as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure. When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription for her tomb ending with the verse: "I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me." If he had been all heartless, he could never have written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried to summon into being-a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch of Shelley-a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of Hell, a candidate for Paradise.

VIII

SHELLEY

Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England, as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"? Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold's critics quarrel most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even, have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call

a star ineffectual. In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the word.

He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is "the sole law which should govern the moral world" led him in Laon and Cythna (later transformed into The Revolt of Islam) to make the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared, "intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life." It was introduced "merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has a tendency to promote." Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to the improvement of his readers' morals? He did not

wish his readers to practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.

Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political, like his ethical, theories had something miragelike about them. He was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards achieving the earthly paradise he foretold in The Mask of Anarchy and Prometheus Unbound.

It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define Shelley's genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems do

not seem to be quite vertebrate-to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But Shelley, like his skylark, is a "scorner of the ground," and our feet do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are carried from landscape to landscape. In Alastor, scene succeeds scene faster than the eye can seize it.

Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape. This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in "The Cloud." Here is the very music of the changing shape. "I change, but I cannot die," is the cloud's boast:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.