Charles Sotheran - Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer
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Charles Sotheran >> Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
AS A
PHILOSOPHER AND REFORMER.
BY
CHARLES SOTHERAN.
_INCLUDING AN ORIGINAL SONNET_
BY
CHARLES W. FREDERICKSON
TOGETHER WITH
A PORTRAIT OF SHELLEY AND A VIEW OF HIS TOMB.
"Let us See the Truth, whatever that may be."--_Shelley_, 1822.
_NEW YORK_.
CHARLES P. SOMERBY, 139 EIGHTH STREET.
1876.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876,
by Charles Sotheran,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
* * * * *
TO
CHARLES WILLIAM FREDERICKSON,
OF NEW YORK.
DEAR FRIEND:
As in ancient times, none were allowed participation in the Higher
Mysteries, without having proved their fitness for the reception of
esoteric truth, so in these days only those seem to be permitted to
breathe the hidden essence in Shelley, who have realized the acute
phases of spiritality. Among the few who have enjoyed these bi-fold
gifts, none have had more fortuitous experience than yourself, to whom
I now take the liberty of dedicating this volume.
Yours fraternally,
CHARLES SOTHERAN.
_December_, 1875.
[Illustration: VIEW OF SHELLEY'S TOMB, IN THE
PROTESTANT CEMETERY, AT ROME. FROM A SKETCH BY A.J. STRUTT.]
* * * * *
"To see the sun shining on its bright grass, and hear the whispering
of the wind among the leaves of the trees, which have overgrown the
tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth,
and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young children, who, buried
there, we might, if we were to die, desire a sleep they seem to
sleep."--SHELLEY.
To the Memory
OF
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,
BY
CHARLES W. FREDERICKSON.
Amid the ruins of majestic Rome,
That told the story of its countless years,
I stood, and wondered by the silent dust
Of the "Eternal Child." Oh, Shelley!
To me it was not given to know thy face,
Save through the mirrored pages of thy works;
Those whisper'd words of wood and wave, are to mine ears,
Sweet as the music of ocean's roar, that breaks on sheltered shores.
Thy sterner words of Justice, Love and Truth,
Will to the struggling soul a beacon prove,
And barrier against the waves of tyranny and craft.
Then rest, "_Cor Cordium_," and though thy life
Was brief in point of years, its memory will outlive
The column'd monuments around thy tomb.
* * * * *
NEW YORK, _Nov_. 25, 1875.
MY DEAR SOTHERAN:--
The copy of the lines on our Beloved-Poet, which you requested, are
entirely at your service--make what use of them you please.
Yours, sincerely,
C.W. FREDERICKSON.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, AS A PHILOSOPHER AND REFORMER.
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE NEW YORK LIBERAL CLUB, ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 6TH,
1875.
"Let us see the Truth, whatever that may be."--SHELLEY, 1822.
_Mr. Vice-President and Members of the Liberal Club_:
"The Blood of the Martyr is the Seed of the Church." Persecution ever
fails in accomplishing its desired ends, and as a rule lays the
foundations broad and deep for the triumph of the objects of and
principles inculcated by the persecuted.
Driven from their homes by fanatical tyranny, not permitted to worship
as they thought fit, a band of noble and earnest, yet on some points
mistaken men, were, a little over two hundred and fifty years ago,
landed on this continent from the good ship "Mayflower." The "Pilgrim
Fathers" were, in their native land, refused liberty of conscience and
freedom of discussion; their apparent loss was our gain, for if it had
not been for that despotism, and the corresponding re-action, which
made those stern old zealots give to others many of the inalienable
rights of liberty denied to themselves, you and I could not to-night
perhaps be allowed to meet face to face, without fear, to discuss
metaphysical and social questions in their broadest aspects, without
the civil or theological powers intervening to close our mouths.
"Fragile in health and frame; of the purest habits in morals; full of
devoted generosity and universal kindness; glowing with ardor to attain
wisdom; resolved at every personal sacrifice to do right; burning with a
desire for affection and sympathy," a boy-under-graduate of Oxford,
described as of tall, delicate, and fragile figure, with large and
lively eyes, with expressive, beautiful and feminine features, with head
covered with long, brown hair, of gracefulness and simplicity of manner,
the heir to a title and the representation of one of the most ancient
English families, which numbered Sir Philip Sidney on its roll of
illustrious names, just sixty-four years ago, and in this nineteenth
century, for no licentiousness, violence, or dishonor, but, for his
refusal to criminate himself or inculpate friends, was, without trial,
expelled by learned divines from his university for writing an
argumentative thesis, which, if it had been the work of some Greek
philosopher, would have been hailed by his judges as a fine specimen of
profound analytical abstruseness--for that expulsion are we the debtors
to theological charity and tolerance for "Queen Mab."
Excommunicated by a mercenary and abject priesthood, cast off by a
savage father, the admirer of that gloomy theology founded by the
murderer of Michael Servetus, and charged by his jealous brother
writers as one of the founders of a Satanic School, for neither
immorality of life nor breach of the parental relation, but for
heterodoxy to an expiring system of dogmatism, and for acting on and
asserting the right of man to think and judge for himself, a father
was to have two children torn from him, in the sacred name of law and
justice, by the principal adviser of a dying madman, "Defender of the
Faith, by Law Established," and by us despised as the self-willed
tyrant, who lost America and poured out human blood like water to
gratify his lust of power. By that Lord Chancellor whose cold,
impassive statue has a place in Westminster Abbey, where Byron's was
refused admittance, and whose memory, when that stone has crumbled
into dust, will live as one who furnished an example for execrable
tyranny over the parental tie, and that Lord Eldon whom an outraged
father curses in imperishable verse:
"By thy most impious hell, and all its terrors;
By all the grief, the madness and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be _their_ errors,
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built;
* * * * *
By all the hate which checks a father's love;
By all the scorn which kills a father's care;
By those most impious hands that dared remove
Nature's high bounds--by thee, and by despair.
"Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, 'my children are no longer mine.
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.'
"I curse thee, though I hate thee not. O slave!
If thou could'st quench the earth consuming hell
Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well."
Sad as it is to contemplate any human being in his agony making use of
such language to another; and however much we may sympathize with the
poet, yet we cannot but have inwardly a feeling of rejoicing; for, if
it had not been for this unheard of villainy, we should probably never
have had the other magnificent poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe
Shelley composed during his self-imposed ostracism, and which furnish
such glorious thoughts for the philosopher, and keen trenchant weapons
for the reformer.
Have any of my hearers ever stood, in the calm of a summer evening, in
Shelley's native land, listening to the lovely warble of the
nightingale, making earth joyful with its unpremeditated strains, and
the woods re-echo with its melody? Or gazed upwards with anxious ken
towards the skylark careering in the "blue ether," far above this
sublunary sphere of gross, sensual earth, there straining after
immortality, and
"Like a poet hidden,
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears, it heeded not,"
pouring out such bursts of song as to make one almost worship and
credit the fables, taught in childhood at our mothers' knees, of the
angelic symphonies of heavenly choirs. Such was the poetry of Shelley;
and as the music of the nightingale or the skylark is far exceeding in
excellence that of the other members of the feathered kingdom, so does
Shelley rank as a poet far above all other poets, making even the poet
of nature, the great Wordsworth himself, confess that Shelley was
indeed the master of harmonious verse in our modern literature. It is
broadly laid down in the Marvinian theory that all poets are insane. I
would much like to break a lance with the learned Professor of
Psychology and Medical Jurisprudence; but as the overthrow of this
dogma does not come within the scope of my essay, I would suggest to
those who may have been influenced by that paper to read Shelley's
"Defence of Poetry." I shall quote two extracts therefrom, each
pertinent to my subject. The first describes the function of the poet:
"But poets, or those who imagine and express this
indestructible order, are not only the authors of language
and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary,
and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the
founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of
life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity
with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension
of the agencies of the invisible world, which is called
religion."
The other is in extension of the same idea, and concludes the essay:
"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration;
the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts
upon the present; the words which express what they
understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel
not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but
moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world."
I have no hesitation in saying that for treating Shelley as a
philosopher, I shall be attacked with great "positivism" by the
disciples[A] of manufacturers of bran-new Brummagen philosophies dug
out of Aristotelian and other depths to which are added new thoughts,
not their own. The reason which David Masson offers in his "Recent
British Philosophy" for placing Alfred Tennyson among the same class
is equally applicable now:
[Footnote A: If Diogenes or Socrates, leaving High Olympus and sweet
converse with the immortals, were to condescend to visit New York some
Friday evening. I am sadly afraid they would be astounded at many of
their would-be brothers in philosophy. On seeing the travestie of
ancient academies and groves where the schools used to congregate, the
dialogues consisting of bald atheism under sheep's clothing to trap
the unwary, and termed "The _Religion_ of Humanity," of abuse and
personality in lieu of argument, of buffoonery called wit, of airing
pet hobbies alien to the subject instead of disputating, of shouting
vulgar claptrap instead of rhetoric, etc.--I sadly fear these stout
old Greeks, having power for the nonce, would, throwing philosophy to
the dogs in a moment of paroxysmal indignation, despite physiognomies
trained to resemble their own, have these fellows casked up in tubs
without lanterns, but with the appropriate "snuffers," fit emblems of
their faiths, and dropped far outside Sandy Hook. A proper finale to
the vapid utterance made by one of these gentry that all "Reformers
should be annihilated," Imagine Plato or Epicurus offering such a
suggestion. O tempora! O mores!]
"To those who are too strongly possessed with our common habit of
classifying writers into kinds, as historians, poets, scientific and
speculative writers, and so on, it may seem strange to include Mr.
Tennyson in this list. But as I have advisedly referred to Wordsworth
as one of the representatives and powers of British philosophy in the
age immediately past, so I advisedly named Tennyson as succeeding him
in the same character. Though it is not power of speculative reason
alone that constitutes a poet, is it not felt that the worth of a poet
essentially is measured by the depth and amount of his speculative
reason? Even popularly, do we not speak of every great poet as the
exponent of the spirit of his age? What else can this mean than that
the philosophy of his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the
great elemental problems, find expression in his verse? Hence I ought
to include other poets in this list, and more particularly Mr.
Browning and Mrs. Browning, and the late Mr. Clough. But let the
mention of Mr. Tennyson suggest such other names, and stand as a
sufficient protest against our absurd habit of omitting such in a
connection like the present. As if, forsooth, when a writer passed
into verse, he were to be abandoned as utterly out of calculable
relationship to all on this side of the boundary, and no account were
to be taken of his thoughts and doings, except in a kind of curious
appendix at the end of the general register? What if philosophy, at a
certain extreme range, and of a certain kind, tends of necessity to
pass into poesy, and can hardly help being passionate and metrical? If
so, might not the omission of poets, purely as being such, from a
conspectus of the speculative writers of any time, lead to erroneous
conclusions, by giving an undue prominence in the estimate of all such
philosophizing as could most easily, by its nature, refrain from
passionate or poetic expression? Thus, would philosophy, or one kind
of philosophy in comparison with another, have seemed to had been in
such a diminished condition in Britain about the year 1830, if critics
had been in the habit of counting Wordsworth in the philosophic list
as well as Coleridge, Mackintosh, Bentham, and James Mill? Was there
not more of what you might call Spinozaism in Wordsworth than even in
Coleridge, who spoke more of Spinoza? But that hardly needs all this
justification, so far as Mr. Tennyson is concerned, of our reckoning
_him_ in the present list. He that would exclude In "Memoriam" (1850)
and "Maud" (1855) from the conspectus of the philosophical literature
of our time, has yet to learn what philosophy is. Whatever else "In
Memoriam" may be, it is a manual for many of the latest hints and
questions in British Metaphysics."
The soi-disant philosophers and classifiers of the sciences and arts
who will not permit such poets as Shelley and Tennyson to be put in
the category of philosophers, remind one very forcibly of the passage
in Macbeth: "The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and these are of
them!"
As a poet and not as a poet, as an acknowledged legislator for the
race, as a philosopher, (a searcher after, or lover of wisdom) and as
a political and social reformer, it is my intention to treat Shelley
this evening, and having finished my prefatory remarks, will now
regard him in those attributes which peculiarly should enshrine him in
your hearts and mine.
The philosophical theories of advanced thinkers are always tinged with
the reflex of that which called them forth, or impeded them in their
development, consequently social bondage and the "anarch custom" being
always present to Shelley, the great idea ever uppermost to him was
that true happiness is only attainable in perfect freedom: the
atrocious system of fagging, now almost extinct in the English Public
Schools and the tyrannical venality of ushers, deeply impressed
themselves on the mind of Shelley, and he tells us, in the beautiful
lines to his wife, of the remembrance of his endeavors to overthrow
these abominations having failed, of flying from "the harsh and
grating strife of tyrants and of foes" and of the high and noble
resolves which inspired him:
"And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around;
But none were near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground.
So, without shame, I spake: 'I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.' I then controll'd
My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and bold.
"And from that hour did I, with earnest thought,
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught,
I cared to learn; but from that secret store
Wrought linked armor for my soul, before
It might walk forth, to war among mankind.
Thus, power and hope were strengthen'd more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined."
The fruits born of this seed are discernible in every line of his
works. While having all reverence for his college companions,
Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Demosthenes, his mind instinctively turns
towards the deemed heretical works of the later French philosophers,
D'Holbach, Condillac, La Place, Rousseau, the encyclopaedists, and
other members of that school. His intellect he furbishes with stores
of logic and of chemistry, in which his greatest love was to
experimentalize; of botany and astronomy, in which he was more than a
mere adept; from Hume, too, whose essay on "Miracles," wrong as it is
in the main on many important points, was one of the alphas of his
creed--and with deep draughts from his great instructor, Plato, of
whom he always spoke with the greatest adoration, as, for instance, in
the preface to the Symposium:
"Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek
philosophers; and from, or rather perhaps through him and
his master, Socrates, have proceeded those emanations of
moral and metaphysical knowledge, on which a long series and
an incalculable variety of popular superstitions have
sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt of
mankind."
It is desirable to call attention to the great minds from whom the
student of the early part of this century could only cull his
knowledge--he had no Spencer and no Mill, at whose feet to sit--he had
in science none of the conclusions of Darwin, of Huxley, of Tyndall,
of Murchison, of Lyell, to refer to, and yet I think, that the careful
reader will, like myself, find prefigured in Shelley's works much of
that of which the world is in full possession to-day, and which the
mystical Occultists, Rosicrucians, and Cabalists have now, and have
ever had, conjoined to a mysterious command over the active hidden
material and spiritual powers in the infinite domain of nature.
The idea of the _Supreme Power_ or _God_, as emanating from Shelley,
is one of the most sublime to be found in the pages of metaphysical
learning at the command of ordinary mortals. By many it may be
considered only a vague pantheism; yet, rightly regarded in a
reconciliative spirit, it is of such an universal character as to
harmonize with not only Deism, Theism and Polytheism, but even
Atheistical Materialism. Listen to the following, which I select out
of numerous examples, as a finger-post for others who seek the living
springs of undefiled truth, as in Shelley:
"Whosoever is free from the contamination of luxury and
license may go forth to the fields and to the woods,
inhaling joyous renovation from the breath of Spring, and
catching from the odors and sounds of autumn some diviner
mood of sweetest sadness, which improves the softened heart.
Whosoever is no deceiver and destroyer of his fellow-men--no
liar, no flatterer, no murderer--may walk among his species,
deriving, from the communion with all which they contain of
beautiful or majestic, some intercourse with the Universal
God. Whosoever has maintained with his own heart the
strictest correspondence of confidence, who dares to examine
and to estimate every imagination which suggests itself to
his mind--whosoever is that which he designs to _become_,
and only aspires to that which the divinity of his own
nature shall consider and approve--he has already seen God."
Can any one cavil with these beautiful expressions, this outpouring of
genius? If such there be, his heart and understanding must be sadly
warped, any appeal would be in vain, for him the Veil of Isis could
never be lifted. After a careful study of Shelley's works I can find
nothing to warrant the execration formerly levelled at his head, not
even in the "Refutation of Deism," that remarkable argument in the
Socratic style between Eusebes and Theosophus in which, as in all his
prose works, is displayed keen discernment, logical acuteness, and
close analytical reasoning not surpassed by the greatest
philosophers--most certainly his notions of God were not in unison
with the current theological ideas, and it was this daring rebellion
against the popular faith, the chief support of custom which caused
all the trouble. If ever he attempted to show the non-existence of
Deity, his negation was solely directed against the gross human
notions of a creative power, and _ergo_ a succession of finite
creative powers _ad infinitum_, or a Personal God who has only been
acknowledged in the popular teachings as an autocratic tyrant, and as
Shelley puts it in his own language:
"A venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his
breast the theatre of various passions, analogous to those
of humanity, his will changeable and uncertain as that of an
earthly king."
Not to be compared with the far different eternal and infinite.
"Spirit of Nature! all sufficing power,
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
Unlike the God of human error, thou
Requirest no prayers or praises, the caprice
Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee
Than do the changeful passions of his breast
To thy unvarying harmony."
And by this doctrine of necessity here apostrophised our philosopher
instructs us in a lengthy statement of great clearness:
"We are taught that there is neither good nor evil in the
universe, otherwise than as the events to which we apply
these epithets have relation to our own peculiar mode of
being. Still less than with the hypothesis of a personal
God, will the doctrine of necessity accord with the belief
of a future state of punishment. God made man such as he is,
and then damned him for being so; for to say that God was
the author of all good, and man the author of all evil, is
to say that one man made a straight line and a crooked one,
and another man made the incongruity."
For you to better understand the exact position in which Shelley
placed himself, it is elsewhere thus admirably expressed:
"The thoughts which the word 'God' suggest to the human mind
are susceptible of as many variations as human minds
themselves. The Stoic, the Platonist, and the Epicurean, the
Polytheist, the Dualist, and the Trinitarian, differ entirely
in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in
considering it the most awful and most venerable of names,
as a common term to express all of mystery, or majesty, or
power, which the invisible world contains. And not only has
every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this
name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, which
exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or
yield themselves with any candor of feeling to the
influences of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of
opinion to exist between them.... God is neither the Jupiter
who sends rain upon the earth; nor the Venus through whom
all living things are produced; nor the Vulcan who presides
over the terrestrial element of fire; nor the Vesta that
preserves the light which is enshrined in the sun, the moon,
and the stars. He is neither the Proteus nor the Pan of the
material world. But the word 'God' unites all the attributes
which these denominations contain and is the (inter-point)
and over-ruling spirit of all the energy and wisdom included
within the circle of existing things."
Of these attributes generally supposed to appertain to Deity, he
writes:
"There is no attribute of God which is not either borrowed
from the passions and powers of the human mind, or which is
not a negation. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence,
infinity, immutability, incomprehensibility, and
immateriality, are all words which designate properties and
powers peculiar to organized beings, with the addition of
negations, by which the idea of limitation is excluded."