Crashaw and Shelley sprang from the same seed; but in the one case the seed was choked with thorns, in the other case it fell on good ground.The Metaphysical School was in its direct results an abortive movement, though indirectly much came of it--for Dryden came of it.Dryden, to a greater extent than is (we imagine)generally perceived, was Cowley systematised; and Cowley, who sank into the arms of Dryden, rose from the lap of Donne.
But the movement was so abortive that few will thank us for connecting with it the name of Shelley.This is because to most people the Metaphysical School means Donne, whereas it ought to mean Crashaw.We judge the direction of a development by its highest form, though that form may have been produced but once, and produced imperfectly.Now the highest product of the Metaphysical School was Crashaw, and Crashaw was a Shelley manque; he never reached the Promised Land, but he had fervid visions of it.The Metaphysical School, like Shelley, loved imagery for its own sake: and how beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery may be, let The Skylark and The Cloud witness.It is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to a fixed object, lags continually from the path to play.This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy.The Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it frostily.To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love.So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a Sensitive Plant.In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they went astray cannot be said to have done anything so dainty as is implied by TOYING with imagery.They cut it into shapes with a pair of scissors.From all such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate spontaneity.No trappings are too splendid for the swift steeds of sunrise.His sword-hilt may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of an Excalibur.His thoughts scorch through all the folds of expression.
His cloth of gold bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked poetry.
It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction.Science can now educe threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality Shelley runs with agile ease.To him, in truth, nothing is abstract.The dustiest abstractions Start, and tremble under his feet, And blossom in purple and red.
The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous imagination.The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind.The most wrinkled AEson of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius.In a more intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.Here afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge.They laid their fancies chill on the anvil.Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins.The generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his Ode on the Passions.In this, despite its beauty, there is still a soupcon of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry.Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the Ode to Evening, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the language comparable to the miniatures of Il Penseroso.Crashaw, Collins, Shelley--three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy light," is near of kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmy-eyed"; and the "shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of "Thought's crowned powers."This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions.Take the passage (already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come From the temples high Of man's ear and eye Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,* * * * *From those skiey towers Where Thought's crowned powers Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
Our feet now, every palm, Are sandalled with calm, And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;And beyond our eyes The human love lies Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.
Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the root of such a power.The root, we take it, is this.He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation.Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress, whose constant changes of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her parts.
