In person Shelley was attractive, winning and almost beautiful, but not to be called handsome. His height was nearly 5 ft. i i ; he was slim, agile and strong, with something of a stoop; his com plexion brilliant, his hair abundant and wavy, dark brown but early beginning to grizzle; the eyes, deep blue in tint, have been termed "stag-eyes"—large, fixed and beaming. His voice was high-pitched and wanting in richness and suavity; his general aspect, though extremely variable according as his mood of mind and his expres sion shifted, was on the whole youthful. The only portrait of Shelley, from which some idea of his looks used to be formed, is that painted by an amateur, Miss Curran, in 1819; Mrs. Shelley, later, pronounced it to be "in many things very like." This is now in the National Portrait Gallery, together with a quasi-duplicate of it painted by Clint, chiefly from Miss Curran's likeness, and partly from a water colour (now lost) by Lieutenant Williams. In 19o5 (Century Magazine) another portrait was brought for ward : a pencil sketch taken in the last month of the poet's life by an American artist, William E. West, followed by an oil-painting fdunded on that sketch. The two works differ very considerably, and neither of them resembles Miss Curran's portrait ; yet we incline to believe that the sketch was really taken from Shelley.
If we except Goethe (and leave out of count living writers, whose ultimate value cannot at present be assessed), we must consider Shelley to be a supreme poet of the new era which, beginning with the French Revolution, remains continuous into our own day. Victor Hugo shares his lofty poetic stature, and might for certain reasons be even pre ferred to him; Byron and Wordsworth also belong to the same great period, and later, Tennyson and Browning. The grounds, however, on which Shelley's eminence is based are mainly three. He is unexcelled in his ideality, unexcelled in his music and unex celled in his importance. By importance we here mean the di rect import of the work performed, its controlling power over the reader's thought and feeling, the contagious fire of its white hot intellectual passion, and the long reverberation of its appeal. Shelley is emphatically the poet of the future. In his own day an alien in the world of mind and invention, and in our day but partially a denizen of it, he appears destined to become, in the long vista of years, an informing presence in the innermost shrine of human thought. Shelley appeared at the time when the sublime frenzies of the French revolutionary movement had exhausted the elasticity of men's thought—at least in England—and had left them flaccid and stolid; but that movement prepared another in which revolution was to assume the milder guise of reform, con quering and to conquer. Shelley was its prophet. As an iconoclast and an idealist he took the only position in which a poet could advantageously work as a reformer. To outrage his contempo raries was the condition of leading his successors to triumph and of personally triumphing in their victories. Shelley had the temper of an innovator and a martyr; he united speculative keenness and humanitarian zeal in a degree for which we might vainly seek his precursor. We have already named ideality as one of his leading excellences. This Shelleian quality combines, as its con stituents, sublimity, beauty and the abstract passion for good. Perhaps no outstanding English poet, and he was essentially an English poet, has used a greater variety of forms and measures than Shelley. In the pure lyrics the rapture, the music and the
emotion are in exquisite balance, and the work has often as much of delicate simplicity as of fragile and flower-like perfection. Great as Shelley's fame is now, it should be remembered that it was entirely posthumous. He practically received no encouragement during his lifetime, and died believing that the world had rejected his poetry.
Some of Shelley's principal writings have already been mentioned above; we must now give a brief account of others. Alastor (1816) was succeeded (1817) by The Revolt of Islam, a poem of no common length in the Spenserian stanza, preaching bloodless revolution; it was written in a sort of friendly competi tion with Keats (who produced Endymion) and is amazingly fine, but as a whole somewhat long-drawl. and exhausting. This tran scendental epic (for such it may be termed) was at first named Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City, and the lovers of the story were then brother and sister as well as lovers— an experiment upon British endurance which the publishers would not connive at. The year 1818 produced Rosalind and Helen, a comparatively weak poem, begun in England and finished in Italy, and Julian and Maddalo, a very strong one, written in the neigh bourhood of Venice—demonstrating in Shelley a singular power of seeing ordinary things with directness, and at once figuring them as reality and transfiguring them into poetry. In each of these two poems Shelley gives a quasi-portraiture of himself ; and in the latter one may perhaps trace a veiled description of Harriet's tragic end. The next year, 1819, was his culmination, producing as it did the grand tragedy of The Cenci and the sublime ideal drama Prometheus Unbound, composed partly on the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. This last we have no hesitation in calling his masterpiece. It embodies, in forms of surpassing imagination and beauty, Shelley's deepest and most daring con ceptions. Prometheus, the human mind and will, has invested with the powers proper to himself Jupiter, the god of heaven, who thereupon chains and torments Prometheus and oppresses man kind; in other words, the anthropomorphic god of religion is a creation of the human mind, and both the mind of man and man himself are enslaved as long as this god exercises his delegated but now absolute power. Prometheus, who is from of old wedded to Asia, or Nature, protests against and anathematizes the usurper enthroned by himself. At last the anathema (although Prometheus has revoked it by an act of self-conquest) takes effect : Eternity, Demogorgon, dismisses Jupiter to unending nothingness. Prometheus is at once unbound, the human mind is free; he is reunited to his spouse Nature, and the world of man passes from thraldom and its degradation into limitless progres sion, or (as the phrase goes) perfectibility, moral and material. This we regard as in brief the argument of Prometheus Unbound. It is closely analogous to the argument of the juvenile poem Queen Mab, but so raised in form and creative touch that, whereas to write Queen Mab was only to be an ambitious and ebullient tiro, to invent Prometheus Unbound was to be the poet of the future. The Witch of Atlas (182o) is the most perfect work among all Shelley's longer poems, though it is neither the deepest nor the most interesting. It may be rated as a pure exercise of roving imagination—guided, however, by an intense sense of beauty, and by its author's exceeding fineness of nature.