Selected Poems and Prose

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  15 Rousseau: In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the natural state of human equality had been obscured by modern civil society and recommended the order of nature as a standard for social reform.

  16 No man … masters: Quoting Matthew 6:24: ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ In the remainder of the essay, PBS further interprets Christ’s doctrines, stressing the need to minimize bodily wants and to pursue the virtue and knowledge that promote universal love, justice and equality.

  On Love

  PBS appears to have drafted these remarks on the psychology of love between 20 and 25 July 1818 after translating Plato’s Symposium and before drafting what he refers to as a ‘prefatory essay’ (Letters II, p. 26) to his translation, ‘A Discourse on the manners of the Antient Greeks relative to the subject of Love’. In the ‘Discourse’ he examines the differences between ancient Greek and modern notions and practices in the domain of sexual behaviour, taking special care to explain the social circumstances in which male homosexuality became the model of erotic love that figures centrally in the Symposium. He also affirms his conviction that the innate human impulse to love another being increases in complexity, depth, intensity and duration as civilization advances, is indeed an index of its advance. ‘On Love’ takes inspiration from the lyrical praise of love in the Symposium while maintaining its own reservations on the possibility of erotic fulfilment. Among other important explorations of love in PBS’s work which amplify, vary, test and alter the ideas of the essay are: Alastor (Preface, and ll. 149–91), Laon and Cythna (Dedication, and ll. 2587–2712), Epipsychidion and A Defence of Poetry.

  The text is taken from PBS’s untitled MS draft in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 11 (see BSM XV). The title ‘On Love’ was supplied by MWS when she published the essay for the first time in The Keepsake for 1829.

  1  proof: Test or trial.

  2  what is Love: PBS first wrote then cancelled the response: ‘It is the sweet chalice of life whose dregs are bitterer than wormwood.’

  3  This is Love: Followed in PBS’s draft by the cancelled sentence: ‘All else is vanity.’

  4  prototype: ‘The first or primary type of a person or thing; an original on which something is modelled’ (OED). See note 7 below.

  5  soul within our soul: PBS introduces the figure of a ‘soul out of my soul’ into his affective autobiography in Epipsychidion, l. 238.

  6  Paradise … overleap: Alluding to Satan’s entry into Paradise by leaping over the boundary surrounding it in Milton’s Paradise Lost IV.179–83.

  7  antitype: A person or thing foreshadowed by and conforming to the prototype. See note 4 above.

  8  inconceivable: Incomprehensible.

  9  Sterne says … some cypress: ‘Was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections—if I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to’ (Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, ed. Paul Goring (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 28).

  On Life

  PBS drafted this untitled prose fragment in late 1819 in the notebook that contains his draft of A Philosophical View of Reform. It was later removed from the notebook and is now in the Morgan Library and Museum (MA 408) and supplies our text. Thomas Medwin published a version in 1832 in The Athenaeum and again the following year in The Shelley Papers. MWS included a more accurate text in 1840 (ELTF) under the present title.

  Beginning as an expression of wonder and astonishment, ‘On Life’ develops a series of metaphysical and epistemological reflections which encapsulate PBS’s thinking on a range of philosophical questions. Both materialism and the ‘popular’ dualism of mind and matter (together with the dogmatic theism such dualism has underpinned) are deemed inadequate to account for our experience of ‘life’. Instead PBS subscribes to the ‘intellectual system’, a sceptical idealism derived from the empiricist philosophers David Hume (1711–76) and William Drummond (?1770–1828). Drummond’s Academical Questions (1805), a major source for ‘On Life’, defended Hume against the attacks of Scottish ‘Common Sense’ philosophers like Thomas Reid (1710–96) and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). In a letter of November 1819, PBS cited Drummond as ‘the most acute metaphysical critic of the age’ (Letters II, p. 142). The central tenet of the ‘intellectual system’ is that we can have no knowledge of things independent of the ideas that we form of them, or, as PBS puts it, that ‘nothing exists but as it is perceived’. This position is to be distinguished from the ‘immaterialism’ which PBS rejected in a letter to Godwin in July 1812 (Letters I, p. 316). Although MWS wrote in her Preface to 1840 (ELTF) that PBS was ‘a disciple of the Immaterial Philosophy of Berkeley’, PBS does not accept the conclusion of George Berkeley (1685–1753) that the ideas that form the world have been created and are maintained in existence by an act of divine perception. ‘Mind’, PBS writes, ‘as far as we have any experience of its properties … cannot create, it can only perceive’, a position he reaffirmed in September 1819 (Letters II, p. 122–3). Hence things, according to PBS’s understanding of the ‘science of mind’, exist: it is just that we can have no objective knowledge of them. Compare ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 142–4, where PBS interrogates the relationship between the mountain and ‘the human mind’s imaginings’.

  For critical consideration of PBS’s engagement with the ‘intellectual philosophy’, see: Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 13–43; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 61–72; C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Skepticism (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 24–41; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 131–53.

  1  of: The draft possibly reads ‘by’.

  2  ‘Non merita … il Poeta’: ‘None but God and the Poet deserve the name of creator.’ See A Defence of Poetry.

  3  ‘such stuff … made of’: Quoting Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i.156–8: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’

  4  ‘looking both before and after’: Shakespeare, Hamlet: ‘Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused’ (see ‘Additional Passages’ in Wells and Taylor OUP edition, p. 689).

  5  ‘thoughts … eternity’: In Milton’s Paradise Lost II.142–51, Belial fears lest he and the other rebel angels might be annihilated if they exasperate God further and so lose their ‘thoughts that wander through eternity’ (l. 148).

  6  change and extinction: PBS first wrote ‘nothingness and dissolution’. Neither phrase is cancelled.

  7  pioneer: An infantryman whose task was ‘to clear terrain in readiness for the main body of troops’ (OED).

  8  the state called reverie: In the fifth Promenade of his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker; 1782) Rousseau gives just such an account of this ‘state’.

  9  blunted: The word is ambiguously formed in the MS. MWS and some later editors read ‘planted’. Norton 2002 prefers ‘blunted’, citing the identical phrase ‘impressions blunted by re-iteration’ in A Defence of Poetry (p. 675).

  10 preceded: MWS in 1840 (ELTF) gives the word as ‘produced’.

  11 basis of: Written above ‘cause of’ in the MS; neither phrase is cancelled.

  12 thoughts: Written above ‘things’ in the MS; neither word is cancelled.

  The Coliseum

  PBS began this unfinished story on 25 November 1818, after he, MWS and Claire Clairmont had been in Rome for four days and had made daily visits to the ruined amphitheatre (MWS J
ournal I, p. 239). It is impossible now to tell when he gave up working on it, but the Colosseum was still on his mind in mid December 1818, when he sent T. L. Peacock an enthusiastic description of it from Naples, some two weeks after leaving Rome (Letters II, pp. 58–9). PBS might have taken the story up again during his second visit to the city, from March to June 1819, when the celebrations of the Easter season (‘The Coliseum’ is set on Easter Day), and the Shelleys’ renewed visits to the amphitheatre, will have rekindled his interest.

  A partial first draft survives in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12 (see BSM XVIII). Our text is based on the fair draft in MWS’s hand, with corrections by PBS, in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 5 (see BSM XXII), and on the continuation of this draft in PBS’s own hand now in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4 (see BSM XXI). A number of gaps in MWS’s transcription have been supplied from PBS’s first draft, which we have also preferred on some points of punctuation and spelling. In a few instances where the fair draft is unresolved, a conjectural reading has been necessary. Thomas Medwin published a partial text in The Shelley Papers (1833), where he described it as ‘the first scene of a tale which promised to rival, if not to surpass, “Corinne”’ (Shelley Papers, pp. 51–2), Mme de Staël’s romance (1807) set principally in Rome and Naples. Medwin says that PBS ‘allowed me to copy’ this ‘exquisite fragment’, but editors have found his text unreliable. MWS published a complete text in 1840 (ELTF), where she drew comparison in her Preface with PBS’s essay ‘On Love’:

  ‘The Coliseum’ is a continuation to a great degree of the same subject. Shelley had something of the idea of a story in this. The stranger was a Greek,—nurtured from infancy exclusively in the literature of his progenitors,—and brought up as a child of Pericles might have been; and the greater the resemblance, since Shelley conceived the idea of a woman, whom he named Diotima, who was his instructress and guide. In speaking of his plan, this was the sort of development he sketched; but no word more was written than appears in these pages. (I, p. x)

  The similarity that MWS notes to PBS’s essay ‘On Love’ is pronounced but other interpretative contexts are possible. For example, it may be that PBS conceived his story as a response to Byron’s treatment of the Colosseum in his much-anticipated and widely read Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), where the ancient ruin is presented as a symbol of the frailty of human nature and the futility of human endeavour. In December 1819, PBS wrote to Charles Ollier of Julian and Maddalo, composed in 1818, that he meant ‘to write three other poems [like it], the scenes of which will be laid at Rome, Florence, and Naples, but the subjects of which will all be drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities, as that of this was’ (Letters II, p. 164), and it may be that he had conceived ‘The Coliseum’ as part of a series of prose (rather than verse) pieces to be set in different Italian cities. Medwin claimed that ‘like Byron in “Childe Harold”, or Madame De Staël, [PBS] meant to have idealised himself in the principal character’, i.e. the stranger who accosts the old man and his daughter in the amphitheatre (Shelley Papers, p. 52).

  The place of the Colosseum in the cultural history of Romantic-period Europe is considered by Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For detailed critical commentary, see Kevin Binfield, ‘“May They Be Divided Never”: Ethics, History, and the Rhetorical Imagination in Shelley’s “The Coliseum”’, KSJ 46 (1997), pp. 125–47; Timothy Clark, ‘Shelley’s The Coliseum and the Sublime’, Durham University Journal 85 (July 1993), pp. 225–35; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 163–73; and Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 76–80.

  1  The Coliseum: PBS’s first draft is entitled ‘Diotima’ (the name of a woman in Plato’s Symposium who instructs Socrates on the true nature of love). The fair draft is untitled; the title ‘The Coliseum’ first appeared in Medwin’s Shelley Papers (1833).

  2  Praxitelean … greatest of poets: Praxiteles (born c.390 BC) was one of the leading sculptors of Classical Greece. The ‘greatest of poets’ is Homer, traditionally held to have been blind.

  3  awful: Awe-inspiring.

  4  the Forum: An area at the heart of ancient Rome which enclosed the city’s most important public buildings; also known in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the Campo Vaccino (literally ‘cow pasture’) because of its overgrown condition.

  5  clamys: Usually spelled chlamys: ‘A short mantle or cloak worn by men in ancient Greece’ (OED).

  6  Antinous: A Greek youth, famed for beauty and the favourite of the Roman emperor Hadrian (reigned AD 117–38).

  7  Over all … form and gestures: In Shelley Papers, Medwin glossed this description of the stranger: ‘There never was drawn a more perfect portrait of Shelley himself’ (p. 129n.).

  8  obtrusions: Unwelcome intrusions or advances.

  9  Il Diavolo di Bruto: ‘Brutus’ Devil’; Plutarch recounts, in the Life of Julius Caesar and the Life of Marcus Brutus, the appearance of an evil spirit to Brutus on two occasions, at Sardis and before the Battle of Philippi, the second occasion portending Brutus’ death. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (IV.ii.326–39) gives the apparition the form of Caesar’s ghost, which Brutus questions – ‘Art thou some god, some angel or some devil?’ – receiving the reply: ‘Thy evil spirit’. Brutus interprets the ghost as a sign that his ‘hour is come’ (V.v.20).

  10 its clear … universe: Cp. Epipsychidion, ll. 164–9.

  11 ‘Are they … chambers?’: As Timothy Clark observes, the old man’s question recalls the fact that in ancient Rome elephants were kept in the Colosseum to kill and be killed during the games, and that the amphitheatre could be partly flooded to stage mock sea battles (‘Shelley’s The Coliseum’, p. 233).

  12 its craggy summit: The Colosseum is not nearly high enough to intercept the clouds.

  13 the condition of life: Cp. this and the following sentence with PBS’s description of love in his essay ‘On Love’.

  14 with tingling joy: Perhaps to be replaced by ‘with extas[y]’, which is written in a minute hand above this line.

  15 [?have been sought by them]: PBS’s draft is difficult to decipher and our text is conjectural.

  16 Heraclitus … so sour a disposition: Greek philosopher (c.535–c.475 BC), author of the treatise On Nature, and noted for his melancholic and sometimes misanthropic disposition.

  17 Democritus … her request: The Greek philosopher Democritus (c.460–c.370 BC) was one of the founders of the ‘atomist’ school, which maintained that the universe was composed of space and tiny, indivisible particles. The story of his sister and the festival of Ceres (goddess of agriculture) is told in Diogenes Laërtius’ ‘Life of Democritus’, in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (third century AD).

  18 The men … wisdom: The ancient Romans and the Greeks from whom they acquired philosophy.

  19 my limbs: An uncancelled word below the line, perhaps ‘person’, may be intended as a replacement.

  20 and: PBS’s draft ends here, in mid sentence.

  Related Passage

  In 1840 (ELTF) MWS printed this passage without title as a footnote keyed to the phrase ‘It was such itself’; later editors have followed her example. However, apart from the reflections on the remains of ancient Rome which figure in both the ‘Related Passage’ and the story, there does not appear to be any specific connection between them. Placing the passage in a footnote, as MWS has done, suggests that she recognized a general similarity to ‘The Coliseum’ but did not regard it as integral to the text. The passage was drafted separately from the body of the story in PBS’s MS notebook and there is no indication that it should figure as part of the narrative. Moreover, unlike the story, the passage describes a broader scene, such as might be found in the Roman Forum.
It has more in common with PBS’s draft of 1819 on ‘The Arch of Titus’ than with the ‘The Coliseum’ (see BSM XXI and Letters II, pp. 89–90). The Arch of Titus is located near the Roman Forum; neither is visible from within the Colosseum, where PBS’s story is set. PBS might have intended the passage for a part of ‘The Coliseum’ which is now missing from the MS or which he planned but never wrote, or for another purpose altogether.

  1  [?palaces]: PBS’s draft is difficult to decipher and might read ‘places’.

  2  a human … solemn joy: PBS alludes to the Roman ‘triumphs’, processions of troops, captives and booty, organized to celebrate military victories abroad and sometimes passing under triumphal arches constructed to memorialize the occasion.

  From On the Devil, and Devils

  Our text is based on PBS’s draft, now Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9 (see BSM XIV), which was composed in late 1819–early 1820. MWS planned to include a version in 1840 (ELTF), but withdrew it shortly before publication of that volume, having presumably decided that the content was too controversial (a printer’s proof with corrections by MWS survives in the Bodleian Library).

  ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ was first published in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1880), edited by Harry Buxton Forman. PBS’s leading purpose in this witty piece seems to be to poke fun at the Christian religion by drawing attention to the problematic nature of one of its chief figures: the Devil. He was almost certainly referring to ‘On the Devil’ in his letter of 20 January 1821, to his publisher Charles Ollier, in which he remarks that he ‘had written a Lucianic essay’ (after the ancient Greek satirist Lucian) concerning how ‘the popular faith is destroyed—first the Devil, then the Holy Ghost, then God the Father’ (Letters II, p. 258). However, PBS also takes his disquisition as an occasion covertly to attack the use, by the British government, of informers and agents provocateurs to repress political dissent. Peter Bell the Third features PBS’s serio-comic creation of a Devil for the contemporary world.