If you are seriously interested only
in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has
been thought and said in the world.
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