THE CENTENARY OF SHELLEY.

BY PROFESSOR PAUL DE REUL.

[Read June 13th, 1922.]

My first word will be one of thanks for the kind words just spoken of my country and of myself, and for the great honour done to me in inviting me to speak before this audience.

My second word will be one of apology for accepting the invitation. It seems indeed very conceited, nay, almost impudent for a foreigner to come and speak in an un-English voice, and in no style in the least worthy of the subject, on a great English poet before the most refined English literary public, and before a poet like Sir Henry Newbolt. Let me say that I should not have accepted, but for the occasion of a centenary which allows me to present, not a real lecture that should teach you anything, but the homage of a foreigner (and perhaps interesting as such) to the great poet whom it is natural that we should remember at this time of the century and of the year.

To prevent disappointment, I must also warn you that this tribute will be in the way of criticism, not of unmitigated praise or lyrical description of a romantic life and death already well known and often told.

Centenaries of great men are becoming an institution. But if it is to do any good, if it is not to degene

rate into a ceremonial of conventional eulogy, we ought to improve the occasion of a centenary anniversary by attempting a judgment, calm and impartial, definitive as far as human things can be of the hero we are celebrating.

Now Shelley has been praised more than judged or criticised, and it is quite natural that it should be So. His fame had been totally eclipsed by that of Byron. Shelley thought more highly of "the Pilgrim of Eternity" than of himself. " than of himself. Byron burned his body on the coast of Viareggio, but this was the first honour ever paid to him. He died practically unknown. Young Browning, discovering "the atheist poet," had some difficulty in procuring his works. Tennyson learned his name only at Cambridge. Complete editions of his works did not appear for about twenty years.

But by-and-by a reaction set in in his favour, and continued steadily. One landmark of it is Browning's little poem, "Memorabilia":

"Ah, did you once see Shelley plain

And did he stop and speak to you?"

The reaction reached its climax about the ninth decade of the last century. Adverse criticism such as M. Arnold's (with his "ineffectual angel ") had been so awkwardly beside the mark that it rather strengthened the universal admiration.

Yet it is time, I think, that we should no longer admire Shelley indiscriminately, and I am going to set myself to the pedantic task of taking and leaving, of weighing pros and cons. Let it be said to devout

Shelleyans that I do it only to ease my critical conscience, and to leave me free to admire him the more afterwards. We want to establish his fame on the most solid basis, to make it shine as a flame on an altar. Therefore we must separate the pure metal from the dross, or, like his own West Wind, blow on his dead leaves and separate them from the living ones.

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For beside the living parts of his work I find long tracts of dry land—trying allegories and abstractions, not only in his juvenile "Queen Mab" but in " The Revolt of Islam," parts of " Prometheus," of “ Julian and Maddalo," of "Epipsychidion "-indeed in all his longer poems; and many people will perhaps agree that a full enjoyment, a complete satisfaction, must rather be derived from his short poems and passages of the long ones.

Now, if we were asked what is wanting in these dry tracts, I think we might reply, without hesitating : a more direct and intimate contact with life, with reality, with nature-in one word, that little grain of realism which seems indispensable even in the most ethereal poetry.

I am well aware that the defect I am speaking of is, to a certain extent, the defect of a quality; but that the defect was not necessary, not unavoidable, is sufficiently proved by his universally admired masterpieces such as the "Hymn to Mont Blanc," the "Euganean Hills," the "Skylark," the "Cloud," the "West Wind" and the fourth act of "Prometheus where he did remain in contact with Nature, as I wish he had done more often.

Shelley's excessive contempt for reality is shown

in his private life, in his poetical theory, finally in the form and matter of his poetry.

In his private life it is shown in a delightfully picturesque way, but certainly it is manifested by a want of judgment or psychology as regards men or women of his own personal feelings. I am not going to defend the Oxford dons who rusticated him for

his pamphlet on "The Necessity of Atheism." Either they read and did not understand, or they were scared by the title even from reading it. Yet what simplicity in Shelley to send copies to the Bishops with a view to convert them! What candour again, when he discovers that his revered master, William Godwin, is a living author, to write to him about his discovery :

"I had enrolled your name in the list of the honourable dead!"

We know his absurd marriage and the rupture of it. I doubt whether the light thrown on this affair by the full publication of his journals will be much in favour of Shelley's judgment when he tried to lay that unction to his soul that Harriet had been false to him. If he really believed she had been, would he have written that extraordinary letter from Troyes in France, where he invites her to join him and Mary Godwin with whom he had eloped ?

Shelley was almost a saint in his devotion to ideals, sometimes in his devotion to the sick and poor. But with women he could be selfish and unjust. He clothed them with imaginary virtues which he rebuked them afterwards for wanting. He embraced "a cloud instead of Juno" and accused the cloud.

He had no sense of fact, could not well distinguish a fact from an illusion, which occasionally gives him an appearance of insincerity. Shall I remind you, for the sake of picturesqueness, that neither had he any due regard for dinner? In his vegetarian period

he would at any time of day or night cut a slice of bread and sprinkle it with dry currants kept loose in his waistcoat-pocket.

But let us revert to more serious matters-I mean Shelley's view of the poet's character, set out in his 'Defence of Poetry.'

Poetry is not so much for him an expression of life according to the laws of beauty as a revelation, an intuition, a sixth sense, an openness to that divine influx, inspiration:

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'It is an error to assert that the fine passages of poetry are produced by labour or study. The toil and delay recommended by critics means no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments."

It will be noticed that this theory, inasmuch as it neglects art, considered as a controlling power over inspiration, makes little difference between the lyric and the mystic. Shelley has the lyrical cry; but sometimes the cry is over-acute: its intensity seems abnormal, morbid, febrile; you think of a musical instrument that breaks by overstringing :

These flights are indeed priceless when the poet stops at the height of them, on the borders of ecstasy, or even when he describes with melodious sadness. his falls from them, like a rocket falling back in a