A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination and on Shakespeare by George MacDonald (best book club books of all time txt) 📖

that purpose, rather than an utterance which suggested itself naturally to a mind where the thought was vitally present. The words are more a
clothing for the thought than an embodiment of it. They do not lie near enough to the thing which is intended to be represented by them. It is, however, but just to remark, that some of the obscurity is owing to the fact, that, even with Mrs. Shelley's superintendence, the works have not yet been satisfactorily edited, or at least not conducted through the press with sufficient care. [Footnote: This statement is no longer true.]

The Cenci is a very powerful tragedy, but unfitted for public representation by the horrible nature of the historical facts upon which it is founded. In the execution of it, however, Shelley has kept very much nearer to nature than in any other of his works. He has rigidly adhered to his perception of artistic propriety in respect to the dramatic utterance. It may be doubted whether there is sufficient difference between the modes of speech of the different actors in the tragedy, but it is quite possible to individualize speech far too minutely for probable nature; and in this respect, at least, Shelley has not erred. Perhaps the action of the whole is a little hurried, and a central moment of awful repose and fearful anticipation might add to the force of the tragedy. The scenes also might, perhaps, have been constructed so as to suggest more of evolution; but the central point of horror is most powerfully and delicately handled. You see a possible spiritual horror yet behind, more frightful than all that has gone before. The whole drama, indeed, is constructed around, not a prominent point, but a dim, infinitely-withdrawn, underground perspective of dismay and agony. Perhaps it detracts a little from our interest in the Lady Beatrice, that after all she should wish to live, and should seek to preserve her life by a denial of her crime. She, however, evidently justifies the denial to herself on the ground that, the deed being absolutely right, although regarded as most criminal by her judges, the only way to get true justice is to deny the fact, which, there being no guilt, she might consider as only a verbal lie. Her very purity of conscience enables her to utter this with the most absolute innocence of look, and word, and tone. This is probably a historical fact, and Shelley had to make the best of it. In the drama there is great tenderness, as well as terror; but for a full effect, one feels it desirable to be brought better acquainted with the individuals than the drama, from its want of graduation, permits. Shelley, however, was only six-and-twenty when he wrote it. He must have been attracted to the subject by its embodying the concentration of tyranny, lawlessness, and brutality in old Cenci, as opposed to, and exercised upon, an ideal loveliness and nobleness in the person of Beatrice.

But of all Shelley's works, the Prometheus Unbound is that which combines the greatest amount of individual power and peculiarity. There is an airy grandeur about it, reminding one of the vast masses of cloud scattered about in broken, yet magnificently suggestive forms, all over the summer sky, after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand; the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory. The beings of Greek, mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls which he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. In reading this, as in reading most of his poetry, we feel that, unable to cope with the evils and wrongs of the world as it and they are, he constructs a new universe, wherein he may rule according to his will; and a good will in the main it is-good always in intent, good generally in form and utterance. Of the wrongs which Shelley endured from the collision and resulting conflict between his lawless goodness and the lawful wickedness of those in authority, this is one of the greatest,-that during the right period of pupillage, he was driven from the place of learning, cast on his own mental resources long before those resources were sufficient for his support, and irritated against the purest embodiment of good by the harsh treatment he received under its name. If that reverence which was far from wanting to his nature, had been but presented, in the person of some guide to his spiritual being, with an object worthy of its homage and trust, it is probable that the yet free and noble result of Shelley's individuality would have been presented to the world in a form which, while it attracted still only the few, would not have repelled the many; at least, not by such things as were merely accidental in their association with his earnest desires and efforts for the well-being of humanity.

That which chiefly distinguishes Shelley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader, say for instance of that fantastically brilliant poem, The Witch of Atlas , the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, accompanied ever by "a low melodious thunder." The evidences of pure imagination in his writings are unfrequent as compared with those of fancy: there are not half the instances of the direct embodiment of idea in form, that there are of the presentation of strange resemblances between external things.

One of the finest short specimens of Shelley's peculiar mode is his Ode to the West Wind , full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But of all his poems, the most popular, and deservedly so, is the Skylark . Perhaps the Cloud may contest it with the Skylark in regard to popular favour; but the Cloud , although full of beautiful words and fantastic cloud-like images, is, after all, principally a work of the fancy; while the Skylark , though even in it fancy predominates over imagination in the visual images, forms, as a whole, a lovely, true, individual work of art; a lyric not unworthy of the lark , which Mason apostrophizes as "sweet feathered lyric." The strain of sadness which pervades it is only enough to make the song of the lark human.

In The Sensitive Plant , a poem full of the peculiarities of his genius, tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket of mystical speculation, one curious idiosyncrasy is more prominent than in any other-curious, as belonging to the poet of beauty and loveliness: it is the tendency to be fascinated by what is ugly and revolting, so that he cannot withdraw his thoughts from it till he has described it in language, powerful, it is true, and poetic, when considered as to its fitness for the desired end, but, in force of these very excellences in the means, nearly as revolting as the objects themselves. Associated with this is the tendency to discover strangely unpleasant likenesses between things; which likenesses he is not content with seeing, but seems compelled, perhaps in order to get rid of them himself, to force upon the observation of his reader. But the admirer of Shelley is not pleased to find that one or two passages of this nature have been omitted in some editions of his works.

Few men have been more misunderstood or misrepresented than Shelley. Doubtless this has in part been his own fault, as Coleridge implies when he writes to this effect of him: that his horror of hypocrisy made him speak in such a wild way, that Southey (who was so much a man of forms and proprieties) was quite misled, not merely in his estimate of his worth, but in his judgment of his character. But setting aside this consideration altogether, and regarding him merely as a poet, Shelley has written verse which will last as long as English literature lasts; valuable not only from its excellence, but from the peculiarity of its excellence. To say nothing of his noble aims and hopes, Shelley will always be admired for his sweet melodies, lovely pictures, and wild prophetic imaginings. His indignant remonstrances, intermingled with grand imprecations, burst in thunder from a heart overcharged with the love of his kind, and roused to a keener sense of all oppression by the wrongs which sought to overwhelm himself. But as he recedes further in time, and men are able to see more truly the proportions of the man, they will judge, that without having gained the rank of a great reformer, Shelley had in him that element of wide sympathy and lofty hope for his kind which is essential both to the birth and the subsequent making of the greatest of poets.


A SERMON. [Footnote: Read in the Unitarian chapel, Essex-street, London, 1879.]


PHILIPPIANS iii. 15, 16.-Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded; and if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by that same.


This is the reading of the oldest manuscripts. The rest of the verse is pretty clearly a not overwise marginal gloss that has crept into the text.

In its origin, opinion is the intellectual body, taken for utterance and presentation by something necessarily larger than any intellect can afford stuff sufficient for the embodiment of. To the man himself, therefore, in whose mind it arose, an opinion will always represent and recall the spirit whose form it is,-so long, at least, as the man remains true to his better self. Hence, a man's opinion may be for him invaluable, the needle of his moral compass, always pointing to the truth whence it issued, and whose form it is. Nor is the man's opinion of the less value to him that it may change. Nay, to be of true value, it must have in it not only the possibility, but the necessity of change: it must change in every man who is alive with that life which, in the New Testament, is alone treated as life at all. For, if a man's opinion be in no process of change whatever, it must be dead, valueless, hurtful Opinion is the offspring of that which is itself born to grow; which, being imperfect, must grow or die. Where opinion is growing, its imperfections, however many and serious, will do but little hurt; where it is not growing, these imperfections will further the decay and corruption which must already have laid hold of the very heart of the man. But it is plain in the world's history that what, at some given stage of the same, was the embodiment in intellectual form of the highest and deepest of which it was then spiritually capable, has often and speedily become the source of the most frightful outrages upon humanity. How is this? Because it has passed from the mind in which it grew into another in which it did not grow, and has of necessity altered its nature. Itself sprung from that which was deepest in the man, it casts seeds which take root only in the intellectual understanding of his neighbour; and these, springing up, produce flowers indeed which look much the same to the eye, but fruit which is poison and bitterness,-worst of it all, the false and arrogant notion that it is duty to force the opinion upon the acceptance of others. But