LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.
Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about his children,
and the still more poignant anguish of his own heart, and with the cloud
of what he thought swift-coming death above his head, Shelley worked
steadily, during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of "Laon and Cythna".
Six months were spent in this task. "The poem," to borrow Mrs. Shelley's
words, "was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of
Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is
distinguished for peculiar beauty." Whenever Shelley could, he composed
in the open air. The terraces of the Villa Cappuccini at Este and the
Baths of Caracalla were the birthplace of "Prometheus". "The Cenci" was
written on the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn. The Cascine of
Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Guiliano, and
the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his
loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the "Triumph of Life", was
transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.
If "Alastor" had expressed one side of Shelley's nature, his devotion to
Ideal Beauty, "Laon and Cythna" was in a far profounder sense
representative of its author. All his previous experiences and all his
aspirations--his passionate belief in friendship, his principle of the
equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his
confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free
love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and
tyranny--are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of
this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self
which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine,
Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely
feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of
grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In
the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and
sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but
because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the
intolerance of custom in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us
that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers "a
virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that
faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor
misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among
mankind;" to illustrate "the growth and progress of individual mind
aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to
celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world."
The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem
highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian
stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are
Shelley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at
the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph of the good
cause, the final victory of despotic force, and the martyrdom of the
hero, together with whom the heroine falls a willing victim. It is full
of thrilling incidents and lovely pictures; yet the tale is the least
part of the poem; and few readers have probably been able either to
sympathize with its visionary characters, or to follow the narrative
without weariness. As in the case of other poems by Shelley--especially
those in which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of art his
genius was not well suited--the central motive of "Laon and Cythna" is
surrounded by so radiant a photosphere of imagery and eloquence that it
is difficult to fix our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of
splendour. Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, or the
lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of poetry had here
tried the full strength of his pinions in their flight. This truth was
by no means recognized when "Laon and Cythna" first appeared before the
public. Hooted down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served
to intensify the prejudice with which the author of "Queen Mab" had come
to be regarded.
I have spoken of this poem under its first name of "Laon and Cythna". A
certain number of copies were issued with this title (How many copies
were put in circulation is not known. There must certainly have been
many more than the traditional three; for when I was a boy at Harrow, I
picked up two uncut copies in boards at a Bristol bookshop, for the
price of 2 shillings and 6 pence a piece.); but the publisher, Ollier,
not without reason dreaded the effect the book would make; he therefore
induced Shelley to alter the relationship between the hero and his
bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the
title of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While
still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems--the
one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and
morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he
finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he
entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best
work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of
Lionel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an ideal of the
man he would have wished to be. The poet in "Alastor", Laon in the
"Revolt of Islam", Lionel in "Rosalind and Helen", and Prince Athanase,
are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and
scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life,
Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed
his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as
befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a
powerful characteristic.
Before quitting the first period of Shelley's development, it may be
well to set before the reader a specimen of that self-delineative poetry
which characterized it; and since it is difficult to detach a single
passage from the continuous stanzas of "Laon and Cythna", I have chosen
the lines in "Rosalind and Helen" which describe young Lionel:
To Lionel,
Though of great wealth and lineage high,
Yet through those dungeon walls there came
Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!
And as the meteor's midnight flame
Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth
Flashed on his visionary youth,
And filled him, not with love, but faith.
And hope, and courage mute in death;
For love and life in him were twins,
Born at one birth: in every other
First life, then love its course begins,
Though they be children of one mother;
And so through this dark world they fleet
Divided, till in death they meet:
But he loved all things ever. Then
He past amid the strife of men,
And stood at the throne of armed power
Pleading for a world of woe:
Secure as one on a rock-built tower
O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro,
'Mid the passions wild of human kind
He stood, like a spirit calming them;
For, it was said, his words could find
Like music the lulled crowd, and stem
That torrent of unquiet dream,
Which mortals truth and reason deem,
But IS revenge and fear and pride.
Joyous he was; and hope and peace
On all who heard him did abide,
Raining like dew from his sweet talk,
As where the evening star may walk
Along the brink of the gloomy seas,
Liquid mists of splendour quiver.
His very gestures touch'd to tears
The unpersuaded tyrant, never
So moved before: his presence stung
The torturers with their victim's pain,
And none knew how; and through their ears,
The subtle witchcraft of his tongue
Unlocked the hearts of those who keep
Gold, the world's bond of slavery.
Men wondered, and some sneer'd to see
One sow what he could never reap:
For he is rich, they said, and young,
And might drink from the depths of luxury.
If he seeks Fame, Fame never crown'd
The champion of a trampled creed:
If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned
'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed
Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil,
Those who would sit near Power must toil;
And such, there sitting, all may see.
During the year he spent at Marlow, Shelley was a frequent visitor at
Leigh Hunt's Hampstead house, where he made acquaintance with Keats, and
the brothers Smith, authors of "Rejected Addresses". Hunt's
recollections supply some interesting details, which, since Hogg and
Peacock fail us at this period, may be profitably used. Describing the
manner of his life at Marlow, Hunt writes as follows: "He rose early in
the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly,
wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read
again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine),
conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open) again
walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten
o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was
generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible,
in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring
interest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job." Mrs. Shelley,
in her note on the "Revolt of Islam", confirms this account of his Bible
studies; and indeed the influence of the Old Testament upon his style
may be traced in several of his poems. In the same paragraph from which
I have just quoted, Leigh Hunt gives a just notion of his relation to
Christianity, pointing out that he drew a distinction between the
Pauline presentation of the Christian creeds, and the spirit of the
Gospels. "His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith in
the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one on the other, very
formidable to those who chose to forget what Scripture itself observes
on that point." We have only to read Shelley's "Essay on Christianity",
in order to perceive what reverent admiration he felt for Jesus, and how
profoundly he understood the true character of his teaching. That work,
brief as it is, forms one of the most valuable extant contributions to a
sound theology, and is morally far in advance of the opinions expressed
by many who regard themselves as specially qualified to speak on the
subject. It is certain that, as Christianity passes beyond its mediaeval
phase, and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, it will more and more
approximate to Shelley's exposition. Here and here only is a vital
faith, adapted to the conditions of modern thought, indestructible
because essential, and fitted to unite instead of separating minds of
divers quality. It may sound paradoxical to claim for Shelley of all men
a clear insight into the enduring element of the Christian creed; but it
was precisely his detachment from all its accidents which enabled him to
discern its spiritual purity, and placed him in a true relation to its
Founder. For those who would neither on the one hand relinquish what is
permanent in religion, nor yet on the other deny the inevitable
conclusions of modern thought, his teaching is indubitably valuable. His
fierce tirades against historic Christianity must be taken as directed
against an ecclesiastical system of spiritual tyranny, hypocrisy, and
superstition, which in his opinion had retarded the growth of free
institutions, and fettered the human intellect. Like Campanella, he
distinguished between Christ, who sealed the gospel of charity with his
blood, and those Christians, who would be the first to crucify their
Lord if he returned to earth.
That Shelley lived up to his religious creed is amply proved. To help
the needy and to relieve the sick, seemed to him a simple duty, which he
cheerfully discharged. "His charity, though liberal, was not weak. He
inquired personally into the circumstances of his petitioners, visited
the sick in their beds,....and kept a regular list of industrious poor,
whom he assisted with small sums to make up their accounts." At Marlow,
the miserable condition of the lace-makers called forth all his
energies; and Mrs. Shelley tells us that an acute ophthalmia, from which
he twice suffered, was contracted in a visit to their cottages. A story
told by Leigh Hunt about his finding a woman ill on Hampstead Heath, and
carrying her from door to door in the vain hopes of meeting with a man
as charitable as himself, until he had to house the poor creature with
his friends the Hunts, reads like a practical illustration of Christ's
parable about the Good Samaritan. Nor was it merely to the so-called
poor that Shelley showed his generosity. His purse was always open to
his friends. Peacock received from him an annual allowance of 100
pounds. He gave Leigh Hunt, on one occasion, 1400 pounds; and he
discharged debts of Godwin, amounting, it is said, to about 6000 pounds.
In his pamphlet on "Putting Reform to the Vote", he offered to subscribe
100 pounds for the purpose of founding an association; and we have
already seen that he headed the Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 500
pounds. These instances of his generosity might be easily multiplied;
and when we remember that his present income was 1000 pounds, out of
which 200 pounds went to the support of his children, it will be
understood not only that he could not live luxuriously, but also that he
was in frequent money difficulties through the necessity of raising
funds upon his expectations. His self-denial in all minor matters of
expenditure was conspicuous. Without a murmur, without ostentation, this
heir of the richest baronet in Sussex illustrated by his own conduct
those principles of democratic simplicity and of fraternal charity which
formed his political and social creed.
A glimpse into the cottage at Great Marlow is afforded by a careless
sentence of Leigh Hunt's. "He used to sit in a study adorned with casts,
as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus." Fancy
Shelley with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a tiny, low-roofed room,
correcting proofs of "Laon and Cythna", between the Apollo of the
Belvedere and Venus de' Medici, life-sized, and as crude as casts by
Shout could make them! In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother
and Allegra, lived as Shelley's guests; and here Clara Shelley was born
on the 3rd of September, 1817. In the same autumn, Shelley suffered from
a severe pulmonary attack. The critical state of his health, and the
apprehension, vouched for by Mrs. Shelley, that the Chancellor might lay
his vulture's talons on the children of his second marriage, were the
motives which induced him to leave England for Italy in the spring of
1818. (See Note on Poems of 1819, and compare the lyric "The billows on
the beach.") He never returned. Four years only of life were left to
him--years filled with music that will sound as long as English lasts.
It was on the 11th of March that the Shelleys took their departure with
Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra. They went straight to Milan, and
after visiting the Lake of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and
Rome, they settled early in the following December at Naples. Shelley's
letters to Peacock form the invaluable record of this period of his
existence. Taken altogether, they are the most perfect specimens of
descriptive prose in the English language; never over-charged with
colour, vibrating with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of
Italy, frank in their criticism, and exquisitely delicate in
observation. Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace,
combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a
style at once familiar and elevated. That Shelley's sensibility to art
was not so highly cultivated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough
in many passages: but there is no trace of admiring to order in his
comments upon pictures or statues. Familiarity with the great works of
antique and Italian art would doubtless have altered some of the
opinions he at first expressed; just as longer residence among the
people made him modify his views about their character. Meanwhile, the
spirit of modest and unprejudiced attention in which he began his
studies of sculpture and painting, might well be imitated in the present
day by travellers who think that to pin their faith to some famous
critic's verdict is the acme of good taste. If there were space for a
long quotation from these letters, I should choose the description of
Pompeii (January 26, 1819), or that of the Baths of Caracalla (March 23,
1819). As it is, I must content myself with a short but eminently
characteristic passage, written from Ferrarra, November 7, 1818:--
"The handwriting of Ariosto is a small, firm, and pointed character,
expressing, as I should say, a strong and keen, but circumscribed energy
of mind; that of Tasso is large, free, and flowing, except that there is
a checked expression in the midst of its flow, which brings the letters
into a smaller compass than one expected from the beginning of the word.
It is the symbol of an intense and earnest mind, exceeding at times its
own depth, and admonished to return by the chillness of the waters of
oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet. You know I always seek in
what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and
tangible object; and as we do not agree in physiognomy, so we may not
agree now. But my business is to relate my own sensations, and not to
attempt to inspire others with them."
In the middle of August, Shelley left his wife at the Bagni di Lucca,
and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. He arrived at midnight in a
thunderstorm. "Julian and Maddalo" was the literary fruit of this
excursion--a poem which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti
as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment
of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to
sadness amid all its splendour by the gloomy presence of the madhouse,
ranks among Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of
Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the
sunset and the island of San Lazzaro:--
Oh!
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy,
Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers
Of cities they encircle!--it was ours
To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,
Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men
Were waiting for us with the gondola.
As those who pause on some delightful way,
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
Looking upon the evening, and the flood
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky. The hoar
And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared,
Thro' mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills. They were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seem from Lido through the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles--
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"
Said my companion, "I will show you soon
A better station." So o'er the lagune
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
I was about to speak, when--"We are even
Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo,
And bade the gondolieri cease to row.
"Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well
If you hear not a deep and heavy bell."
I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island, such a one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,--
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,--
We could just hear its coarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief--"What we behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,"--
Said Maddalo; "and ever at this hour,
Those who may cross the water hear that bell,
Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,
To vespers."
It may be parenthetically observed that one of the few familiar
quotations from Shelley's poems occurs in "Julian and Maddalo":--
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Byron lent the Shelleys his villa of the Cappuccini near Este, where
they spent some weeks in the autumn. Here "Prometheus Unbound" was
begun, and the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills" were composed;
and here Clara became so ill that her parents thought it necessary to
rush for medical assistance to Venice. They had forgotten their
passport; but Shelley's irresistible energy overcame all difficulties,
and they entered Venice--only in time, however, for the child to die.
Nearly the whole of the winter was spent in Naples, where Shelley
suffered from depression of more than ordinary depth. Mrs. Shelley
attributed this gloom to the state of his health, but Medwin tells a
strange story, which, if it is not wholly a romance, may better account
for the poet's melancholy. He says that so far back as the year 1816, on
the night before his departure from London, "a married lady, young,
handsome, and of noble connexions," came to him, avowed the passionate
love she had conceived for him, and proposed that they should fly
together. (Medwin's Life of Shelley, volume 1 324. His date, 1814,
appears from the context to be a misprint.) He explained to her that his
hand and heart had both been given irrevocably to another, and, after
the expression of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, they
parted. She followed him, however, from place to place; and without
intruding herself upon his notice, found some consolation in remaining
near him. Now she arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of
Shelley's life was a wide one, and included more destinies than his own.
Godwin, as we have reason to believe, attributed the suicide of Fanny
Imlay to her hopeless love for Shelley; and the tale of Harriet has
already been told. Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in
Medwin's story, especially when we remember what Hogg half-humorously
tells us about Shelley's attraction for women in London. At any rate,
the excessive wretchedness of the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be
accounted for by the "constant and poignant physical sufferings" of which
Mrs. Shelley speaks, since these were habitual with him. She was
herself, moreover under the impression that he was concealing something
from her, and we know from her own words in another place that his "fear
to wound the feelings of others" often impelled him to keep his deepest
sorrows to himself. (Note on the Revolt of Islam.)
All this while his health was steadily improving. The menace of
consumption was removed; and though he suffered from severe attacks of
pain in the side, the cause of this persistent malady does not seem to
have been ascertained. At Naples he was under treatment for disease of
the liver. Afterwards, his symptoms were ascribed to nephritis, and it
is certain that his greater or less freedom from uneasiness varied with
the quality of the water he drank. He was, for instance, forced to
eschew the drinking water of Ravenna, because it aggravated his
symptoms; while Florence, for a similar reason, proved an unsuitable
residence. The final settlement of the Shelleys at Pisa seems to have
been determined by the fact that the water of that place agreed with
him. That the spasms which from time to time attacked him were extremely
serious, is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived with
him at this period, and by his own letters. Some relief was obtained by
mesmerism, a remedy suggested by Medwin; but the obstinacy of the
torment preyed upon his spirits to such an extent, that even during the
last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him
prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh
is heir to. It may be added that mental application increased the
mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt that the composition of "The Cenci" had
cost him a fresh seizure. Yet though his sufferings were indubitably
real, the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic disease;
and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when he attributed Shelley's
spasms to insufficient and irregular diet, and to a continual
over-taxing of his nervous system.
Mrs. Shelley states that the change from England to Italy was in all
respects beneficial to her husband. She was inclined to refer the
depression from which he occasionally suffered, to his solitary habits;
and there are several passages in his own letters which connect his
melancholy with solitude. It is obvious that when he found himself in
the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes,
he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to
paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as
much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness
with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen
circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary
broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his
heaven. Byron, who had some right to express a judgment in such a
matter, described him as the most companionable man under the age of
thirty he had ever met with. Shelley rode and practised pistol-shooting
with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes,
and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.
All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution,
remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic
persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordinary kind he hated. The
voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with
Shelley's almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to
make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on
his mistaking his wife's mention of the Aziola, a little owl common
enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike
for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some
disagreement between him and Mrs. Shelley, and kept him further apart
from Byron than he might otherwise have been. In a valuable letter
recently published by Mr. Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all
society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that
is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to
Trelawny, he said:--"She can't bear solitude, nor I society--the quick
coupled with the dead."
In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all in Italy, except
Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs.
Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She was a
woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less
enthusiastic than Shelley liked, quite capable of appreciating the
inestimable privilege of his acquaintance. Her husband, to use a now
almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his
wife's enlightened opinions, and remained staunch through good and ill
report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew absolutely no
one. Shelley's time was therefore passed in study and composition. In
the previous summer he had translated the "Symposium" of Plato, and
begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a
fragment. Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his
observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to
their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of
Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Tasso struck him as cold
and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio
he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely
characteristic. "How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of
nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the
morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it
obscure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of
the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations. His
more serious theories of love agree especially with mine. He often
expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very
beautiful kind. He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian,
stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one
little remark, or rather maxim of his, which might do some good to the
common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,--'Bocca baciata non perde
ventura; anzi rinnouva, come fa la luna'?" Dante and Petrarch remained
the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of
the "Inferno" seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of
Italian poems. Of Petrarch's "tender and solemn enthusiasm," he speaks
with the sympathy of one who understood the inner mysteries of
idealizing love.
It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that Shelley,
notwithstanding is profound study of style and his exquisite perception
of beauty in form and rhythm, required more than merely artistic
excellences in poetry. He judged poems by their content and spirit; and
while he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic manner, he
held that art must be moralized in order to be truly great. The
distinction he drew between Theocritus and the earlier Greek singers in
the "Defence of Poetry", his severe strictures on "The Two Noble
Kinsmen" in a letter to Mary (August 20, 1818) and his phrase about
Ariosto, "who is entertaining and graceful, and SOMETIMES a poet,"
illustrate the application of critical canons wholly at variance with
the "art for art" doctrine.
While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek. Plato was often
in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable
companions. How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be
gathered from the following extract:--"I congratulate you on your
conquest of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the perpetually
increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer there truly
begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of
Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in
tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable
with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is
nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began
the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon,
whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am
bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Autos," he writes to
Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820. "Faust", too, was a favourite. "I
have been reading over and over again "Faust", and always with
sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and
augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem to me an unfit
study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the
delusions of an imagination not to be restrained." The profound
impression made upon him by Margaret's story is expressed in two letters
about Retzsch's illustrations:--"The artist makes one envy his happiness
that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared look
upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on
the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured."
The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German
were Shelley's translations from Homer and Euripides, from Dante, from
Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso", and from "Faust", translations which
have never been surpassed for beauty of form and complete transfusion of
the spirit of one literature into the language of another. On
translation, however, he set but little store, asserting that he only
undertook it when he "could do absolutely nothing else," and writing
earnestly to dissuade Leigh Hunt from devoting time which might be
better spent, to work of subordinate importance. (Letter from Florence,
November 1819.) The following version of a Greek epigram on Plato's
spirit will illustrate his own method of translation:--
Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?
To what sublime and star-y-paven home
Floatest thou?
I am the image of swift Plato's spirit,
Ascending heaven:--Athens does inherit
His corpse below.
Some time in the year 1820-21, he composed the "Defence of Poetry",
stimulated to this undertaking by his friend Peacock's article on
poetry, published in the Literary Miscellany. (See Letter to Ollier,
January 20, 1820, Shelley Memorials, page 135.) This essay not only sets
forth his theory of his own art, but it also contains some of his finest
prose writing, of which the following passage, valuable alike for matter
and style, may be cited as a specimen:--
"The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the
good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at
periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity
of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.
The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.
"Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things;
it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty
to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love,
patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful universe
which we inhabit--what were our consolations on this side of the
grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend
to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged
faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning,
a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man
cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say
it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our
natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could
this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is
impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition
begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious
poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble
shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest
poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the
finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and
the delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no
more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an
artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the
intermixture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by
the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the
"Paradise Lost" as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have
his own authority also for the muse having "dictated" to him the
"unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would
allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando
Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to
painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still
more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or
picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's
womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is
incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the
media of the process.
"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as
it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but
its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming
calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which
paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced
principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most
enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war
with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and
friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they
last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not
only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined
organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord,
and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the
sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes
immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests
the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and
veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind,
bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters
abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns
of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man."
In the midst of these aesthetic studies, and while producing his own
greatest works, Shelley was not satisfied that his genius ought to be
devoted to poetry. "I consider poetry," he wrote to Peacock, January
26th, 1819, "very subordinate to moral and political science, and if I
were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter; for I can conceive a
great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, and harmonizing the
contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled. Far from me is such
an attempt, and I shall be content, by exercising my fancy, to amuse
myself, and perhaps some others, and cast what weight I can into the
scale of that balance which the Giant of Arthegall holds." Whether he
was right in the conviction that his genius was no less fitted for
metaphysical speculation or for political science than for poetry, is a
question that admits of much debate. (See Mrs. Shelley's note on the
Revolt of Islam, and the whole Preface to the Prose Works.) We have
nothing but fragments whereby to form a definite opinion--the unfinished
"Defence of Poetry", the unfinished "Essay on a Future State", the
unfinished "Essay on Christianity", the unfinished "Essay on the
Punishment of Death", and the scattered "Speculations on Metaphysics".
None of these compositions justify the belief so confidently expressed
by Mrs. Shelley in her Preface to the prose works, that "had not Shelley
deserted metaphysics for poetry in his youth, and had he not been lost
to us early, so that all his vaster projects were wrecked with him in
the waves, he would have presented the world with a complete theory of
mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have
contributed; but more simple, and unimpugnable, and entire than the
systems of these writers." Their incompleteness rather tends to confirm
what she proceeds to state, that the strain of philosophical composition
was too great for his susceptible nerves; while her further observation
that "thought kindled imagination and awoke sensation, and rendered him
dizzy from too great keenness of emotion," seems to indicate that his
nature was primarily that of a poet deeply tinctured with philosophical
speculation, rather than that of a metaphysician warmed at intervals to
an imaginative fervour. Another of her remarks confirms us in this
opinion. "He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to
be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry." (Note on Prometheus.)
This is the position of the poet rather than the analyst; and on the
whole, we are probably justified in concluding with Mrs. Shelley, that
he followed a true instinct when he dedicated himself to poetry, and
trained his powers in that direction. (Note on Revolt of Islam.) To
dogmatize upon the topic would be worse than foolish. There was
something incalculable, incommensurable, and daemonic in Shelley's
genius; and what he might have achieved, had his life been spared and
had his health progressively improved, it is of course impossible to
say.
In the spring of 1819 the Shelleys settled in Rome, where the poet
proceeded with the composition of "Prometheus Unbound". He used to write
among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled
of all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of flowers and
shrubs described in his incomparable letter of March the 23rd to
Peacock. Rome, however, was not destined to retain them long. On the 7th
of June they lost their son William after a short illness. Shelley loved
this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours without
taking rest. He was now practically childless; and his grief found
expression in many of his poems, especially in the fragment headed
"Roma, Roma, Roma! non e piu com' era prima." William was buried in the
Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley had written a description to
Peacock in the previous December. "The English burying-place is a green
slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I
think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the
sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with
the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves
of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil
which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly
of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were
to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and
so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion."
Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they established themselves
at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. Here Shelley began and finished
"The Cenci" at the instance of his wife, who rightly thought that he
undervalued his own powers as a dramatic poet. The supposed portrait of
Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affected his
imagination, and he fancied that her story would form the fitting
subject for a tragedy. It is fortunate for English literature that the
real facts of that domestic drama, as recently published by Signor
Bertolotti, were then involved in a tissue of romance and legend. During
this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family. Mrs. Gisborne's
son by a previous marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer, and Shelley
conceived a project of helping him build a steamer which should ply
between Leghorn and Marseilles. He was to supply the funds, and the
pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne family. The scheme
eventually fell through, though Shelley spent a good deal of money upon
it; and its only importance is the additional light it throws upon his
public and private benevolence. From Leghorn the Shelleys removed in the
autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th of November, the present Sir
Percy Florence Shelley was born. Here Shelley wrote the last act of
"Prometheus Unbound", which, though the finest portion of that unique
drama, seems to have been an afterthought. In the Cascine outside
Florence he also composed the "Ode to the West Wind", the most
symmetrically perfect as well as the most impassioned of his minor
lyrics. He spent much time in the galleries, made notes upon the
principal antique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study.
The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the month of January,
1820, they took up their abode at Pisa.
1819 was the most important year in Shelley's life, so far as literary
production is concerned. Besides "The Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound",
of which it yet remains to speak, this year saw the production of
several political and satirical poems--the "Masque of Anarchy",
suggested by the news of the Peterloo massacre, being by far the most
important. Shelley attempted the composition of short popular songs
which should stir the English people to a sense of what he felt to be
their degradation. But he lacked the directness which alone could make
such verses forcible, and the passionate apostrophe to the Men of
England in his "Masque of Anarchy" marks the highest point of his
achievement in this style:--
Men of England, Heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!
Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fall'n on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
"Peter Bell the Third", written in this year, and "Swellfoot the
Tyrant", composed in the following autumn, are remarkable as showing
with what keen interest Shelley watched public affairs in England from
his exile home; but, for my own part, I cannot agree with those critics
who esteem their humour at a high rate. The political poems may
profitably be compared with his contemporary correspondence; with the
letters, for instance, to Leigh Hunt, November 23rd, 1819; and to Mr.
John Gisborne, April 10th, 1822; and with an undated fragment published
by Mr. Garnett in the "Relics of Shelley", page 84. No student of
English political history before the Reform Bill can regard his
apprehensions of a great catastrophe as ill-founded. His insight into
the real danger to the nation was as penetrating as his suggestion of a
remedy was moderate. Those who are accustomed to think of the poet as a
visionary enthusiast, will rub their eyes when they read the sober lines
in which he warns his friend to be cautious about the security offered
by the English Funds. Another letter, dated Lerici, June 29, 1822,
illustrates the same practical temper of mind, the same logical
application of political principles to questions of public economy.
That "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci" should have been composed in
one and the same year must be reckoned among the greatest wonders of
literature, not only because of their sublime greatness, but also
because of their essential difference. Aeschylus, it is well known, had
written a sequel to his "Prometheus Bound", in which he showed the final
reconciliation between Zeus, the oppressor, and Prometheus, the
champion, of humanity. What that reconciliation was, we do not know,
because the play is lost, and the fragments are too brief for supporting
any probable hypothesis. But Shelley repudiated the notion of
compromise. He could not conceive of the Titan "unsaying his high
language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary."
He therefore, approached the theme of liberation from a wholly different
point of view. Prometheus in his drama is the human vindicator of love,
justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and
creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prometheus is the mind of man
idealized, the spirit of our race, as Shelley thought it made to be.
Jove is the incarnation of all that thwarts its free development. Thus
counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental antitheses
of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate. They give the
form of personality to Shelley's Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already
expressed in the first canto of "Laon and Cythna"; but, instead of being
represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into
the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry. Prometheus resists
Jove to the uttermost, endures all torments, physical and moral, that
the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly
expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the
spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives; Jove disappears; the
burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace
and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes
in the emancipation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain,
but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus
is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia. Asia,
withdrawn from sight during the first act, but spoken of as waiting in
her exile for the fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit. She
is the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean. Like Aphrodite, she rises in
the Aegean near the land called by her name; and in the time of
tribulation she dwells in a far Indian vale. She is the Idea of Beauty
incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and
enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor's vision, the breathing
image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part. At the
moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot
see her, only feels her influence. The essential thought of Shelley's
creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made real by a
spirit, which he sometimes called the spirit of Nature, but which is
always conceived as more than Life, as that which gives its actuality to
Life, and lastly as Love and Beauty. To adore this spirit, to clasp it
with affection, and to blend with it, is, he thought the true object of
man. Therefore the final union of Prometheus with Asia is the
consummation of human destinies. Love was the only law Shelley
recognized. Unterrified by the grim realities of pain and crime revealed
in nature and society, he held fast to the belief that, if we could but
pierce to the core of things, if we could but be what we might be, the
world and man would both attain to their perfection in eternal love.
What resolution through some transcendental harmony was expected by
Shelley for the palpable discords in the structure of the universe, we
hardly know. He did not give his philosophy systematic form: and his new
science of love remains a luminous poetic vision--nowhere more
brilliantly set forth than in the "sevenfold hallelujahs and harping
symphonies" of this, the final triumph of his lyrical poetry.
In "Prometheus", Shelley conceived a colossal work of art, and sketched
out the main figures on a scale of surpassing magnificence. While
painting in these figures, he seems to reduce their proportions too much
to the level of earthly life. He quits his god-creating,
heaven-compelling throne of mythopoeic inspiration, and descends to a
love-story of Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not sustain
the visionary and primeval dignity of these incarnated abstractions;
nor, on the other hand, has he so elaborated their characters in detail
as to give them the substantiality of persons. There is therefore
something vague and hollow in both figures. Yet in the subordinate
passages of the poem, the true mythopoeic faculty--the faculty of
finding concrete forms for thought, and of investing emotion with
personality--shines forth with extraordinary force and clearness. We
feel ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while we read the
description of Oceanus, and the raptures of the Earth and Moon.
A genuine liking for "Prometheus Unbound" may be reckoned the
touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry. The
world in which the action is supposed to move, rings with spirit voices;
and what these spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than
any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own heart's
song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are hymns in "Prometheus",
which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from
meaning, the substance of a new ethereal music; and yet, although their
verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance
for those who understand. Shelley scorned the aesthetics of a school
which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is
so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to
whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man
whose sense of hearing is too gross for the tenuity of a bat's cry. A
voice in the air thus sings the hymn of Asia at the moment of her
apotheosis:--
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them,
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds, ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee whereso'er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee.
But thy voice sounds low and tender,
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost for ever!
Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly
Turneresque; and there is much in "Prometheus Unbound" to justify this
opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows
are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated
from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of
many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.
Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.
The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and
beyond it. "I seek," he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation
of something beyond the present and tangible object." For him, as for
the poet described by one of the spirit voices in "Prometheus", the bees
in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,--
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom,
more perfectly before us than that picture does? (Forman, volume 2 page
181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the
little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act? (Forman, volume 2
page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have illustrated
this drama. He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the
trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and
the charioted Hour. Prometheus, too, with his "flowing limbs," has just
Blake's fault of impersonation--the touch of unreality in that painter's
Adam.
Passing to "The Cenci", we change at once the moral and artistic
atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is
absent. Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded. Instead of
soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In
exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into
the sphere of dreadful passions--all the agony, endurance, and
half-maddened action, of which luckless human innocence is capable. To
tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed. Her father, a
monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by
imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage. At last her patience ended;
and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness
in living man, she wrought his death. For this she died upon the
scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided
in the execution of the murder. The interest of "The Cenci", and it is
overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two
chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into
greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality. Perhaps Shelley intended
this--as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of
figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to
my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention,
in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty,
Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a
contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old
Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for
Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with
an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the
uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine
weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of
Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through
extraordinary suffering in circumstances of exceptional horror--the
innocence of a noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its
wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the
merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full
height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger,
and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her
sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action,
the glance of self-assured purity with which she annihilates the
cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her
tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful
dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate
and powerful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it
is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the
other world, as once he came to her on earth.
Shelley dedicated "The Cenci" to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven
in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work,
and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more
sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was
very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peacock requesting him
to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O'Neil, he thought, would play the
part of Beatrice admirably. The manager, however, did not take this
view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even
submitted to an actress like Miss O'Neil. Shelley's self-criticism is
always so valuable, that it may be well here to collect what he said
about the two great dramas of 1819. Concerning "The Cenci" he wrote to
Peacock:--"It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and
opinions which characterize my other compositions; I having attended
simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable
the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree
of popular effect to be produced by such a development." "'Cenci' is
written for the multitude, and ought to sell well." "I believe it
singularly fitted for the stage." "'The Cenci' is a work of art; it is
not coloured by my feelings, nor obscured by my metaphysics. I don't
think much of it. It gave me less trouble than anything I have written
of the same length." "Prometheus", on the other hand, he tells Ollier,
"is my favourite poem; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and
feed him with fine ink and good paper"--which was duly done.
Again:--"For 'Prometheus', I expect and desire no great sale; Prometheus
was never intended for more than five or six persons; it is in my
judgment of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and
is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it; it is
original, and cost me severe mental labour." Shelley was right in
judging that "The Cenci" would be comparatively popular; this was proved
by the fact that it went through two editions in his lifetime. The value
he set upon "Prometheus" as the higher work, will hardly be disputed.
Unique in the history of literature, and displaying the specific
qualities of its author at their height, the world could less easily
afford to lose this drama than "The Cenci", even though that be the
greatest tragedy composed in English since the death of Shakespeare. For
reasons which will be appreciated by lovers of dramatic poetry, I
refrain from detaching portions of these two plays. Those who desire to
make themselves acquainted with the author's genius, must devote long
and patient study to the originals in their entirety.
"Prometheus Unbound", like the majority of Shelley's works, fell
still-born from the press. It furnished punsters with a joke, however,
which went the round of several papers; this poem, they cried, is well
named, for who would bind it? Of criticism that deserves the name,
Shelley got absolutely nothing in his lifetime. The stupid but venomous
reviews which gave him occasional pain, but which he mostly laughed at,
need not now be mentioned. It is not much to any purpose to abuse the
authors of mere rubbish. The real lesson to be learned from such of them
as may possibly have been sincere, as well as from the failure of his
contemporaries to appreciate his genius--the sneers of Moore, the
stupidity of Campbell, the ignorance of Wordsworth, the priggishness of
Southey, or the condescending tone of Keats--is that nothing is more
difficult than for lesser men or equals to pay just homage to the
greatest in their lifetime. Those who may be interested in studying
Shelley's attitude toward his critics, should read a letter addressed to
Ollier from Florence, October 15, 1819, soon after he had seen the vile
attack upon him in the "Quarterly", comparing this with the fragments of
an expostulatory letter to the Editor, and the preface to "Adonais".
(Shelley Memorials, page 121. Garnett's Relics of Shelley, pages 49,
190. Collected Letters, page 147, in Moxon's Edition of Works in one
volume 1840.) It is clear that, though he bore scurrilous abuse with
patience, he was prepared if needful to give blow for blow. On the 11th
of June, 1821, he wrote to Ollier:--"As yet I have laughed; but woe to
those scoundrels if they should once make me lose my temper!" The
stanzas on the "Quarterly" in "Adonais", and the invective against Lord
Eldon, show what Shelley could have done if he had chosen to castigate
the curs. Meanwhile the critics achieved what they intended. Shelley, as
Trelawny emphatically tells us, was universally shunned, coldly treated
by Byron's friends at Pisa, and regarded as a monster by such of the
English in Italy as had not made his personal acquaintance. On one
occasion he is even said to have been knocked down in a post-office by
some big bully, who escaped before he could obtain his name and address;
but this is one of the stories rendered doubtful by the lack of precise
details.