The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Voice of Shelley

I have recently been remonstrated with upon two points--first, that I called Nero an artist; and second, that I called Shelley a typical aristocrat. The first query is somewhat easily answered. I called Nero an artist because he was an artist. He loved art in every form all his life, and his last words were a poetical quotation. If he fiddled while Rome was burning, he thought quite as much of the fiddle as he did of the fire. And if he thought a great deal of the fire, it was from the simple, and from his point of view unanswerable, reason that a fire is a very artistic thing. Mr Max Beerbohm in one of his most delightful and absurd essays has denounced the fire brigade as a band of vandals who destroy a `fair thing'. He has threatened to start an opposition fire brigade whose pipes shall be filled not with water but with oil. Nero was only Max made serious; Nero was only Max without his good nature; Nero was only Max in action.

But the aim I had in mentioning him is very simple. A defender of undenominationalism spoke of giving his hand to every man who was working for his highest, thereby implying, as it seemed to me, that if a man put something or other highest it did not in practice matter very much what it was. To this I replied that it seemed to me a very awful and urgent matter whether a man put the right thing or the wrong thing highest; that to put the right thing highest was very difficult, and to put the wrong thing very deadly. A salient example of this is the pursuit of mere art or beauty. The moment a man puts beauty higher than love Nero becomes a logical possibility.

The other matter, it may be, is less obvious, but not, I think, less true. When I call Shelley a typical aristocrat; I have fully in remembrance all his revolutionary ardour and his almost anarchic ideality; I do not call Shelley an aristocrat in spite of these things; I call him an aristocrat because of them. The true aristocrat is by nature an anarchist. The aristocrat was and is the person desiring to do as he liked. His castle was a defiance of the decent orders of the king. His motorcar was a defiance of the decent orders of the democracy. The gentlemen of real history were never anything but rowdy. They were admired for being rowdy. They were hanged for being rowdy. They are no longer hanged which seems to me to mark a considerable falling-off in the fullness of the control of the democracy. They are still admired.

Now all this patrician rebelliousness seems to me to have been built into the blood and bone of Shelley, as into the blood and bone of Byron. It was the subconscious foundation upon which he erected his republican idealism. Shelley loved liberty as all aristocrats love liberty. Shelley hated kings as all aristocrats hated kings; the feud between them has flamed since the beginning of the world. Shelley hated priests, and hated them most of all; for priests represent a startling and supernatural denial of the gradations of mankind; an aristocracy can submit to a king or humour a democracy, but another aristocracy is too much for them. Of course, Shelley, a man of quite crystalline sincerity, did not know that his anarchism had this feudal foundation; he imagined, I have no doubt, that he was a veritable voice of the people. His voice is the voice of liberty, it is the voice of beauty, it is the voice of change, and even the voice of revolution, but whatever it is it is never the voice of the people. There is not enough pain in it, and there is not enough laughter. There is not enough of that clean thing which Shelley and many other fine gentlemen would call coarseness. Shelley was idealistic; he was lyric; he was a hundred things, but there were two things that he never was. He was never comic and he was never tragic. Everything that comes out of the common heart, the heart of the real people, is comic and tragic.

There are only two kinds of ballads, recurrent and permanent, coming from the community itself. There are sad ballads about broken hearts and cheerful ballads about broken heads. There is not a trace of this popular quality in Shelley anywhere. It is not necessary, however, in order to indicate this truth to compare Shelley with any folk literature of other times or places. We can compare him with another poet, another democratic idealist, another man moved by the French Revolution, living almost in Shelley's time, and almost in Shelley's country, a man who differed from Shelley in nothing except that he was really a man of the people. To think of him after Shelley is like swallowing fire after swallowing water. It is not so easy to get out of one's mouth the stinging taste of the sweetness and bitterness of Burns.

Shelley never came to that queer common place where grand passion meets the grotesque; where the cross is a sublime gibbet and the gibbet a caricature of the cross. That is the first and best reason why he was never of the people. But there were other reasons as well. One wholly non-popular element in him was his anarchism. The poor are not anarchists, and never can be anarchists. They live too close to life for such artistic trifling. When I speak of anarchism, of course I do not use the term in the exact sense which indicates a political programme. I do not mean that Shelley disapproved of all government though he sometimes used phrases which might be taken in this sense. But his trend and tone was to offer liberty and an escape from rule as a panacea for the misfortunes of the people; and this is not a genuine popular trend or tone. The people know that life cannot be conducted without rules. The people is the maker and keeper of all custom, tradition and convention, just as it is the maker and (except, perhaps, in modern England) the keeper of all religion. Shelley never understood any of these deep tides in the profanum vulgus. And with all his many princely virtues I do not think I am doing him any injustice if I say that he never tried to understand them.