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The poet, as was only to be expected, had his little grievance with the printer, who, in spite of all his remonstrances and corrections in proof, the printer was a little wrong-headed Scotchman, had insisted at the last moment in heading his Tyrtean "Proem," a fine aerial trumpet-blast somewhat Shelleyan in style, with the word that was evidently intended, namely, "Poem."
Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism.
Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in weal or woe." Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion.
Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type. In Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the same class. People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to generalise.
Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.
We may catch some fleeting echoes of Keats's melody in 'Pippa Passes'; it is almost a commonplace that some measure of Shelleyan fancy is recognizable in 'Pauline'. But the poetic individuality of Robert Browning was stronger than any circumstance through which it could be fed. It would have found nourishment in desert air.
Enthusiasts may, according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the preëminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the disjunction.
Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which Oxford, with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the Arabian Nights a town of palaces and princesses, rather than of proctors.
I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together to share each other's emotions, and fancies, and dreams." "Platonic!" "Well no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it. They remind me of what are their names Laon and Cythna. Also of Paul and Virginia a little.
The Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was rebelling against Satan.
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