he virtually ignores all such doctrine as undeniably effete. So far he, of course, sympathises with the French materialists, and with them he abolishes at one blow all the traditional and prescriptive beliefs of mankind. The fact that a doctrine has been generally accepted is a presumption rather against it than in its favour. He will believe nothing, nor even temporarily accept any practical precept which is not capable of direct scientific proof. But, in the next place, Godwin did not in any sense accept the materialism of the French writers. He, like other English thinkers, had been profoundly impressed by the idealism of Berkeley. But then he extends Berkeley by the aid of Hume. He abolishes not only matter but mind. It may be still convenient to use the word mind, but in fact there is nothing, so far as we know, but a chain of 'ideas' which somehow link themselves together so as to produce the complex idea we generally know by that name. Of any substratum, any internal power which causes the coherence of these ideas or of the universe in general, we know and can know absolutely nothing.

When a man has got so far, he not unfrequently begins to feel himself a little bewildered. Nothing is left--to quote from a philosopher of whom neither Godwin nor Shelley apparently ever heard--but 'ceaseless change.' 'I know of no being, not even of my own. Pictures are--they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; pictures which float past without there being anything past which they float, which by means of like pictures are connected with each other; pictures without anything which is pictured in them, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these pictures--nay, I am not even this, but merely a confused picture of the pictures. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a life which is dreamed of, and without a mind which dreams it; with a dream which is woven together in a dream of itself. Perception is the dream; thought is the dream of that dream.'

This description of the thoroughgoing sceptical position might pass for a description of the state of mind produced by some of Shelley's poetry. It is, at any rate, a state of mind from which a reasoner is generally anxious to provide some escape, lest all ground for reasoning should be cut away. How can knowledge be possible if the mind is merely a stream of baseless impressions, cohering or separating according to radically unknowable laws? Godwin, however, goes on calmly, without any attempt to solve our difficulties, and proceeds to build up his scheme of perfectibility. Upon this shifting quicksand of utter scepticism he lays the foundations of his ideal temple of reason. For, as he argues, since a man is nothing but an aggregate of 'ideas' he is capable of indefinite modification. Education or the influences of climate or race can have no ineradicable power upon this radically arbitrary combination of flitting phantasms. Anything may be the cause of anything; for cause means nothing but the temporary coherence of two sets of unsubstantial images. And hence, we may easily abolish all the traditional ties by which people have hitherto been bound together, and rearrange the whole structure of human society on principles of mathematical and infallible perfection. The force which is to weave ropes of sand, or rather to arrange the separate independent unsubstantial atoms in a perfect mathematical sphere, rounded, complete and eternal, is the force of reason.

Godwin is troubled by no misgiving as to the power of reason when all reality seems to have been abolished. He quietly takes for granted that reason is the sole and sufficient force by which men are or may be guided, and that it is adequate for any conceivable task. Not only can it transform society at large, but it is potentially capable of regenerating any given individual. The worst scoundrel could be made into a saint if only you could expose him to a continuous discharge of satisfactory syllogisms. Reason, as he calmly observes, is 'omnipotent.' Therefore, he infers, when a man's conduct is wrong, a very simple statement will not only show it to be wrong--just as it is easy to show that two sides of a triangle are greater than the third--but make him good. No perverseness, he thinks, would resist a sufficiently intelligible statement of the advantages of virtue. From this agreeable postulate, which he regards as pretty nearly self-evident, Godwin draws conclusions from some of which, great as was his courage in accepting absurdities, he afterwards found it expedient to withdraw. Thus, for example, morality, according to him, means simply the right calculation of consequences--I must always act so as to produce the greatest sum of happiness. The accidental ties, the associations formed by contingent circumstances, are no more to override this principle than a proposition of Euclid is to vary when applied to different parts of space. Three angles of a triangle are as much equal to two right angles in England as in France. Similarly the happiness of an Englishman is just as valuable as the happiness of a Frenchman, and the happiness of a stranger as the happiness of my relations. Hence--so runs his logic--friendship, gratitude, and conjugal fidelity are simply mistakes. If my father is a worse man than a stranger, I should rather save the stranger's life than my father's, for I shall be contributing more to human happiness. If my wife and I are tired of each other, we had better form new connections, for it is unreasonable to sacrifice happiness to any accidental ties. Any particular rule, indeed, is so far a mistake; for to act upon such a rule is to disregard the general principles of reason. In every action and in every relation of life, I should hold myself absolutely free to act simply and solely with reference to the greatest happiness. Habits are bad, for habits imply disregard of reason, and all promises are immoral, for to keep a promise is to pay a blind obedience to the past. To punish is unreasonable; for, in pure reason, we have no more right to hate a villain than a viper or a cup of poison. The only legitimate end of punishment is reform, and reform should be produced by argument instead of imprisonment. All coercion is clearly bad, for coercion is not argument; and, since all government implies coercion, all government is immoral. Society, in short, must be reduced to an aggregate of independent atoms, free from all conventions, from all prescriptive rights and privileges, without the slightest respect for any traditional institutions, and acting at every moment in obedience to the pure dictates of reason.

When these principles have forced their way, and the omnipotence of reason shows their triumph to be only a question of time, we shall reach the millennium. Mind will then be omnipotent over matter ; kings, priests, laws, and family associations will disappear; and every man will live in perfect peace and happiness in the light of reason. One difficulty, indeed, suggests itself. Why, if reason be thus omnipotent, has it done so little in the past? Whence this persistence of inequality and injustice, this enormous power of sheer obstinate, unreasoning prejudice in a set of beings who are to be so completely regenerated by the power of pure reason? Monarchy, he declares summarily, is founded on imposture. How, if reason be the one force, has imposture been so successful, and, if successful for so long, why should it not be successful hereafter?

To this Godwin has no very intelligible answer, or perhaps he hardly sees that an answer is desirable. But, in truth, his whole system appears to be so grotesque when brought to one focus and distinctly stated, that we must in fairness recall two things: first, that most philosophical systems appear absurd when summarised after their extinction; and, secondly, that in bringing out in a very brief space the most salient features of such a doctrine, it is quite impossible to avoid caricature. There is enough not only of apparent philosophy in it, but of really intelligent--though strangely one-sided--reflection to enable us to understand how this deification of reason, falling in with the most advanced movements of the time, should affect Shelley's simple, impulsive, and marvellously imaginative nature. Men of much stricter logical training considered Godwin to be a great, if paradoxical, thinker, and Shelley, who had rather an affinity for abstract metaphysical ideas than a capacity for constructing them into logical wholes, was for a time entirely carried away. When after reading Godwin's quiet prosaic enunciation of the most startling paradoxes in the least impassioned language, we turn to Shelley's poetical interpretation, the two seem to be related as the stagnant pool to the rainbow-coloured mist into which it has been transmuted. Shelley's fervid enthusiasm has vapourised the slightly muddy philosophic prose, changed it into impalpable ether, and tinged it with the most brilliant, if evanescent, hue. Shelley had certainly learnt from others besides Godwin, and in particular had begun those Platonic readings which afterwards generated his characteristic belief in a transcendental world, the abode of the archetypal ideas of beauty, love, and wisdom. But through all his poetry we find a recurrence of the same ideas which he had originally imbibed from his first master.

The Godwinism, indeed, is strongest in the crude poetry of 'Queen Mab,' where many passages read like the 'Political Justice' done into verse. So, for example, we have a na?f statement of the incoherent theory which has already been noticed in Godwin's treatise. After pointing to some of the miseries which afflict unfortunate mankind, and observing that they are not due to man's 'evil nature,' which, it seems, is merely a figment invented to excuse crimes, the question naturally suggests itself, to what, then, can all this mischief be due? Nature has made everything perfect and harmonious, except man. On man alone she has, it seems, heaped 'ruin, vice, and slavery.' But the indignant answer is given:--

Nature! No! Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society.

Shelley improved as a poet, and in a degree rarely exemplified in poetry, between 'Queen Mab' and the 'Prometheus'; but even in the 'Prometheus' and his last writings we find a continued reflection of Godwin's characteristic views. Everywhere as much a prophet as a poet, Shelley is always announcing, sometimes in exquisite poetry, the advent of the millennium. His conception of the millennium, if we try to examine precisely what it is, always embodies the same thought, that man is to be made perfect by the complete dissolution of all the traditional ties by which the race is at present bound together. In the passage which originally formed the conclusion to the 'Prometheus,' the 'Spirit of the Hour' reveals the approaching consummation. The whole passage is a fine one, and it is almost a shame to quote fragments; but we may briefly observe that in the coming world everybody is to say exactly what he thinks; women are to be--

gentle radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel.

Thrones, altars, judgment seats, and prisons are to be abolished when reason is absolute; and when

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself.

To be 'unclassed, tribeless, and nationless', and we may add, without marriage, is to be in the lowest depths of barbarism. It is so, at least, in the world of realities. But the description will fit that 'state of nature' of which philosophers of the time delighted to talk. The best comment is to be found in Godwin. The great mistake of Rousseau, says that writer, was that whilst truly recognising government to be the source of all evil, he chose to praise the state which preceded government, instead of the state which, we may hope, will succeed its abolition. When we are perfect, we shall get rid of all laws of every kind, and thus, in some sense, the ultimate goal of all progress is to attain precisely to that state of nature which Rousseau regretted as a thing of the past and which is described in Shelley's glowing rhetoric.

The difficulty of making this view coherent is curiously reflected in the mechanism of Shelley's great poem; great it is, for the marvel of its lyrical excellence is fortunately independent of the conceptions of life and human nature which it is intended to set forth. If all the complex organisation which has slowly evolved itself in the course of history, the expression of which is civilisation, order, coherence, and co-operation in the different departments of life, is to be set down as an unmitigated evil, the fruit of downright imposture, all history becomes unintelligible. Man, potentially perfectible, has always been the sport of what seems to be a malignant and dark power of utterly inexplicable origin and character. Shelley, we are told, could not bear to read history. The explanation offered is that he was too much shocked by the perpetual record of misery, tyranny, and crime. A man who can see nothing else in history is obviously a very inefficient historian. Godwin tells us that he had learnt from Swift's bitter misanthropy the truth that all political institutions are hopelessly corrupt. A fusion of the satirist's view, that all which is is bad, with the enthusiast's view, that all which will be will be perfect, just expresses Shelley's peculiar mixture of optimism and pessimism. When we try to translate this into a philosophical view or a poetical representation of the world, the consequence is inevitably perplexing.

Thus Shelley tells us in the preface to the 'Prometheus' that he could not accept the view, adopted by AEschylus, of a final reconciliation between Jupiter and his victim. He was 'averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the champion with the oppressor of mankind.' He cannot be content with the intimate mixture of good and evil which is presented in the world as we know it. He must have absolute good on one side, contrasted with absolute evil on the other. But it would seem--as far as one is justified in attaching any precise meaning to poetical symbols--that the fitting catastrophe to the world's drama must be in some sense a reconciliation between Prometheus and Jupiter; or, in other words, between the reason and the blind forces by which it is opposed. The ultimate good must be not the annihilation of all the conditions of human life, but the slow conquest of nature by the adaptation of the life to its conditions. We learn to rule nature, as it is generally expressed, by learning to obey it. Any such view, however, is uncongenial to Shelley, though he might have derived it from Bacon, one of the professed objects of his veneration. The result of his own view is that the catastrophe of the drama is utterly inexplicable and mysterious. Who are Jupiter and Demogorgon? Why, when Demogorgon appears in the car of the Hours, and tells Jupiter that the time is come, and that they are both to dwell together in darkness henceforth, does Jupiter immediately give up with a cry of Ai! Ai! and descend as through a theatrical trapdoor? Dealing with such high matters, and penetrating to the very ultimate mystery of the universe, we must of course be prepared for surprising inversions. A mysterious blind destiny is at the bottom of everything, according to Shelley, and of course it may at any moment crush the whole existing order in utter annihilation. And yet, it is impossible not to feel that here, too, we have still the same incoherence which was shown more crudely in 'Queen Mab.' The absolute destruction of all law, and of law not merely in the sense of human law, but of the laws in virtue of which the stars run their course and the frame of the universe is bound together, is the end to which we are to look forward. It will come when it will come; for it is impossible to join on such a catastrophe to any of the phenomenal series of events, of which alone we can obtain any kind of knowledge. The actual world, it is plain, is regarded as a hideous nightmare. The evil dream will dissolve and break up when something awakes us from our mysterious sleep; but that something, whatever it may be, must of course be outside the dream, and not a consummation worked out by the dream itself. We expect a catastrophe, not an evolution. And, finally, when the dream dissolves, when the 'painted veil' called life is drawn aside, what will be left?

Some answer--and a remarkable answer--is given by Shelley. But first we may say one word in reference to a point already touched. The entire dissolution of all existing laws was part of Shelley's, as of Godwin's, programme. The amazing calmness with which the philosopher summarily disposes of marriage in a cursory paragraph or two, as a fond thing, foolishly invented and repugnant to the plain teaching of reason, is one of the most grotesque crudities of his book. This doctrine has to be taken into account both in judging of Shelley's character and considering some of his poetical work. It is, of course, frequently noticed in extenuation or aggravation of the most serious imputation upon his character. We are told that Shelley can be entirely cleared by revelations which have not as yet been made. That is satisfactory, and would be still more satisfactory if we were sure that his apologists fully appreciated the charge. According to the story as hitherto published, we can only say that his conduct seems to indicate a flightiness and impulsiveness inconsistent with real depth of sentiment. The complaint is that he behaved ill to the first Mrs. Shelley, considered not as a wife, but as a human being, and as a human being then possessing a peculiar and special claim upon his utmost tenderness. This is only worth saying in order to suggest the answer to a casuistical problem which seems to puzzle his biographers. Is a man the better or the worse because, when he breaks a moral law, he denies it to be moral? Is he to be more or less condemned because, whilst committing a murder, he proceeds to assert that everybody ought to commit murder when he chooses? Without seeking to untwist all the strands of a very pretty problem, I will simply say that, to my mind, the question must in the last resort be simply one of fact. What we have to ask is the quality implied by his indifference to the law? If a man acts wrongly from benevolent feeling, misguided by some dexterous fallacy, his error affords no presumption that he is otherwise intrinsically bad. If, on the other hand, his indifference to the law arises from malice, or sensuality, it must of course lower our esteem for him in proportion, under whatever code of morality he may please to shelter his misdoings.

In Shelley's particular case we should probably be disposed to ascribe his moral deficiencies to the effect of crude but specious theory upon a singularly philanthropic but abnormally impulsive mind. No one would accuse him of any want of purity or generosity; but we might regard him as wanting in depth and intensity of sentiment. Allied to this moral weakness is his incapacity for either feeling in himself or appreciating in others the force of ordinary human passions directed to a concrete object. The only apology that can be made for his selection of the singularly loathsome motive for his drama is in the fact that in his hands the chief character becomes simply an incarnation of purely intellectual wickedness; he is a new avatar of the mysterious principle of evil which generally appears as a priest or king; he represents the hatred to good in the abstract rather than subservience to the lower passions. It is easy to understand how Shelley's temperament should lead him to undervalue the importance of the restraints which are rightly regarded as essential to social welfare, and fall in with Godwin's tranquil abolition of marriage as an uncomfortable fetter upon the perfect liberty of choice. But it is also undeniable that the defect not only makes his poetry rather unsatisfying to those coarser natures which cannot support themselves on the chameleon's diet, but occasionally leads to unpleasant discords. Thus, for example, the worshippers of Shelley generally regard the 'Epipsychidion' as one of his finest poems, and are inclined to warn off the profane vulgar as unfitted to appreciate its beauties. It is, perhaps, less difficult to understand than to sympathise very heartily with the sentiment by which it is inspired. There are abundant precedents, both in religious and purely imaginative literature, for regarding a human passion as in some sense typifying, or identical with, the passion for ideal perfection. So far a want of sympathy may imply a deficiency in poetic sensibility. But I cannot believe that the 'Vita Nuova' would have been the better if Dante had been careful to explain that there was another lady besides Beatrice for whom he had an almost equal devotion; nor do I think that it is the prosaic part of us which protests when Shelley thinks it necessary to expound his anti-matrimonial theory in the 'Epipsychidion.' Why should he tell us that--

I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

and so on; in short, that he despises the 'modern morals' which distinctly approve of monogamy? Human love, one would say, becomes a fitting type of a loftier emotion, in so far as it implies exclusive devotion to its object. During this uncomfortable intrusion of a discordant theory, we seem to be listening less to the passionate utterance of a true poet than to the shrill tones of a conceited propagator of flimsy crotchets, proclaiming his tenets without regard to truth or propriety. Mrs. Shelley does not seem to have entered into the spirit of the composition; and we can hardly wonder if she found this little bit of argument rather a stumbling-block to her comprehension.

To return, however, from these moral deductions to the more general principles. It is scarcely necessary to insist at length upon the peculiar idealism implied in Shelley's poetry. It is, of course, the first characteristic upon which every critic must fasten. The materials with which he works are impalpable abstractions where other poets use concrete images. His poetry is like the subtle veil woven by the witch of Atlas from 'threads of fleecy mists,' 'long lines of light,' such as are kindled by the dawn and 'star-beams.' When he speaks of natural scenery the solid earth seems to be dissolved, and we are in presence of nothing but the shifting phantasmagoria of cloudland, the glow of moonlight on eternal snow, or the 'golden lightning of the setting sun.' The only earthly scenery which recalls Shelley to a more material mind is that which one sees from a high peak at sunrise, when the rising vapours tinged with prismatic colours shut out all signs of human life, and we are alone with the sky and the shadowy billows of the sea of mountains. Only in such vague regions can Shelley find fitting symbolism for those faint emotions suggested by the most abstract speculations, from which he alone is able to extract an unearthly music. To insist upon this would be waste of time. Nobody, one may say briefly, has ever expanded into an astonishing variety of interpretation the familiar text of Shakespeare--

We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little lives Are rounded with a sleep.

The doctrine is expressed in a passage in 'Hellas,' where Ahasuerus states this as the final result of European thought. The passage, like so many in Shelley, shows that he had Shakespeare in his mind without exactly copying him. The Shakespearean reference to the 'cloud-capped towers' and 'gorgeous palaces' is echoed in the verses which conclude with the words:--

The italicised words point to the original in the 'Tempest;' but Shelley proceeds to expound his theory more dogmatically than Prospero, and we are not quite surprised when Mahmoud is puzzled and declares that the words 'stream like a tempest of dazzling mist through his brain.' The words represent the most characteristic effect of Shelley as accurately as the aspect of consistent idealism to a prosaic mind.

It need not be said how frequently the thought occurs in Shelley. We might fix him to a metaphysical system if we interpreted him prosaically. When in 'Prometheus' Panthea describes to Asia a mysterious dream, suddenly Asia sees another shape pass between her and the 'golden dew' which gleams through its substance. 'What is it?' she asks. 'It is mine other dream,' replies Panthea. 'It disappears,' exclaims Asia. 'It passes now into my mind,' replies Panthea. We are, that is, in a region where dreams walk as visible as the dreamers, and pass into or out of a mind which is indeed only a collection of dreams. The archaic mind regarded dreams as substantial or objective realities. In Shelley the reality is reduced to the unsubstantiality of a dream. To the ordinary thinker, the spirit is the receptacle of ideas. With Shelley, a little further on, we find that the relation is inverted; spirits themselves inhabit ideas; they live in the mind as in an ocean. Thought is the ultimate reality which contains spirits and ideas and dreams, if, rather, it is not simpler to say that everything is a dream.

The Faery-land of Spenser might be classified in our inadequate phraseology as equally 'ideal' with Shelley's impalpable scenery. But Spenser's allegorical figures are as visible as the actors in a masque; and, in fact, the 'Faery Queen' is a masque in words. His pages are a gallery of pictures, and may supply innumerable subjects for the artist. To illustrate Shelley would be as impossible as to paint a strain of music, unless, indeed, some of Turner's cloud scenery may be taken as representative of his incidental descriptions.

This language frequently reminds us of metaphysical doctrines which were unknown to Shelley in their modern shape. Nobody, perhaps, is capable of thinking in this fashion in ordinary life; and Shelley, with all his singular visions and hallucinations, probably took the common-sense view of ordinary mortals in his dealings with commonplace or facts. It is surprising enough that, even for purely poetical purposes, he could continue this to the ordinary conceptions of object and subject. But his familiarity with this point of view may help to explain some of the problems as to his ultimate belief. It is plain that he was in some sense dissatisfied with the simple scepticism of Godwin. But he found no successor to guide his speculations. Coleridge once regretted that Shelley had not applied to him instead of Southey, who, in truth, was as ill qualified as a man could well be to help a young enthusiast through the mazes of metaphysical entanglement. It is idle to speculate upon the possible result. Shelley, if we may judge from a passage in his epistle to Mrs. Gisborne, had no very high opinion of Coleridge's capacity as a spiritual guide. Shelley, in fact, in spite of his so-called mysticism, was an ardent lover of clearness, and would have been disgusted by the haze in which Coleridge enwrapped his revelations to mankind. But Coleridge might possibly have introduced him to a sphere of thought in which he could have found something congenial. One parallel may be suggested which will perhaps help to illustrate this position.

Various passages have been quoted from Shelley's poetry to prove that he was a theist and a believer in immortality. His real belief, it would seem, will hardly run into any of the orthodox moulds. It is understood as clearly as may be in the conclusion to the 'Sensitive Plant':--

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