Though Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist
openly the oppressions existent during 'the good old times' had faded
with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He
was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings
as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our
nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and
intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon
the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance,
was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing
"The Cenci", when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it
roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great
truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few,
as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured
countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the "Mask
of Anarchy", which he sent to his friend Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in
the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor.
'I did not insert it,' Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting
preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, 'because I thought
that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do
justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked
in this flaming robe of verse.' Days of outrage have passed away, and
with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many
to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on
his suggestions, and gained the day. But they rose when human life was
respected by the Minister in power; such was not the case during the
Administration which excited Shelley's abhorrence.
The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular
tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many
stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired, those
beginning
'My Father Time is old and gray,'
before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching
passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; it might
make a patriot of any man whose heart was not wholly closed against his
humbler fellow-creatures.