French Revolution ended. Indeed it had in England ended in poetry before Shelley died. In the poetry of Keats there is not a trace that it had ever been. There is no universal None of its ideas appear. interest in man, not even that which was deepest in Shelley, the interest in the possible perfection of the race. Keats cares only for beauty, and he seeks it only in the past, in the loveliness of Greece, in the romance of the Middle Ages. Shelley closes for a time the record of the Revolution in English poetry,

CHAPTER X

SHELLEY'S INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIANITY

THE

HERE is a remarkable fragment of an "Essay on Christianity," by Shelley, which gives his view of Jesus Christ and of his teaching, and I would draw attention to it, especially in its relation to modern criticism and modern theology on the religious position and aims of Christ. The essay is full of noteworthy things, and it bears, independent of the prose style which is his own, the unmistakable stamp of Shelley's character and imagination.

It is, in truth, the attempt to carry out a direct and long-cherished intention. In the notes on "Queen Mab," he speaks of Christ as "in the foremost list of those true heroes who died for humanity." In a subnote to this, he expresses an after-thought which reverses his judgment in the text with regard to the objects of Jesus, but this after-thought he so completely laid aside, that he told Trelawny it was his desire to write a life of Christ which should revoke it. It seems to me that this fragment was an attempt to carry out that intention, and that it took the form of an essay because, as he said to Trelawny, he found the materials for a life of Christ, from his point of view, inadequate.

I do not know on what grounds the essay is put so early in Shelley's life as 1815 by Mr. Rossetti. I should be inclined from internal evidence, and specially from certain of its phrases analogous to expressions in his later poems, to place it at least four years later, but

internal evidence is always shaky evidence. Still, it does exist, and I shall want a good deal of proof to make me believe that this essay was written only two years after the publication of "Queen Mab."

Again, the great admiration it expresses for the character of Jesus may be contrasted with a letter of Shelley's in 1822, in which these words occur:

I differ from Moore in thinking Christianity useful to the world; no man of sense can think it true. I agree with him that the doctrines of the French and material philosophy are as false as they are pernicious, but still they are better than Christianity, inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism.

Shelley succeeds in that sentence in hitting all round, but in striking at Christianity he does not mean to strike at Christ. His blow is directed against the popular and orthodox form of Christianity, as corrupted by churches into a despotism, and not against the doctrine and practice of Christ himself. He makes this distinction himself, even in the notes to "Queen Mab"; and the main drift of this essay is to vindicate Christ and his teaching from the perversions imposed on them. He declares that the time has arrived when these perversions are no longer tenable, when we can put them aside and ask ourselves what it was that Jesus really taught. And looking straight at Christ and his life, he finds that the true drift of his teaching is in direct opposition to the greater number of the doctrines taught in his name.

Alas, the time had not arrived! Nor has it yet arrived, though many forward steps have been made towards it. There are still doctrines preached about God which make him into the Demon whom Shelley hated, which, by filling him with a Revenge which

they call Justice, mingle up his character with that attributed to Satan. There are still schemes of doctrine which make him into the hater of men, which represent him as the author of eternal hell-that intolerable falsehood which has been the deadliest curse of human kind—which makes him the supporter of tyrants, oppressors, and of aristocracies. There are still representations of the teaching of Jesus which make him Deity, and take him away from us as our brother-man, which destroy or ignore the high socialism of his life, and by making his birth, his history, and all that he did supernatural, place him outside of the pale of knowledge.

It is only when he is freed from these false garments that we can see him as he is. I have said this for many years, and preached another Christ from that of the theologians. Shelley said it, as we shall see, more than ninety years ago and there is no more remarkable vindication of Jesus from the orthodox view of him, and no more remarkable anticipation of the position Jesus will take in the future than this essay of Shelley's.

He is speaking of the biographers of Christ-and he speaks, in blaming them for what they have, out of their own minds, imputed to Jesus, of all those also who from generation to generation have perverted his character and made him the supporter of the panic fears and superstitions which Shelley maintains he hated and used all his faith and reason to oppose. In spite, he says, of all the misrepresentations Jesus Christ has suffered from, enough remains to show that he is the enemy of oppression and falsehood, that he is the advocate of equal justice, that he is disposed to sanction neither bloodshed nor deceit, under whatever pretences their practice may be vindicated. We discover that he

was a "man of meek and majestic demeanour, calm in danger, of natural and simple thought and habits, beloved to adoration by his adherents; unmoved, solemn, severe," "of miraculous dignity and simplicity of character," "of invincible gentleness and benignity," who represented to mankind a God of Universal Love.

The essay is written, however, from the point of view of an Agnostic, as we should call Shelley to-day. And I say this to guard Shelley from being mistaken. There are passages in this essay which seem to go very far towards an expression of a settled belief in a Divine Being and in Immortality, and in a battle between powers of good and evil beyond this earth. But we must always take care not to make too much of the phrases of Shelley. His custom was, when he had to state the opinion of another-as, for example, in this essay on Christ-to put himself aside, and to write as if the real holder of the opinion was writing; and this is often puzzling. And it is made more puzzling by his way of becoming emotionalised as he wrote, even by opinions with which he disagreed, if they happened to be noble or imaginative. For the moment, then, he speaks as if they were personal, and throws around them an emotion which their transient passage through his mind has created. In many places in this essay he is swept away, in describing the views of Christ concerning God and Immortality to speak of them as if they were his own, and he actually uses expressions about them in prose which are borrowed from his own poetry. We must remember, then, that such expressions mean no more than that he was moved by the beauty of the ideas Christ had concerning God and Immortality, and that he could not help ornamenting them and feeling them as his own, for a time, with a poet's ready sym