"Supreme Capacity"

SHELLEY: A LIFE STORY (388 pp.)--Edmund Blunden--Viking ($3.75).

This new biography has been greeted in England as the first really satisfactory life of England's great romantic poet. U.S. critics should agree that, though Newman Ivey White's trenchant and scholarly two-volume Shelley (1940) has more information, Edmund Blunden's book has all that's necessary for a solid interpretation. A very fair poet himself, Blunden writes of Shelley devotedly, but with the ease and savor of long personal familiarity--not only with Shelley's works, but with his period (1792-1822), the scenes in which he lived and the mass of material about him.

"He thinks gigantically," said Lord Byron to Leigh Hunt. "If thought were light, and our planet visible by it, and space were time, the next ages would see us coming by a little ray, made up of such minds." A few days later their friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, aged 29, vanished with his fated little sailboat into a sultry Mediterranean storm. The next ages have been only fitfully aware of Shelley as a gigantic thinker. And Blunden's biography scarcely supports that description; but it shows the poetry maturing with the man: eloquent, fervorous, audacious, imaginative.

Child of England. Field Place, the Sussex manor house where Shelley was born and grew up, "has a mighty roof of Horsham stone, and a line of chimneys like towers." It also has a park, a brook and a lake satisfactory to a fanciful child. Shelley's father, the squire, was a progressive gentleman farmer and brought up his eldest son to know something about pig-raising and Swedish turnips. If Percy seemed literary in boyhood, his literariness was long confined to a large appetite for sixpenny thrillers about vampires, specters and enchantments--a set of motifs he never entirely got over.

Blunden defends Shelley's first efforts at "Gothic" romances (he wrote several at Eton and Oxford) as honest, would-be commercial work; Horrid Novels were popular. Shelley enjoyed Oxford, holding his own there with what Blunden calls his "wickedly perfect politeness." He was really surprised and hurt when his love of epistolary arguments and pamphleteering got him expelled for printing a reasonable discussion on The Necessity of Atheism.

Child of Liberty. Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., had hoped that his son would get comfortably to Parliament and stand for Reform. Instead, Percy took direct action against what he conceived as oppression, social and personal, by marrying a pretty schoolgirl who didn't want to go back to school. Blunden supplies attractive pictures of this adventure--of Harriet "ready to die of laughter" as the 20-year-old Percy, slim and shrill-voiced, stood on a Dublin balcony hurling moral tracts at selected passersby. A combatant for liberty, Shelley poetized in Queen Mob against kings, priests, commerce, wealth and war; he sought out the reformer, William Godwin, and in due course fell in love with his daughter, Mary.

As an enlightened Godwinian, Mary suggested that they all live together, she as Shelley's sister and Harriet, who had now borne Shelley two children, as his wife. Godwin himself, the author of many ennobling and free sentiments, took advantage of the situation to get money out of Shelley. Shelley left Harriet. In 1816 Harriet's body was recovered from a pond in a London park. Blunden only guesses at the circumstances of this painful episode. His book (published 14 months ago in England), was written before publication in the U.S. of The Shelley Legend, (TIME, Nov. 19, 1945), which does a lot to set the record straight. Author Robert Metcalfe Smith proves that Mary Shelley deliberately used forged letters to conceal Shelley's guilt in the suicide.

Child of Poetry. After Harriet's death, Shelley devoted himself to his poetry in Hampstead, in Leigh Hunt's cottage, where young Keats was a fellow visitor, and in Geneva, where the glamorous Lord Byron was a neighbor. The Napoleonic Wars were over; the long golden age of travel on the Continent had begun. Shelley's household abroad included not only Mary, whom he married, but her sister, Claire Claremont, one of Byron's cast-off mistresses. His scandalous behavior shocked London, and he never returned to the city after 1818, later writing stanzas beginning "Hell is a city much like London. . . ."

At Naples, Rome, Florence and Pisa, though ostracized by such respectable English tourists as Walter Savage Landor, Shelley wrote the poetry by which he is best remembered. He thought Keats "a rival who will surpass me" and invited the dying poet to join him; Keats was touched but had enough sense not to. After the "Peterloo massacre" of working people in Manchester, Shelley wrote his Mask of Anarchy, a revolutionary poem of memorable drive:

Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number . . .

After an autumn walk along the Arno in Florence he wrote his Ode to the West Wind; in Pisa The Cloud and To a Skylark.

Of his longer work, in particular Prometheus Unbound, Blunden remarks that "it exacts from the reader a sustained and informed intentness failing which it becomes a luminous haze, and few people have the necessary time and period knowledge for elucidating its multitude of hints to the imagination." Shelley thought Dante's Divine Comedy superior "to all possible compositions." In The Triumph of Life, his last long poem, half finished before he was drowned, he wrote in the terza rima of Dante and with something like Dante's conciseness; Blunden suggests that it holds terrible irony as well as a power of imagery like Goya's. Perhaps the ethereal young lyricist had greater capacities still.

In spite of his way with women, Shelley is thought of--and was considered in his own day--as a somewhat effeminate character. But of his looks just before he died, Thornton Hunt gave this testimony: "The outline of the features and face possesses firmness and hardness entirely inconsistent with a feminine character. . . ." Biographer Blunden finds it regrettable that no portrait of Shelley except the very young and rather girlish one by Amelia Curran has survived. To Blunden, Shelley exemplifies "the supreme capacity called genius."

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