Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  For Shelley Rome too worked steadily on his health with restorative powers. By the end of March it was ‘materially better’ though his spirits were ‘not the most brilliant in the world’. He seems to have attributed this to the continuing solitariness of their situation from English society, though at other times he expressed his relief at avoiding the English. Italian society offered some compensations, however, as he explained to Peacock in a gently provocative description of Italian women. He had, once again, changed his opinion on that score, and garlic was less in evidence.

  The Romans please me much, especially the women: . . . Their extreme innocence & naïveté, the freedom and gentleness of their manners, the total absence of affectation makes an intercourse with them very like an intercourse with uncorrupted children, whom they resemble often in loveliness as well as simplicity. I have seen two women in society here of the highest beauty, their brows & lips and the moulding of the face modelled with sculptural exactness, & the dark luxuriance of their hair floating over their fine complexions — and the lips — you must hear the commonplaces which escape from them before they cease to be dangerous.6

  After the initial burst of touristic enthusiasm, the Shelley household began to fall into a regular routine. A drive or a ride in the Borghese Gardens became an almost daily custom, and Claire frequently spent whole mornings there delighting in the mixture of formality and wilderness, ‘extensive with a variety of green shady nooks, with fountains and statues’. She found a special place on the steps of the Temple of Aesculapius where she would sit and read Wordsworth.7 Mary also liked the carriage part of these visits, but one has the impression that she tired easily, and preferred visits to galleries and museums nearer the Corso, and sketching expeditions with little Willmouse in the Forum or the Colosseum. She was also reading a lot, Shakespeare and Livy.

  For Shelley, the spirit of Rome gradually came to condense itself into three magical gardens of archaeology: — the Forum, the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla. He walked over the first two daily and prompted Claire to write in her diary: ‘In ancient times the Forum was to a city what the soul is to the Body.’ Shelley’s favourite was moonlight walks, and on these he would sometimes go alone, and sometimes take one or other of the girls. From a comparison of Mary’s journal and Claire’s diary it would seem that he preferred on the whole not to take them together. Best of all he preferred to go alone. ‘I walk forth in the purple & golden light of an Italian evening & return by star or moonlight thro this scene. The elms are just budding, & the warm spring winds bring unknown odours, all sweet from the country. I see the radiant Orion through the mighty columns of the temple of Concord,[1] & the mellow fading light softens down the modern buildings of the Capitol the only ones that interfere with the sublime desolation of the scene. On the steps of the Capitol itself stand two colossal statues of Castor & Pollux, each with his horse; finely executed though far inferior to those of Monte Cavallo, the cast of one of which you know we saw together in London — This walk is close to our lodging, & this is my evening walk.’8

  Of all the monuments and marble fragments in the Forum, it was the Arch of Titus, standing at the eastern end of the Via Sacra, and the Arch of Constantine standing below it in the south-western corner of the Piazza di Colosseo, which exerted the most deep and continuous interest. Titus, a single triumphal arch erected in AD 81 to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, was called in medieval times the Arch of the Seven Lamps, because of the magnificent reliefs on the interior of the portico depicting the triumphal Roman chariot carrying off slave and spoils and the huge seven-branched Jewish candlestick. Constantine, a massively vulgar triple arch erected in AD 315, shows the decline of the Roman classic ideal, but is luxuriously decorated by a brilliant series of earlier reliefs, ripped from the monuments of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and packed between the eight Corinthian columns of the supporting façade. It was this marvellously clear, vigorous, set of epic reliefs and sculptures which filled Shelley’s imagination with a vision of effortlessly achieved symbolic power. He was deeply impressed by the clarity of their carved line, and the grace of their hovering presences. They were not merely sculpture, they were ballet suspended in stone, and they offered him an example and an inspiration. From these he saw how images could be made both to retain their humanity, and express divinity, superhuman force and eternal power or potential. In two of the carvings he found specific images — the triumph, the chariot and the winged angels — which he was able to incorporate directly into his work. Shelley first described these carvings in detail in his letters and his Roman notebook, and later transferred them into his poetry.

  Walking back from the Forum one evening he entered in his notebook on the imperial destruction of Jerusalem:

  Titus is represented standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous members of his triumphant army, and the magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged.

  The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the imagery almost ceased with the lapse of fifty generations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer’s family, now a mountain of ruins.

  The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habitation for owls and dragons. The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory. Rome is no more than Jerusalem.9

  The Forum was itself too populated with tourists, and too close to No. 300 Corso to serve as one of Shelley’s open-air studies; but by walking on for some thirty minutes, over the Palatine hill, leaving the Circo Maximo and the Tiber on his right hand, he could reach the fantastic, jungled ruins of the Termi di Caracalla. As he had done at Marlow, he made this expedition into the wilderness the beginning of his writing routine every morning, with his pockets stuffed with books, portable pen and ink, and one of his small sketching notebooks bound in black leather.[2] The huge Baths of Caracalla, which could accommodate over 1,500 people, had been begun by Septimus Severus in AD 206 and continued to serve the Romans as bathing place, gymnasium, sports club and community centre until the Goths cut the aqueducts in the sixth century. Completely ruined by the nineteenth century, they still retained massive surrounding walls, and huge fragments of brick archways and vaulting, many of them towering over 200 feet into the air. These were entirely overgrown with plants and shrubs, but were still secure enough to be climbed by one or two remaining staircases. The effect was like an enormous hanging garden. The floor of the ruins was covered with the red clay of Rome, through which pieces of brilliantly coloured mosaic glowed after rain. Shelley made this deserted but luxuriant site his headquarters, and soon found he could disappear within its labyrinth for as long as he chose, climbing high into some aerial grove, perched among the blossom. He took up the Prometheus drama once more and later he wrote his preface, ‘This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and the thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.’10

  To Peacock at the end of March, he attempted in a long descriptive passage to capture the extraordinary atmosphere of the baths, which was producing on him an almost mystical effect.

  Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled with flowering shrubs whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, & tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one rapidly travelling along the plain. The perpendicular walls resemble nothin
g more than that cliff in Bisham wood which is overgrown with wood, & yet is stony & precipitous — you know the one I mean, — not the chalk pit, but the spot which has that pretty copse of fir trees & privet bushes at its base, & where Hogg & I scrambled up & you — to my infinite discontent — would go home.

  He went on to explain how one could ascend by ‘an antique winding staircase’, dangerously open to the precipice at many turns, and come out some hundred feet up on the summit of the walls.

  Here grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle & the myrtelus & bay & the flowering laurustinus whose white blossoms are just developed, the wild fig & a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks thro the copse wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of these immense labyrinths . . . . Around rise other crags & other peaks all arrayed & the deformity of their vast desolation softened down by the undecaying investiture of nature. Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey.11

  For Shelley, Rome presented overwhelming evidence, both literal and symbolic, that the schema which he had dimly revealed in the colossal wreck of Ozymandias was a permanent and historic truth. Power and imperialism were destroyed. The forces of human love and freedom, and of Nature, which he regarded as allies, did in the end reassert themselves, just as the beautiful and innocent white blossoms of the laurustinus covered over the desolation of Caracalla. Fresh from his terrible experiences at Naples, which had brought him to the verge of breakdown, the recovery of this vision swept over him with the force and conviction of a religious revelation. It was this force, this empassioned wish-fulfilment, that he tried to structure and express in the poetic drama of Prometheus Unbound. He found himself writing now, not as an English tourist but as a Greek visionary. He wrote on a Greek text, with a Greek theme and within a Greek upaithric temple of Nature.

  Once he began writing, Shelley wrote as ever, with immense speed. Only four weeks after their arrival in Rome, he notified Peacock: ‘My Prometheus Unbound is just finished, & in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters & mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; & I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.’12

  The myth of Prometheus the fire-bringer and liberator of mankind was already a familiar force in the liberal culture of the nineteenth century, quite apart from the poems of Goethe and Byron. The success of Mary Shelley’s own modernization of the myth clearly demonstrated its popular currency to Shelley. Politically too, the myth of Prometheus had always been present in the ‘progressive philosophy’ of rationality and revolution which had swept over Europe since the date of Shelley’s own birth. The French Revolutionaries had been Promethean by adoption. Shelley was acutely conscious of his predecessors, but he intended to reconstruct the Aeschylean drama in a new form.

  . . . I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement . . . . [he] is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature . . . .13

  Jupiter (God) was to be conceived as wholly evil, Prometheus (Satan) as a type of human perfection. There were to be none of the slow, monumental moral dawnings of Aeschylus, or the central and strictly speaking tragic recognition of necessity by Prometheus. Shelley’s schema would be more melodramatic, but also more rigid: two totally alienated moral principles would oppose each other within a Manichean framework. The universe was to be polarized into the extreme gnostic oppositions, dark and light, tyranny and freedom, Ahrimanes and Oromazes.

  Moreover, Shelley wanted to attempt something new in his use of poetic language. He wrote:

  The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed.

  To this he added a literary observation which confirms that his Italian reading had been creatively important.

  This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets . . . were in the habitual use of this power.14

  Physically external images which express mental states and processes, dominate the language of the poem. There is a sense in which the whole action is metaphysical rather than physical, and in which the setting of the drama is not so much the universe at large but the dome of a single human skull, so that the ruins of Caracalla sometimes seemed to him like an immense cranial chamber. The technique of using a physical scene as ‘evocation’ of a mental state was one Shelley had first discovered and used in Alastor four years previously and perfected in ‘Julian and Maddalo’. But now Shelley wanted to go one stage further, as he believed the Greeks had done. He wanted his poetry to be so highly wrought that a physical image, while attaining completeness in itself, simultaneously offered meanings at several other levels. He wanted a mythic image, for example, to present also a psychological, or political, or modern scientific meaning: or perhaps all three at once. When the Furies come to torment Prometheus in Act 1, they first announce themselves purely in terms of mythic action:

  First Fury. We are the ministers of pain, and fear,

  And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,

  And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue

  Through wood and lake some struck and throbbing fawn,

  We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live . . . .15

  But very soon, they threaten Prometheus with psychological torment and their language begins to carry a strictly medical meaning as well as the mythic one:

  . . . we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,

  And foul desire round thine astonished heart,

  And blood within thy labyrinthine veins

  Crawling like agony.16

  The physiological suggestiveness of these lines, the implications of the adrenalin ‘shock’ to the heart and the literally ‘monstrous’ invasion of venereal infection through the delicate network of the blood system (an image conceived as long ago as ‘Mont Blanc’) give the Furies of guilt and remorse a wholly new and contemporary presence. The medical base of this image was to be characteristic of the whole poem, whose other major image sources are also from the natural sciences: geology, climatology and electrophysics especially.

  Some of these new ‘multiple’ images are so brilliantly sustained that they threaten to detach themselves from the text. In the second act, two fauns sit on a rock at the entrance to Asia’s cave, and question each other about the nature of the animating forces within the universe. (One thinks of Shelley and Byron at the Diodati.) ‘Canst thou imagine where those spirits live Which make such delicate music in the woods?’ one asks. The second faun’s reply is not only a speculation about the creative forces within Nature — ‘the music in the woods’ — but also about the creative forces within the mind. At a mythic level, Shelley draws upon the sprite world of Shakespeare’s Tempest; but he simultaneously achieves a wonderful psychological image of the ‘act of creation’ in man. It is interesting to note that it is presented as an act of pure elated ‘play’. The image is also given a scientific base. This is drawn from the action of marsh gas rising from within submerged and decomposing vegetation as a result of solar radiation and igniting on contact with the air. Shelley had doubtless observed this phenomenon ma
ny times in the maremma surrounding Naples and Livorno. Strictly speaking this is methane, a gas formed from decaying organic matter, which spontaneously combusts on contact with oxygen. The phenomenon is sometimes known as will ’o the wisp or ignis fatuus, but Shelley’s image can also be transcribed: CH4 + O2:

  I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,

  The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun

  Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave

  The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,

  Are the pavillions where such dwell and float

  Under the green and golden atmosphere

  Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;

  And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,

  The which they breathed within those lucent domes,

  Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,

  They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,

  And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire

  Under the waters of the earth again.17

  The ‘multiple’ image is here moving on three perfectly interpenetrated levels of myth, natural science and psychology. The idea of ‘natural fire’ as a creative force forms a central theme in the Prometheus drama. The use of the ‘multiple’ image, directly inspired by Shelley’s reading of the Greeks, was one of the most ambitious elements in the poem he had set out to write.

  Finally, Shelley intended to give his Prometheus a political dimension. His position was as ever progressive, anti-authoritarian and radical, though he wrote that ‘it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform . . .’.18