All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in these sad 'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is one poem-- perhaps his greatest poem--which may suggest the answer.In the 'Sensitive Plant' (1820) a garden is first described on which are lavished all his powers of weaving an imaginary landscape out of flowers and light and odour.All the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except the Sensitive Plant,"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful."Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this Eden." "A Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended the flowers from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died!" The last part of the poem, a pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corruption and decay when the power of good has vanished and the power of evil is triumphant.Cruel frost comes, and snow,"And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When winter had gone and spring came back The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels."Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we may console ourselves by believing that"In this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs which endure No light, being themselves obscure."The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with his philosophical ideas.It is the creed of the student of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza.What is real and unchanging is the one spirit which interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty and delight," and this spirit--the vision which Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'--is what is always suggested by his poetry at its highest moments.The suggestion, in its fulness, is of course ineffable; only in the case of Shelley some approach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped in philosophical ways of thinking.The forms in which he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of an unsatisfied and disappointed soul.
His philosophy of love is but a special case of this all-embracing doctrine.We saw how in 'Epipsychidion' he rejected monogamic principles on the ground that true love is increased, not diminished, by division, and we can now understand why he calls this theory an "eternal law." For, in this life of illusion, it is in passionate love that we most nearly attain to communion with the eternal reality.Hence the more of it the better.The more we divide and spread our love, the more nearly will the fragments of goodness and beauty that are in each of us find their true fruition.This doctrine may be inconvenient in practice, but it is far removed from vulgar sensualism, of which Shelley had not a trace.Hogg says that he was "pre-eminently a ladies' man," meaning that he had that childlike helplessness and sincerity which go straight to the hearts of women.To this youth, preaching sublime mysteries, and needing to be mothered into the bargain, they were as iron to the magnet.There was always an Eve in his Eden, and each was the "wonder of her kind"; but whoever she was--Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Turner, Mary Godwin, Emilia Viviani, or Jane Williams--she was never a Don Juan's mistress; she was an incarnation of the soul of the world, a momentary mirror of the eternal.Such an attitude towards the least controllable of passions has several drawbacks: it involves a certain inhumanity, and it is only possible for long to one who remains ignorant of himself and cannot see that part of the force impelling him is blind attraction towards a pretty face.It also has the result that, if the lover is a poet, his love-songs will be sad.Obsessed by the idea of communion with some divine perfection, he must needs be often cast down, not only by finding that, Ixion-like, he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said of himself and Emilia), but because, even when the object of his affection is worthy, complete communion is easier to desire than to attain.
Thus Shelley's love-songs are just what might be expected.If he does strain to the moment of ingress into the divine being, it is to swoon with excess of bliss, as at the end of 'Epipsychidion', or as in the 'Indian Serenade':
"Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!"
More often he exhales pure melancholy:
