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ART. V.-SHELLEY AND THE LETTERS OF POETS.

An Introductory Essay to the [supposed] Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Robert Browning. Moxon.

"SILE

ILENCE," says Wordsworth, "is a privilege of the grave, a right of the departed ;" and he concludes that there is no cause why the lives of authors should be pried into with diligent curiosity, and laid open with the same disregard of reserve which may sometimes be expedient in composing the history of men who have borne an active part in the world. This conclusion is surprising from a meditative man, and we venture to think it as illogical as surprising. Are, then, those who have influenced the spiritual life of the nation to be set aside, "not having borne an active part" in the world? Are the permanent moral forces to be disregarded, and our attention concentrated on the transitory machines worked by those forces-are the machines to be considered as fulfilling the great functions of life? Is the silent mighty Thought to be passed over in favour of the loud and limited Fact? Are poets whom Shelley grandly-and truly as grandly-calls "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," not to be recognised among the active influences, but to be set aside in favour of the Eldons or Lord Johns? Not so. The curiosity mankind feels respecting the lives of poets and other teachers is no vulgar feeling, or is vulgar only in the vulgar mind. Biography has its office. All men will admit that it is of some importance to find in the poet's life a sanction for those high thoughts which have moved us in his works; and although it is true that no precept can be made false by any falling short in the practice of him who uttered it, yet the precept comes home to us with added significance when we learn that what was nobly thought was also nobly lived-that the poetry we delight in was the voice of the harmonious manhood of him who sang it. Wordsworth, indeed, adds to the remark just quoted, "it is only for moral or intellectual purposes that such disclosures are justifiable," and this concedes the point, since even affectionate curiosity may be justly called a moral purpose. The publication of a few insignificant letters of Shelley's, with an elaborate preface by Browning, set us thinking on the very great importance one might reasonably attach to characteristic letters written in the unreserve of friendship by poets. Not that these letters threw any light whatever on Shelley's history: that was felt from the first by all readers; and it disturbed no conclusions to learn that these letters were forgeries-at least the majority of them-and so well executed as forgeries, that

The genuine Letters.

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they will probably hold a place in the annals of literary vagabondage.

We have intimated that they are not all spurious. The twentythird, addressed to Keats, for example, is a genuine letter of Shelley's, the original of which has been for many years in the possession of the present reviewer, who printed a copy of it in the "British Quarterly" for November, 1848, and from that printed copy the forger must have produced his. The letter to Lawrence about his "Empire of the Nairs," we have a dim but strong feeling of having seen elsewhere in print. And while on this subject, we may as well print a letter handed to us by our honoured friend Leigh Hunt, the first he ever received from the man who was afterwards to become his most illustrious and best beloved friend. This, at any rate, is no forgery. And although it has no intrinsic interest as a letter, it is curious as exemplifying the passionate ardour with which he tried in all ways to free the world from its burdens. He was then a young student, and a reader of the Examiner. Mr. Leigh Hunt informs us that the "triumph" alluded to was the failure of some Tory prosecution of the press :

"University College, Oxford, March 2, 1811. "Sir,-Permit me, although a stranger, to offer my sincerest congratulations on the occasion of that triumph so highly to be prized by men of liberality; permit me also to submit to your consideration, as to one of the most fearless enlighteners of the public mind at the present time, a scheme of mutual safety and mutual indemnification for men of public spirit and principle, which if carried into effect would evidently be productive of incalculable advantages; of the scheme the enclosed is an address to the public, the proposal for a meeting, and which shall be modified according to your judgment, if you will do me the honour to consider the point. The ultimate intention of my aim is to induce a meeting of such enlightened unprejudiced members of the community, whose independent principles expose them to evils which might thus become alleviated, and to form a methodical society which should be organized so as to resist that coalition of the enemies of liberty which at present renders any expression of opinion on matters of policy dangerous to individuals. It has been for the want of societies of this nature that corruption has attained the height at which we now behold it, nor can any of us bear in mind the very great influence which some years since was gained by (?), without considering that a society of equal extent might establish rational liberty on as firm a basis as that which would have supported the visionary schemes of a completely-equalized community. Although perfectly unacquainted (privately) with you, I address you as a common friend of Liberty, thinking that in cases of this urgency and importance, that etiquette ought not to stand in the way of usefulness. My father is in Parliament, and on attaining 21 I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat. On account of the responsibility to which my residence at this University subjects me, I of course dare

not publicly to avow all that I think, but the time will come when I hope that my every endeavour, inefficient as they may be, will be directed to the advancement of liberty.

Returning to the volume before us, now suppressed by Mr. Moxon, we are struck with the unseemly merriment excited by Mr. Browning's Introduction. The critics, now the letters are known to be forgeries, make merry with Mr. Browning for having written an elaborate preface to them; but if any one will read the preface with candid attention, he will see that it is not specifically an introduction to these few letters, but to the whole mass of Shelley's authentic correspondence. Considered, indeed, as a preface to the new letters it is little less incongruous than the façade of the Parthenon would be to a wayside cottage. But it is quite evident that Browning wanted to say something about Shelley, and seized this occasion for saying it. We will not quarrel with the occasion, nor indeed with the style. The one has proved unhappy; the other is misty and metaphorical, as the prose style of poets is apt to be. A poet is out of his natural element in prose. The swan, whose grace flatters every eye when floating with majestic calmness

"On the smooth bosom of the silent lake,"

has a most graceless waddle on dry land. But if the manner of this preface be open to criticism, the matter is acceptable.

Mr. Browning says, that to him the chief value of Shelley's correspondence lies in its perfect moral and intellectual harmony with the highest efforts of the writer's genius. As a study of character, the letters and the poems yield precisely the same result. In Shelley there was no discordance between the author and the man; he had no stage attitudes, he wore no tragic mask to be wearily laid aside behind the scenes; in the letters we see everywhere the germs of which the poems were but the full and necessary blossom. We wholly agree with Mr. Browning that this was the fact with regard to Shelley, and that it was a beautiful manifestation of the sincerity and unity of his nature. But we must observe, that the opposite fact, noticeable in the letters of some other poets, does not necessarily argue the mere artificiality of their loftier productions. Many-sided minds and versatile temperaments will not only be "everything by turns," but will be everything with equal thoroughness and good faith. A Byron, for example, may be sincerely poetical in his more impassioned moods, and yet write those flippant letters of his that carry with them the unpleasant perfume of the ginand-water under the stimulus of which he wrote Don Juan.

It is bad psychology to doubt the earnestness of an earnest mood, because of the outbreaks of a scornful, sardonic, or playful mood. The poet is more than poet-he is Man. If his nature be many-sided, many-sided will be its manifestations; and instead of our knowledge of the man illustrating his works, it will throw us into inextricable confusion, unless we look deeper and recognise the cause of the contradiction. We are such children in our judgment of men! We catch at the

merest appearances, and suffer them to guide us in our difficult path. If a profound thinker, in his hours of lassitude, have but a grave ennui, and amuse himself with grave trivialities—if he be absent, awkward, dirty, and not given to Homeric laughter, we yield him our respectful admiration-we acknowledge him a true philosopher-we laugh perhaps at his dirt, quiz his manners, and relate anecdotes of his social stupidity, but he is "so absorbed in his ideas!" An incomplete man, we hold him as a complete philosopher! But if, unhappily, a quick temperament, a facile laughter, a gay manner, a love of life in other aspects than those of the study or the laboratory, be added to that thinking power which first won our admiration, we have great difficulty in believing the man of the world does not injure the philosopher. Even Dr. Johnson could with difficulty persuade himself of Shakspeare's tragic power, because of the affluent comedy which Johnson thought so much more natural to him. To believe in the seriousness of a man who can betray levity is so perplexing! Nature has given to all men the faculties of laughter and of tears; and because one or other of these faculties is apt to predominate in remarkable men, we refuse to acknowledge that both may be highly developed. Voltaire regretted that Newton had never written vaudevilles: "je l'en estimerais d'avantage," says he; and however absurd the conjunction may appear, it is sanctioned by the great examples of Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. In France it is otherwise. The mercurial temperament of the race breaks out in mathematicians and philologues; men of science are handsome and gay without suspicion; metaphysics do not shun the salon; archæology has its elegant professors.

But we must not be seduced into a dissertation; the point we wished to touch was, the value of correspondence as letting us into the real secret of the writers. When characters are "all of a piece," the letters do but convince us of this, and show a pale reflection of the mind we have learned to know in its splendour; when the characters are more varied, the letters present them to us in aspects not presented in the works. Charles Lamb, for example, is Elia in his letters, neither more nor less. But how excessively unlike Gertrude of Wyoming are the letters of Tom Campbell! Some men are like the authors of their works, other

men perplex us with the contradiction between men and writers. In the one case the man has contrived to express himself; in the other, the writer has only expressed a mood. We gain a tolerably vivid conception of Burns the man from Burns the poet; but what reader has the slightest idea of the man Campbell or the man Rogers? Mr. Browning would perhaps explain this by his classification of the poets, as objective and subjective -or, as we should prefer stating it, impersonal and personal.

The objective poet, he tells us, simply reproduces the phenomena of the external world, whether physical or moral, without any conscious blending of his individual emotions or any intrusion of his judgment. His function is purely to depict nature and life, and he is perfect in his kind in proportion as he stands aloof from his creations, and gives them a wholeness independent of himself. Hence his poetry can be enjoyed apart from any knowledge of his character or history. The Iliad has not to wait for its appreciation until we have settled the question of Homer and the Homerides. The subjective poet, on the other hand, views the external world mainly in its relations with his inward being; he aims to pass beyond the transient form to the permanent idea, to trace the laws of spiritual harmony and "round the universal meaning." While by the objective poet the outer world is painted, with a finer and more vivid sense, it is true, but still not otherwise than it appears to the common perceptions of humanity; by the subjective poet it is used almost entirely as the exponent of his peculiar ideas and emotions. Hence, in the latter case, we have not a perfect key to the productions of the poet, unless we know the man. We agree with Mr. Browning, that this is the reason why the biography of a Shelley is of more importance to us than that of a Shakspeare; and, of all the materials for a biography, there are none that so effectually reveal a man's nature as a varied collection of letters.

The lover of elegant literature might prescribe for himself a charming course of reading in the Letters of Poets. Cowper, for example, becomes quite a new object of interest in his correspondence; and Southey, whom we cannot accept in his languid epics, is charming in the domestic familiarity of his letters. Schiller somewhat jars upon our preconceptions. Instead of the romantic "ideal" poet, we find him, in the correspondence with Körner, painfully occupied with the trade of literature, which he looks on as a trade, and the profits from which are all calculated with the minute enthusiasm of an épicier. But the shock once over, we get reconciled to the reality, and gain fresh interest from the new glimpse into his life. Lessing's letters are the transcripts of his Titanic existence, ever battling, ever conquering, ever eager for new truth. Voltaire's