Selected Poems and Prose Read online

  II

  Remarkably, for a writer whose works did not enjoy wide circulation, Shelley’s volumes of verse were regularly reviewed in contemporary literary periodicals.20 These notices encompass a more extreme range of opinion than that provoked by any major English poet of the Romantic period. The Shelley that emerges from them is not a single figure but several, usually portrayed in striking colours, not infrequently from the garish quarter of the palette. The most egregious instance of this kind is the vain, sour, querulous, ignorant and vicious individual who is sketched in a review of Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam in the April 1819 number of the Quarterly Review.21 To this image of moral deformity even blacker traits might be added, the reviewer (Shelley’s Eton contemporary J. T. Coleridge, nephew of the poet) assures readers, were he inclined to ‘withdraw the veil of private life’. Years later T. L. Peacock recalled this review as a ‘malignant’ example of ‘odium theologicum’, exhibiting all the venomous animosity of religious dispute.22 The same might be said more emphatically of an article in The Investigator for 1822, which serves as both an obituary notice of Shelley and a repudiation ‘with unmingled horror and disgust’ of Queen Mab as ‘nine cantos of blasphemy and impiety, such as we never thought that any one, on the outside of Bedlam, could have uttered’, before going on to imagine the spirit of the drowned atheist trembling before the throne of God, to be judged for infidelity, seduction and incest.23 As against the paternalistic severity of the Tory Quarterly Review, administering necessary chastisement to one of its own class who has gone astray, while allowing that he just might still be redeemed, and the evangelical and moralistic Investigator’s unmingled revulsion, may be set the liberal Leigh Hunt’s sustained defence of his friend Shelley in a series of reviews and articles in The Examiner, as a benevolent reformer, tolerant, philanthropic and, although a philosophical non-believer, a truer Christian, because more charitable, than his self-righteous detractors. Hunt’s admiration found an unexpected echo when, in 1821, relatively cheap pirated editions of Queen Mab began to appear. Ironically, the poem that Shelley originally imagined as influencing aristocratic youth circulated widely right through the nineteenth century among the labouring classes, in particular Chartists, socialists and freethinkers – acquiring the popular epithet of ‘the Chartists’ Bible’.24

  Opinions considered subversive of the established order and a supposedly licentious biography were not the focus of all contemporary reviews, however; a not inconsiderable number avoid any comment on the political stance and moral character of the man to deliver what can be nuanced and subtly appreciative responses to the poetry. To be sure, there are reservations. The representation of incestuous rape and parricide in The Cenci provokes shock and revulsion, for example, and the peculiarly concentrated imagery of Prometheus Unbound is condemned by several critics as muddled and incomprehensible – ‘absolutely and intrinsically unintelligible’ and displaying a ‘total want of meaning’, according to the Quarterly Review.25 Such judgements notwithstanding, there is a large consensus that Shelley possesses poetic and dramatic powers that are considerable, even exceptional, and that they promise well for future development. Shelley himself insisted in A Defence of Poetry on the distinction between the imperfections of the poet as a man and the poet ‘inasmuch as he is a poet’ and as such ‘the happiest, the best, the wisest and the most illustrious of men’ (here). In fact this idea of the poet as a divided being, though in another key, was a leading theme of criticism of Shelley in his lifetime and continued in various forms through the nineteenth century and beyond as an opposition between the reprehensible opinions and behaviour of the man and his exceptional gifts and accomplishments as an author. A conspicuous example appears in the May 1820 issue of the London Magazine, then under the editorship of the liberal John Scott, which delivers a long and scathing verdict on Shelley as one of those modern writers who, out of self-absorbed vanity, claim as morally liberating what is in fact indecent, weak and corrupted. In particular, the plot, characters and tendency of The Cenci are judged to fail utterly of their declared object of ‘teaching the human heart … the knowledge of itself’ (see Preface: here). For all that, the reviewer considers that the tragedy, together with his other works, amply demonstrates that Shelley the poet displays ‘real power of intellect, great vivacity of fancy, and a quick, deep, serious feeling, responding readily and harmoniously, to every call made on the sensibility by the imagery and incidents of this variegated world’.26

  The majority of contemporary reviews were based on Shelley’s long poems, the vehicles of his most contentious views. It was not until the appearance in 1824 of Mary Shelley’s edition of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley that a substantial quantity of his medium-length and shorter verse, including a large number of personal lyrics, became available. This landmark volume, containing eighty-three completed poems, fragments and verse translations, most of them not previously published, aimed to win the readers that Shelley’s poetry had failed to find while he was alive. In addition, Mary’s brief Preface represented her first efforts to counter her late husband’s reputation as depraved and profligate, instead recalling him as a wise, brave and gentle companion and friend, selflessly devoted to ‘the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind’.27 Within two months Posthumous Poems had been withdrawn from sale, following the intervention of the poet’s father, after little more than 300 of the 500 copies that were printed had been sold. Sir Timothy Shelley did not wish the works of his late scandalous son to be given an afterlife during his own lifetime, and made the suppression of the Posthumous Poems and the destruction of all remaining copies a condition of maintaining the allowance he provided to Mary and her son Percy.28 But an interest in Shelley’s poetry had been stimulated, and a number of unauthorized editions appeared before Mary published the enlarged Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in four volumes in 1839. Later that year she reissued the Poetical Works as a single volume with additions. Together these supplemented Posthumous Poems with more than forty further titles. The publication of Shelley’s Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) completed Mary’s editorial labours, which brought before the public almost all his verse and an important selection of his prose, including A Defence of Poetry.

  Mary Shelley’s editions were remarkable achievements in the recovery of Shelley’s texts, especially those that she derived from his often untidy and tangled manuscripts. But they were neither complete nor completely accurate. As the considerable mass of the surviving manuscripts gradually became available for examination in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of individual publications and editions were able to supplement and correct the foundations she had laid down in 1824 and 1839–40. They also provided more ample information on Shelley’s life and the circumstances in which his texts were published, as did the substantial scholarly biography by the Victorian academic Edward Dowden.29 The critical editions of the complete poetry by W. M. Rossetti (1870, 1878) and (especially) by Harry Buxton Forman (1876–7) confirmed Shelley’s position as one of the major poets of the nineteenth century, and the inclusion of his poetry in the Oxford Standard Authors series (1904) might be said to have sealed his canonical status. For bibliographical details of on-going twentieth-century editions of the complete poetry and prose, see Abbreviations and Further Reading.

  As the nature and extent of Shelley’s poetry became more widely known, it gradually secured its place in the mainstream of English literary tradition, though still regularly provoking controversy. Some important waymarks along this route to acceptance were the advocacy for Shelley of the Cambridge Apostles, a group of undergraduates which included Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam and which bore the cost of a facsimile of the first edition of Adonais in 1829. The most widely read and influential Victorian anthology of verse, Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), included twenty-two titles by Shelley, the third l
argest number after William Wordsworth (forty-one) and Shakespeare (thirty-two). Palgrave’s selection of Shelley’s verse consisted exclusively of lyrics, largely of those first published by Mary in Posthumous Poems, half of these on the subject of love – thus setting the terms of popular appreciation of the poet through to the end of the century and into the twentieth. But as Shelley’s reputation as a lyricist of intimate feeling grew, the radical poet continued to live a parallel existence, though in a different social sphere. Queen Mab enjoyed phenomenal circulation in cheap pirated texts following the unauthorized editions of 1821, for one of which the nominal printer and publisher was prosecuted and imprisoned on an action brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.30 The formation of the Shelley Society in 1885 by the scholar, Christian socialist and advocate for workers’ education F. J. Furnivall marked yet another stage in the process of legitimization. The society, which counted George Bernard Shaw among its members as well as several of the great Victorian Shelley specialists, arranged monthly lectures, supported reprints of rare Shelley texts and encouraged serious study of the poet’s ideas and literary techniques. Its most celebrated undertaking was sponsoring the well-publicized first performance of The Cenci in 1886. Ostensibly a ‘private’ occasion – the Lord Chamberlain, exercising the office of censor, had refused to license a public production – the performance was attended by an audience of some 2,400. The society’s achievement in mounting The Cenci was to situate Shelley’s tragedy on the moral fringe of the lively Victorian theatrical world and test its suitability for the stage. The performance was extensively reviewed as a notable dramatic occasion – Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw were among the reviewers – attracting considered, and mixed, opinions on the tragedy itself, the production and the acting, rather than the outraged condemnation the play had attracted when first published.31 Out of the Shelley Society’s activities also emerged the committed political interpretations Shelley’s Socialism (1888), by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, and the social reformer and vegetarian Henry Salt’s A Shelley Primer (1887), a tradition continued, and revised, for the twentieth century in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (1980).

  III

  In a letter of October 1819 to his publisher, Charles Ollier, Shelley evokes the example of the leading poets of the day, for him Wordsworth and Byron, who have drawn upon ‘the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view’.32 Born in 1792, three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, Shelley lived in a time of ‘great events’ such as had never been experienced in the modern history of Europe. Pre-eminent among these was the grand narrative of the French Revolution. Its ideals and accomplishments, failings and atrocities, its experiment in republicanism, the emergence of Napoleon – the empire that rapidly succeeded, followed by the final collapse of the Napoleonic regime and the restoration of monarchy – constituted an overarching influence on Shelley’s writing in verse and prose, as it did on the minds and expectations of his contemporaries. And if the French revolutionary and imperial experiments are viewed as encompassing not only an astonishing sequence of political initiatives and military actions but also the intellectual influences that underlay them – the philosophical and literary responses to them across Europe and in the wider world, the debates occasioned, the sense of possibility opened up and the impetus given to both reform and reaction – then we can appreciate the force of Shelley’s remarks to Byron in letters of September 1816 on the Revolution as ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’ and its suitability for a literary work ‘involving all that is best qualified to interest and to instruct mankind’.33 The recent history of France inevitably recalled the establishment of the young American Republic, which itself had been achieved through a ‘just and successful Revolt’ (as Shelley puts it in A Philosophical View of Reform: here) inspired by democratic ideals and with French assistance.34 An associated conflict, the British–American War of 1812, continued from the middle of that year until the end of 1814.

  The war with France, which lasted with brief interruptions from 1793 to 1815, occasioned significant hardship in Britain. Increased taxation and the scarcity of resources required by the war effort were felt most acutely by those of low or modest income, the continuing heavy impositions necessary to repay the increase in the national debt being a particular source of privation and resentment. The outdated and unequal system of parliamentary representation in Britain had long been the cause of popular discontent, and led to a post-war revival of organized agitation for electoral reform, which was harshly repressed by government. Following the first defeat of Napoleon, the European settlement agreed by the victorious powers at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) represented a cruel disappointment for British liberals, who condemned it as reactionary; while the ‘Holy Alliance’ of September 1815 entered into by Austria, Russia and Prussia (but not Britain), which sought to lend religious sanction to the renewed order of absolutist governance and forestall any fresh revolutionary movements, appeared to European liberal opinion as no more than a cover of pious hypocrisy for the continued exercise of arbitrary political authority. Both at home and abroad the ideals of the Revolution seemed clearly to have given way to reaction.

  As an intellectual heir of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shelley viewed the momentous happenings and public debates of his time within an established tradition of critical thought. The leading ideas that shaped his outlook, evident in both his published works and his private correspondence, are rationalist, secular, progressive and egalitarian. He regularly evokes, to take important examples, the Roman poet Lucretius (98–c.55 BC), materialist critic of religious superstition; the scientific reformer Francis Bacon (1561–1626); the philosophical anarchist William Godwin (1756–1836), who would become his father-in-law in 1816; and the empirical philosopher and sceptic Sir William Drummond (?1770–1828). A summary definition of the modern liberal perspective, together with a history in outline of the major thinkers who have contributed to form it, is set out in the initial section of A Philosophical View of Reform, which concludes:

  The result of the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment of the principle of Utility [or ‘general advantage’] as the substance, and liberty and equality as the forms, according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered.

  Shelley was persuaded that these ideals, conspicuously recalling the Revolutionary Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, would inevitably be realized by a gradual dissemination of knowledge. Human well-being and lasting social improvement could be achieved only if they were preceded and directed by the necessary mental and moral enlightenment. This moderate gradualism he shared with many upper- and middle-class intellectuals of his time. In common with them, he struggled with the practical dilemma of how best to promote the durable reform of inequitable and oppressive political regimes in an age when established power had become deeply resistant to reform. In a postscript to his pamphlet An Address to the Irish People (1812), Shelley urges the need for a comprehensive moral and political regeneration of society which avoids equally ‘the rapidity and danger of revolution’ and the minor concessions and half measures that amount to no more than the ‘time servingness of temporizing reform’.35

  Religion, too, Shelley regarded from a rational and sceptical point of view. Although he maintained a deep admiration for the character and social teachings of Christ, he considered that the grand biblical scheme of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Last Judgement could not command belief in an enlightened age. He especially deplored what he considered the historical exploitation of the fictional narratives and prophecies of the Bible by the collusion of the Christian Church with dynastic and absolutist political systems in order that the ‘cunning and selfish few’ might consolidate their power over the fearful and ignorant many.36 Nor could he accept the conclusions on the origin and governance of the universe arrived at solely by reasoning on the phenomena and operatio
ns of nature, the traditional ground of ‘natural religion’ or ‘deism’, subscribing instead to the sceptical conclusions of empirical philosophers such as David Hume, who held that certainty was unattainable in such matters. Nonetheless, in various contexts Shelley formulated his intuitive persuasion of the existence of a universal presiding and directing power that is immanent in nature. ‘The interfused and overruling Spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things’ is how he puts it in ‘On Christianity’ (here), where he explores the idea most fully. This Spirit he conceived of not as remote from human experience but as closely implicated with it. In his commentary on the beatitude ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8) Shelley makes it clear that, for him, so far from being transcendent and impenetrable, the divine is experienced by the exercise of virtue at the highest reach of our human nature (here).