SHELLEY — Newman Ivey White —Knopf (2 vols., $12.50).
Forced to think about Percy Bysshe Shelley, most people visualize something with wild hair, wild eyes, a decollete shirt, poised to intone: "Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" Responsible for this conception is Shelley's official biographer, Professor Edward Dowden, and a whole school of Victorian apologists. They have busily sold Shelley as an inspired listener to skylarks, with an unfortunate but irrelevant "interest in social revolution. Critic-Poet Francis Thompson advised would-be Shelleyans to "peep over the wild mass of revolutionary metaphysics" and discover that Bysshe (rhymes with pish) was just an "enchanted child."
To such dualizings Duke University's Newman Ivey White has long and flatly said no. To Professor White, Shelley was a child of his century, whose cradle was rocked by "the French Revolution [which] was blowing like an irresistible gale against the rotten political and social structure which the eighteenth century had considered stable and enduring." One of the two or three minds who vitally affected 19th-Century thought, Shelley was perhaps the most radical voice in poetry since Lucretius, an inexorable social revolutionist. A rhyming Marx, he urged the British masses to:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fallen on you—Ye are many—they are few.
To prove his point, Dissenter White worked on a life of Shelley for some 20 years, last fortnight published it. Author White's book is a good piece of scholarship and literary organization which he somehow managed to keep lively, fluent and exciting while packing its two volumes and 1,563 pages with practically every known fact about Shelley.
More important is Biographer White's reappraisal of Shelley as a mind. By bringing together a mass of 19th-Century critical opinion, Author White shows that Shelley's contemporaries understood him much better than Apologists Thompson, Dowden, et al. By placing Shelley squarely in his French Revolutionary context, Author White highlights Shelley's real meaning for our time. In a day when the same old exaltation of the masses, the same revolutionary terror and dictatorship, have culminated in World War II, the family line from Marat to Lenin to Mussolini to Hitler is revealed as passing through Percy Bysshe Shelley.
When the French Revolution died of its own terror, the Romantics, says Author White, were its heirs. They transferred the defeated revolution to literature, agitated for it in prose and verse, plotted for it in garrets and palazzi. Since 1800, romanticism in literature has been politics continued in another form. The task of the romantics was to destroy conservative morale by indicting or ridiculing the instincts and institutions by which average people live—family, marriage, religion, education, the State. Like a band of intellectual sappers, they softened up Europe's mind in advance of every big social change.