THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JULY 8, 1922 SHELLEY'S CENTENARY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18601, 8 July 1922, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JULY 8, 1922 SHELLEY'S CENTENARY.

years ago, on July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, singer and. seer of the natural and spiritual empyrean, was drowned in Italian waters, just before the completion of his thirtieth year. A few weeks later his recovered body was burned, ( after the ancient Greek fashion, on the sea-shore near Via Reggio, and the ashes were subsequently buried by tne side of Keats (who had died in the previous year) in that cemetery at Rome which he had described with luxuriant beauty in “Adonais,” one of the four or five finest elegies extant. His heart is said to have been extracted entire from the flames by Leigh Hunt, Hio heart, which from the burning pyre One who had loved hie wind-swept lyre From out the fierce teeth of the fire. Unmoltea drew. Beside the sea that in its ire Smote him and slew. To some minds the incident may seem trivial, but it has always struck the imagination of the lovers of poetry and of Shelley, and perhaps it is not unfittingly mentioned to-day. What Shelley might have accomplished in verse if he had doubled the number of his years is matter for, wistful conjecture. What he did accomplish during bis brief turn of life bears the stamp of immortality, in so far as the word is applicable to mundane works. He died (and lived) in his enemies’ day, so to speak, when poetic knowledge and humanitarian aspiration were at a low ebb and, unlike his inferior contemporary and half-friend Byron, he never woke up to find himself famous. To him, as to Keats, recognition and celebrity came posthumously and with grudging tardiness. Even long after his death there was—even now there is —much difference of opinion among competent judges of poetry respecting the value of his work. Perhaps there will always be the Shelleyites and the antiShelleyites. To Matthew Arnold he was only a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating against tho void bis luminous wings in vain.”’Not harsh words; but the wholehearted |3helley-enthusiast strenuously resents the "ineffectual” and the “in vain,”—though such a staunch partisan as W. M. Rossetti is willing to admit that the rapture and music and motion are marred at times by ‘Vagueness, unreality, and a pomp of glittering indistinctness, in which excess of sentiment welters amid excess of words.” This is only to say that Shelley had the defects of his qualities. His very ideality caused him to be occasionally nebulous. But these blemishes are not observable in his best poems,—which, broadly speaking, are the short lyrics. Here, it has been well said, “the work -has often as much y of delicate simplicity as of fragile and flowerlike perfection.” To no poet is the image of the dCoHan harp so clearly applicable as to Shelley at his supreme altitude of song. At that zenith of spiritnal ascent ho is on eqnal terms with his own enraptured “Skylark.” It would be idle to deny that tho eccentricity of some phases of Shelley’s character, as well as of some of his speculative opinions, has frightehed many people away from the study of his poetry,—much of which is exemplary in point of wholesomeness, purity, and spirituality. We have no sympathy with the apologists who accept genius as an excuse for faulty conduct, and Shelley’s waywardness of principle and action has to be admitted. The spirit of rebellion was in his blood and brain, and he defied authority and custom in some matters where the sanctions of authority and custom are virtually impregnable. But here again, as in the case of the poetry, too obvious defects must not be allowed to blur the vision of signal merits. A fervent but candid admirer, after frankly acknowledging Shelley’s faults, goes on to remark that even the censors of his conduct have been deeply impressed by the essential beauty of hischaracter. “Here we find enthusiasm, fervour, courage (moral and physical), an unbounded readiness to act npon what he considered right principle, however inconvenient or disastrous the consequence towards others, extreme generosity, and the principle of love for humankind in abundance and superabundance. He respected the truth, such as he conceived it to be, in spiritual or speculative matters, and- respected no construction of the truth which came to him recommended by human authority. No man had more hatred or contempt of custom and prescription; no one had a more authentic or vivid sense of universal charity. The same radiant enthusiasm which appeared in his poetry as idealism stamped his speculation with the conception of perfectibility and his character with loving emotion.” This seems to be a reasonable judgment, lacking neither in shrewdness nor hr sympathy. ■ i