This will disappoint you,who had "a passion for reforming it."Kings and priests are very much where you left them.True,we have a poet who assails them,at large,frequently and fearlessly;yet Mr.Swinburne has never,like "kind Hunt,"been in prison,nor do we fear for him a charge of treason.Moreover,chemical science has discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying principalities and powers.You would be interested in the methods,but your peaceful Revolutionism,which disdained physical force,would regret their application.
Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider satisfactory;for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam,and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and described.We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase.Alas!he is a youth of more than seventy summers;and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining buds and beams.
In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been carried.Ireland has received Emancipation,and almost everything else she can ask for.I regret to say that she is still unhappy;her wounds unstanched,her wrongs unforgiven.At home we have enfranchised the paupers,and expect the most happy results.
Paupers (as Mr.Gladstone says)are "our own flesh and blood,"and,as we compel them to be vaccinated,so we should permit them to vote.Is it a dream that Mr.Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!)has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums?This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have long sought in vain.Atheists,you will regret to hear,are still unpopular;but the new Parliament has done something for Mr.
Bradlaugh.You should have known our Charles while you were in the "Queen Mab"stage.I fear you wandered,later,from his robust condition of intellectual development.
As to your private life,many biographers contrive to make public as much of it as possible.Your name,even in life,was,alas!a kind of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle.
This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators,biographers,anecdotists,and others of the tribe.They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant,like night-birds bewildered by the sun.Men of sense and taste have written on you,indeed;but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether it was your heart,or a less dignified and most troublesome organ,which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre.These biographers fight terribly among themselves,and vainly prolong the memory of "old unhappy far-off things,and sorrows long ago."Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is unessential,their raking up of old letters and old stories.
The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours,who has produced two heavy volumes,styled by him "The Real Shelley."The real Shelley,it appears,was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology.He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,the Englishman who called you "a damned Atheist"in the post-office at Pisa.He finds that you had "a little turned-up nose,"a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal)in the history of the world.To be in harmony with your nose,you were a "phenomenal"liar,an ill-bred,ill-born,profligate,partly insane,an evil-tempered monster,a self-righteous person,full of self-approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
Your friend Dr.Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary,"a bad old man."But enough of this inopportune brawler.
For Humanity,of which you hoped such great things,Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost.The sun will grow cold,slowly--as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your "Prometheus,"but as surely.
If this nightmare be fulfilled,perhaps the Last Man,in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator,will read,by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse,the poetry of Shelley.So reading,he,the latest of his race,will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek)make life worth enduring.In your verse he will have sight of sky,and sea,and cloud,the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.He will be face to face,in fancy,with the great powers that are dead,sun,and ocean,and the illimitable azure of the heavens.In Shelley's poetry,while Man endures,all those will survive;for your "voice is as the voice of winds and tides,"and perhaps more deathless than all of these,and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit.
