mission to return on the following day, and set to work in earnest upon his picture. In a letter which he addressed, about this time, to the same friend at whose correspondence we have already had a glimpse, occurs, inter alia, the following passage: "It is a great mistake to suppose, as many people do, that feminine beauty of form consists solely in rounded outlines, and that any appear ance of strength is a defect in a woman. I hate fat arms, and flabby, dimpled, powerless hands. Nature no more intended hands and arms to look like that than she intended a prize pig to be so heavy that his legs will not support his weight. Women ought to be able to use their limbs freely. And if ever you meet a beautiful girl with strong wrists in whom you feel an interest, take my advice and buy her a gazelle -or if you can't get a gazelle, perhaps a billy-goat might do. Encourage the beast to charge at her, and teach her to catch him neatly by the horns when he is going full tilt. Of course he will bowl her over as clean as a whistle at first, but she mustn't mind that. Once she has acquired the knack of seizing him at the right moment, she will find the result will be worth any bruises he may have given her in teaching her the lesson; and it will be worth ten times the money you have paid for him to see the picture the girl will make as she holds the struggling brute in a perfectly firm grasp, but without any unbecoming exertion." 281 Hours in a Library. No. XX.--GODWIN AND SHELLEY. THE poetic and the metaphysical temperaments are generally held to be in some sense incompatible. Poets, indeed, have often shown the highest speculative acuteness, and philosophy often implies a really poetical imagination. But the necessary conditions of successful achievement in the two cases are so different that the combination of the two kinds of excellence in one man must be of excessive rarity. No man can be great as a philosopher who is incapable of brooding intensely and perseveringly over an abstract problem, absolutely unmoved by the emotion which is always seeking to bias his judgment; whilst a poet is great in virtue of the keenness of his sensibility to the emotional aspect of every decision of the intellect. For the one purpose, it is essential to keep the passions apart from the intellect: for the other, to transfuse intellect with passion. A few of our metaphysicians have ventured into poetical utterance. Berkeley wrote a really fine copy of verses and Hobbes struck out one famous couplet And like a star upon her bosom lay His beautiful and shining golden head, in a translation of Homer, otherwise not easily readable. Scott proposed to publish the whole poetical works of David Hume, consisting of a remarkable quatrain composed in an inn at Carlisle.* Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl, The only exception to this rule in our literature seems to be Coleridge. Coleridge undoubtedly exercised a vast influence upon the speculation of his countrymen, whilst his poems possess merits of the rarest order. It is more worthy of remark that his poetry is successful pretty much in proportion as he keeps it clear of his philosophy. In Christabel, the Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan, we can only discover the philosopher by the evidence of a mind richly stored with associations, and by the tendency to discover a mystical significance in natural objects. Some people would urge that his philosophy would have been improved if it * Hume's biographer, Mr. Hill Burton, gives some other verses attributed to Hume; but the impartial critic must admit that they are of inferior merit. VOL. XXXIX.-NO. 231. 14. had been equally free from poetical elements. In any case, Coleridge is an example of a combination of diverse excellence not easily to be paralleled. Another poet was supposed by some of his admirers to have similar claims upon our respect. Shelley seems to have thought himself as well fitted for abstract speculation as for poetry; and his widow declared that, had he lived longer, he might have "presented to the world a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of those writers." The phrase is by itself enough to prove Mrs. Shelley's incompetence to form any opinion as to her hus band's qualifications for this stupendous task. It is not by forming a patchwork of Berkeley, Kant, and Coleridge that a "complete theory of mind" is likely to be evolved; nor does it appear that Shelley really knew much about either of the latter writers; certainly, he has not given the smallest proof of a power of original speculation in such matters. And yet, though it would be absurd to treat Shelley seriously as an originator of philosophic thought or even as a moderately profound student of philosophy, there is no doubt that his poetry contains a philosophical element which deserves consideration if only to facilitate the comprehension of his poetry. Enough has been written by the competent and the incompetent, the prosaic and the poetical, the hyperbolical panegyrists and the calm analytical critics, of Shelley considered primarily as a poet. Nobody, as it seems to me, is entitled to add anything who has not himself a very unusual share, if not of Shelley's own peculiar genius, at least of receptivity for its products; and after all that has been written by the ablest writers, one can learn more of Shelley by getting, say, the Adonais or the Ode to the Skylark by heart than by studying volumes of talk about his works. At any rate, I feel no vocation to add to the mass of imperfectly appreciative disquisition. Recent discussions, however, seem to show both that some interest is still taken in the other aspect of Shelley's writings, and that an obvious remark or two still remains to be - made. People are in doubt whether to classify Shelley as atheist, pantheist, or theist; they dispute as to whether his writings represent the destructive spirit which undermines all that is good amongst men, or, on the contrary, are the fullest expression yet reached by any human being of the divinest element of religion. Were it not that some parallel phenomena might be very easily suggested, it would be surprising that the meaning of a writer, who had extraordinary powers of expressing himself clearly and an almost morbid hatred of anything like reticence, should be seriously doubtful. The explanation of the wonder is not, I think, very far to seek. For one thing, people have not yet made up their minds as to the true bearing of some opinions which Shelley undoubtedly held. The question whether they were of good or evil import is mixed up with the question as to whether they were true or false. Upon that problem I shall not touch; but a few pages may be occupied by an attempt to indicate what, as a matter of fact, Shelley actually held, or rather what was his general attitude as to certain important questions. One result will probably be that it matters very little what he held so far as his influence upon our own conclusions is concerned. For, to say nothing of Shelley's incapacity to deal satisfactorily with the great controversies of his own time, our point of view has so much shifted that we can consider his opinions almost as calmly as those of the Eleatics or the Pythagoreans. They are matters of history which need affect nobody at the present day. The volume of essays by the late Mr. Bagehot, recently published, contains one upon Shelley, which deals very clearly and satisfactorily, as far as it goes, with this part of Shelley's work. Mr. Bagehot showed with his usual acuteness how Shelley's philosophy reflected the abnormal peculiarities of his character. He speaks less, however, of certain extraneous influences which must have materially affected Shelley's intellectual developments, and indeed, seems to have partly overlooked them. He tells us, for example, that Shelley's poems show an extreme suspicion of aged persons." Undoubtedly a youthful enthusiast is apt to be shocked by the dogged conservatism of older men who have been hammered into a more accurate measure of the immovable weight of superincumbent prejudice in the human mind. Shelley could not revolt against things in general without contracting some dislike to the forces against which he inevitably ran his head at starting. Even here, indeed, the charm of Shelley's unworldly simplicity for men of an opposite type, for cynics like Hogg, and Peacock, and Byron, is one of the pleasantest indications of his character. He attracted, and doubtless because he was attracted by, many who had nothing but contempt for his favourite enthusiasms, and it is still more evident that, however wayward was his career in some relations of life, he had a full measure of the young man's capacity for reverence. Dr. Lind seems to have been his earliest idol; but a far more important connection was that with Godwin. Godwin was in his fifty-sixth and Shelley in his twentieth year, when their correspondence began, and Godwin's most remarkable book was published when Shelley was in the cradle. Young gentlemen of nineteen, even though they belong to the immortals, consider a man of fifty-six to be tottering upon the verge of the grave. Books published before we could To spell appear to have been composed before the invention of letters. Shelley, in short, Godwin was to all intents and purposes a venerable sage, and a fitting embodiment of hoary wisdom. A guide, philosopher, and friend—an oracle who can sanction his aspirations and direct him to the most promising paths-is almost a necessity to every youthful enthusiast; the more necessary in proportion as he has more emphatically broken with the established order. What J. S. Mill was to men who were in their early youth some twenty or thirty years ago, or Dr. Newman to young men of different views at a slightly earlier period, that Godwin was to Shelley in the years of his most impetuous speculation. A lad of genius reads old books with eager appetite and learns something from them; but to get the full influence of ideas he must feel that they come from a living mouth, clothed in modern dialect, and applied to the exciting topics of the day. Perhaps neither Mill nor Dr. Newman said anything which might not be found implicitly contained in the writings of their spiritual ancestors. Much of Mill is already to be found in Locke, and Dr. Newman is at times the interpreter of Butler. But then Butler and Locke have been dead for a long time; and what the impatient youth requires is the direct evidence that the ancient principles are still alive and efficient. The old key has probably become rusty, and is more or less obsolete in form. The youth cannot wait to oil and repair it for himself. He wants the last new invention spick and span, and ready to be applied at once to open the obstinate lock. Shelley read Helvetius and Holbach, and Berkeley and Hume; but, though they supplied him with a tolerably modern version of some ancient theories, they could not tell him by anticipation what precise form of argument would best crush Paley, or what specific policy would regenerate Ireland out of hand. For such purposes a young man wants the very last new teacher, and the chances are that he will read even the older philosophers through the spectacles which such a teacher is kind enough to provide. Thus, when looking about in this dark world, given over as he thought to antiquated prejudice embodied in cruel injustice, poor Shelley greeted the writings of Godwin as the lost traveller greets a beacon-fire on a stormy night. They seemed to contain a new gospel. When he discovered the author to be a real human being, not one of the fixed stars that have been already guiding us from the upper firmament, he threw himself at the philosopher's feet with the rapt fervour of a religious neophyte. In his first letters to Godwin, he pours out his heart: "Considering these feelings" (the feelings, namely, of reverence and admiration which he has entertained for the name of Godwin), "you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the lists of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so; you still live and, I firmly believe, are still planning the welfare of human kind." A letter written soon afterwards from Dublin is still more significant. It begins with a kind of invocation as to a saint. "Guide thou and direct me," exclaims the young gentleman; "in all the weakness of my inconsistencies bear with me; . . . when you reprove me, reason speaks; I acquiesce in her decisions." He presently defends the impatience which Godwin has blamed by an argument which evidently struck even Godwin as having an absurd side. The Political Justice, he says, was first published nearly twenty years before (or almost at the dawn of history!), but yet what has resulted from the general diffusion of its doctrines? "Have men ceased to fight? Have woe and misery vanished from the earth?" Far from it! Obviously something must be done and that at orce. Do |