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 Giuliano, 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;[17] 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 arméd 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 mediæval phase, and casts aside the husk of out-worn
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_l._ He gave Leigh
Hunt, on one occasion, 1000_l._; and he discharged debts of Godwin,
amounting, it is said, to about 6000_l._ In his pamphlet on _Putting
Reform to the Vote_, he offered to subscribe 100_l._ for the purpose of
founding an association; and we have already seen that he headed the
Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 100_l._ These instances of his
generosity might be easily multiplied; and when we remember that his
present income was 1000_l._, out of which 200_l._ 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 large, low-roofed room,
correcting proofs of _Laon and Cythna_, between the Apollo of the
Belvedere and the 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.[18] 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 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 (Jan. 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 Ferrara, Nov. 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 seen 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 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 at 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.[19] 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 been
already 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 to 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.[20]
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, Vaccà, 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 the 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 stanch through good and ill
report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew almost 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 rinnuova,
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 his 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 (Aug. 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.[21] 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_.[22] 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 intertexture
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 æsthetic 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.[23] 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, 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.”[24] 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.[25]
To dogmatize upon the topic would be worse than foolish. There was
something incalculable, incommensurable, and dæmonic 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 è più 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 to 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. Æschylus, 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 humane 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 region 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 Ægean 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 mythopœic 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
mythopœic 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 æsthetics 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 wheresoe’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?[26] What vignette is more
exquisitely coloured and finished than the little study of a pair of
halcyons in the third act?[27] 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
Demogorgon, 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 dæmonic,
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
characterise 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
Shakespere. 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 their 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_.[28] 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 lack of precise details.