With Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it at once.The first thing, since religion is at the bottom of all force and fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason for believing in Christianity.This was easy enough, and a number of impatient argumentative pamphlets were dashed off.
One of these, 'The Necessity of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life.But, while Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might also be usefully attacked:--there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution.These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres.The spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze.We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is described.In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find"Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love, And the bright beaming stars That through the casement shone."Though many poets have begun their careers with something better than this, 'Queen Mab' will always be read, because it gives us, in embryo, the whole of Shelley at a stroke.The melody of the verse is thin and loose, but it soars from the ground and spins itself into a series of etherial visions.And these visions, though they look utterly disconnected from reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate interest in science.In this respect the sole difference between 'Queen Mab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that, in the prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their disquisitions on physiology and astronomy, determinism and utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is explicit.These notes are a queer medley.We may laugh at their crudity--their certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument, the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to recognise that here is something more than the ordinary dogmatism of youthful ignorance.There is a flow of vigorous language, vividness of imagination, and, above all, much conscientious reasoning and a passion for hard facts.His wife was not far wrong when she praised him for a 'logical exactness of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all second-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively something which is for ever hidden from the mass of mankind--the difference between an argument and a confused stirring of prejudices.Then, again, he was not content with abstract generalities: he was always trying to enforce his views by facts industriously collected from such books of medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and history as he could get hold of.For instance, he does not preach abstinence from flesh on pure a priori grounds, but because "the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth." We catch here what is perhaps the fundamental paradox of his character--the combination of a curious rational hardness with the wildest and most romantic idealism.For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a mind no stranger to thought and research.
We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic achievement, and it will be well before going further to underline the connection, which persists all through his work and is already so striking in 'Queen Mab', between his poetry and his philosophical and religious ideas.
Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet.But his philosophy was much more definite than Coleridge's; it gave substance to his character and edge to his intellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be distinguished from the emotion generating his verse.There is, however, no trace of originality in his speculative writing, and we need not regret that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet, he decided against philosophy.Before finally settling to poetry, he at one time projected a complete and systematic account of the operations of the human mind.It was to be divided into sections--childhood, youth, and so on.One of the first things to be done was to ascertain the real nature of dreams, and accordingly, with characteristic passion for a foundation of fact, he turned to the only facts accessible to him, and tried to describe exactly his own experiences in dreaming.The result showed that, along with the scientific impulse, there was working in him a more powerful antagonistic force.He got no further than telling how once, when walking with Hogg near Oxford, he suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and a scene presented itself which, though commonplace, was yet mysteriously connected with the obscurer parts of his nature.
