Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley’s good spirits, despite uncertain health, were produced by the knowledge of the quality of his work which was now reaching London for publication. Indeed the posting of The Mask at the end of September 1819 marks the most critical single moment of his entire professional career. Hunt had already received ‘Julian and Maddalo’, posted in August; manuscript copies of Prometheus had gone both to Peacock and Ollier earlier in September, and a clean-copy of The Cenci had been posted ahead of the printed edition to Peacock on 21 September. Thus, four major works, the fruit of Shelley’s first eighteen months in Italy, were all arriving in London virtually within a few days of each other. In retrospect one can see that everything turned on Hunt’s acceptance of The Mask for immediate publication in the Examiner as Shelley intended.

  The question was whether Shelley’s work would now finally reach a broad readership. The publication of The Mask would undoubtedly have had explosive effect, all the more because it was to be first detonated among a liberal rather than a strictly radical readership. Even among the radicals, who saw published in September Hone’s pamphlet The Political House that Jack Built with vicious illustrations by Cruikshank, as part of the massive wave of post-Peterloo protest, the absolutely explicit attack and power of Shelley’s poem would have struck home with unique impact. Moreover it spoke to the people in the street, not merely to the reviewer or the politician or the Hampstead drawing-room. The very roughness of the verse, the deliberate ruggedness of grammar and style, pushed aside the dillettante and the littérateur.

  This was a significant legal point. When Sir Francis Burdett, as part of his Peterloo protest, sent to the press an open letter, ‘To the Electors of Westminster’, he was subsequently prosecuted for seditious libel and convicted. In directing the jury at Leicester to convict, Mr Justice Best made what is one of the most significant literary and political distinctions of the age: ‘If you find in [his writing] an appeal to the passions of the lower orders of the people, and not having a tendency to inform those who can correct abuses, it is a libel.’29 In other words, if such a composition as Burdett’s was addressed to the ruling classes, it was allowable; if it was addressed to the working classes, it was libellous. There can be no doubt into which category Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy fell. Burdett was eventually sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and fined £2,000. This was only for sending a letter to the papers.

  If therefore Shelley’s poem had been printed in the Examiner, as he intended, there would undoubtedly have been a violent public controversy, and almost certainly a prosecution. But besides being a highly tendentious work, The Mask is also a great poem, and Shelley’s name would at last have begun to be generally known in liberal and radical circles and among the discerning of every political colour in England. With the beginnings of a real public reputation, it was quite possible that Harris, the director of Covent Garden, would have accepted The Cenci at least for a short run, and the two other major poems already on their way to Ollier, ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and Prometheus Unbound would surely have found a ready audience and promising sales.

  In the event, exactly the reverse happened. Hunt, after consultation with his brother John Hunt, put The Mask of Anarchy aside. It was never published in Shelley’s lifetime. Following this, and despite Peacock’s good offices, both Covent Garden and apparently Drury Lane turned down The Cenci — a dangerous subject by an unknown author. ‘Julian and Maddalo’ was never published in Shelley’s lifetime either. Prometheus Unbound appeared much later in 1820, almost unnoticed except among a handful of reviewers. It sold hardly a score of copies. The chance of popular recognition, so near in the autumn of 1819, and certainly never nearer, slipped from Shelley’s fingers, through the prudence of friends and publishers.

  Why did Hunt not publish The Mask? The short answer is clearly that he feared political prosecution. He feared with good reason. 1819 marked the height of the government’s attack on the free press, and there were no less than seventy-five prosecutions for seditious or blasphemous libel during that year.30 They resulted in heavy or crippling fines, and prison sentences ranging between a few months and five years. Hunt himself had done time as a guest of His Majesty’s Hospitality ten years previously; his brother John Hunt, the managing editor of the Examiner, was to serve a sentence of twelve months for attacking the monarchy in 1820. But on this occasion, Hunt was no longer prepared to risk his neck, and at the moment of crisis and decision he revealed his true colours as a liberal rather than a committed radical.

  When he brought out The Mask of Anarchy in 1832, to coincide with the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill, he explained his decision of 1819 in these words. ‘I did not insert it because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.’31 In other words, that the man in the street might recognize that Shelley had written a radical poem; and the Home Office also. But Hunt genuinely thought that the time was not ripe to inflame the ‘people at large’[3], and that Shelley’s belief in passive resistance was incompatible at that time with massive democratic demonstrations.

  Nevertheless one notes the roll-call of those who did protest and were prosecuted as a result of Peterloo; among many, Samuel Bamford, Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright, Sir Charles Wolseley, James Wroe of the Manchester Observer, a fearless pamphleteer Joseph Swann of Macclesfield (who was sentenced to four and a half years, which he served in chains), and above all Richard Carlile, now editor of the most notable radical paper of the period, the Republican.[4] Yet in every case these men were prosecuted for material that they themselves had both written and caused to be published. One cannot blame Hunt if his author was not in England. Shelley was not there to stand by his editor, and to take legal responsibility on his own shoulders; or indeed to choose alternative means of publication. It was Shelley’s own self-exile in Italy, his failure to be on the spot, that provided the ultimate cause of the critical sequence of failed publications in late 1819 and early 1820. This in turn was to dictate the obscure fortunes of the remaining works printed in his lifetime. But these things were not clear to Shelley for many months. On the contrary, he now felt on the offensive, for the moment of crisis had found him prepared. There was a brief interlude of house-moving and resettling for the winter.

  On 30 September, Shelley’s household, with the addition of Charles, left the Villa Valsovano. They took leave of Mrs Gisborne and Henry, with many promises concerning the steamboat, and set out on the road for Pisa and Florence. As the carriage began to bounce eastwards over the rough track, the dog Oscar leapt after it and ran alongside, his slender tail wagging, and his bright teeth smiling up to where Mary sat, eight months pregnant and trembling slightly, with the strain of travel.32

  ‘Poor Oscar!’ wrote Shelley later to Mrs Gisborne. ‘I feel a kind of remorse to think of the unequal love with which two animated beings regard each other, when I experience no such sensations for him as those which he manifested for us. His importunate regret is however a type of ours as regards you. Our memory — if you will accept so humble a metaphor — is forever scratching at the door of your absence.’33

  At Pisa, they broke their journey briefly to call upon another expatriate lady, a Mrs Mason who lived in the Via Managonella. Like Aemilia Curran, she had Godwinian and Irish republican connections. She was married, and her house, the Casa Silva at Pisa, was to become in the spring one of Shelley’s most important addresses in Italy. The roads to Florence were very bad, and Mary found the going exhausting, so they stopped one night at Pisa, and another at Empoli, finally arriving on 2 October. They moved in at once to their apartment in Madame du Plantis’s house, the Palazzo Marini at No. 4395 Via Valfonda, near Santa Maria Novella. Mary found the rooms comfortable and secure, and she was glad to hear that there were other English people in the building. She sent a note to Livorno, telling Mrs Gisborne of their safe arrival, and asking for several of thei
r books — Cobbett, Byron’s Childe Harold and The Revolt of Islam — to be sent to Mrs Mason at Pisa, together with half a pound of ‘the very best green tea’. On second thoughts, she crossed The Revolt off the list. ‘Clare & Shelley send their best love to you & I would say to Henry but that would not do from the young lady so take out her name & only remember her kindly to him as well as my self.’34

  During their first week in Florence, they went out on visits to the ballet and the opera, and Claire arranged for more music lessons. Mary could not long manage these excursions, and she stayed more and more on the sofa and in bed. Charles flirted with Zoïde du Plantis, and Shelley with an amused and practised eye observed that Zoïde was ‘not so fair but I fear as cold as the snowy Florimel in Spenser [and] is in & out of love with Charles as the winds happen to blow’.35 For the time being Charles was in a ‘high state of transitory contentment’, but he was intending to leave in November for further study in Vienna.

  Shelley was much by himself. After a preliminary tour round Florence he decided to concentrate on the Uffizi Gallery, and he concocted ‘a design of studying [it] piecemeal’ through the winter. His solitary visits became almost as regular as those to the Forum and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome had been. His aim, he said, was to observe especially in the sculpture the rules by which ‘that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension’ was realized in external form.36 Later he assembled an interesting series of manuscript notes on the subject.

  But politics and the English Revolution remained steadily in the forefront of his mind. In these weeks of October and November, he produced a whole series of brilliant political ballads, songs and elegies in which the enormous energy and angry directness of The Mask continued to flow and coruscate. These are some of the best short poems Shelley ever wrote. He also wrote a full-length verse satire on contemporary English poetry and politics; and in early November a long open letter for the Examiner attacking the prosecution of Richard Carlile for sedition. He was reading Clarendon’s three-volume The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, and also Plato’s Republic.37

  The impulse which the horror of the Peterloo massacre had given Shelley was now immeasurably deepened and intensified by the discovery of a savage personal attack in the Quarterly. The two pieces of violence — although to an outsider totally disconnected in kind — fused in his mind with the most extraordinary and creative force. Public and private sufferings were made identical in the heat of his imagination.

  Shelley had already heard from both Hunt and Ollier of the review of The Revolt of Islam in the Quarterly for April 1819 and he had written for a copy from Livorno. But before this arrived, he came across the article unexpectedly one afternoon in the second week of October at Delesert’s English Library.

  The article is long38 and the author, John Taylor Coleridge, a distant relative of the poet and a man who had been at school with Shelley at Eton, had clearly assembled a personal dossier on his subject. There are explicit references in the piece to Shelley’s misery at school, his expulsion from Oxford, his friendship with Godwin, and his withdrawal of Laon and Cythna-the ‘incestuous’ version — from circulation. On this last, the reviewer wrote with both texts before him, and made considerable and not unjustified play with Shelley’s ‘wholly prudential’ but still blasphemous alterations, and his penchant for incest. He also accused him of plagiarizing Wordsworth. It seems too that the reviewer knew of the existence of Queen Mab, and the ‘Hermit of Marlow’ pamphlets, and had made inquiries about Shelley’s relationships with Harriet, Mary and Claire between 1814 and 1816.

  Some of this background detail was so close that Shelley was convinced for the rest of his life that the writer responsible was his former acquaintance and early confidant Robert Southey.39 Who else, he wondered, could have written: ‘[Mr Shelley’s] speculations and his disappointments [began] in early childhood, and even from that period he has carried about with him a soured and discontented spirit — unteachable in boyhood, unamiable in youth, querulous and unmanly in manhood — singularly unhappy in all three.’ Who else could have paternally decided that ‘[Mr Shelley] is really too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world, but the little world within his own breast’?40 The Quarterly’s actual criticism of Shelley’s poetry was marginal, even flattering; its main case was against his ‘theories’, political, social, religious and sexual. There is an unmistakable air of gusto in the way it reduced Shelley’s radicalism ad absurdum. Taylor Coleridge was arguing from the very heart of the Quarterly belief in sound government, law and order, the social hierarchies, institutionalized religion and benevolent but firm paternalism. He intended to attack Shelley both as an individual and as a political and philosophic type, a new and dangerous species of post-Jacobin democrat and leveller. Far from making his article a mere piece of philistine viciousness, this gives it genuine social interest, the more so when one considers that the Quarterly was the most widely read and most authoritative review of the day. The article was not, as Hunt liked to make out, a mere lampoon.

  Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws — this would put an end to felonies and misdemenours at a blow; he would abolish the rights of property, of course there could thenceforward be no violation of them, no heart-burnings between the poor and the rich, no disputed wills, no litigated inheritances… he would overthrow the constitution, and then we should have no expensive court, no pensions or sinecures… no army or navy; he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles… marriage he cannot endure, and there would at once be a stop put to the lamented increase of adulterous connections amongst us, whilst repealing the canon of heaven against incest, he would add to the purity and heighten the ardour of those feelings with which brother and sister now regard each other; finally, as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in our religion. . . .

  This is at least intelligible; but it is not so easy to describe the structure, which Mr Shelley would build upon this vast heap of ruins. ‘Love’, he says, ‘is the sole law which shall govern the moral world’; but Love is a wide word with many significations, and we are at a loss as to which of them he would have it now bear. We are loath to understand it in its lowest sense, though we believe that as to the issue this would be the correctest mode of interpreting it. But this at least is clear, that Mr Shelley does not mean it in its highest sense: he does not mean that love, which is the fulfilling of the law, and which walks after the commandments, for he would erase the Decalogue, and every other code of laws.41

  This attack puts the Quarterly position very well, especially in its definition of the ‘highest love’, and also shows what it most feared. Like few other reviews it was prepared to argue ideas, or at least admit of their existence. It is also interesting that such an attack was written long before the reviewer could have even heard of Prometheus Unbound or The Cenci; or have expected the dramatic political development of Peterloo.

  The article’s final paragraph contains a memorable attempt at a personal coup de grâce in the highest style. Having referred to Shelley’s ‘proud and rebel mind’, his ‘thousand sophisms’ and his ‘impurity of practice’, it delivered itself with Ozymandian finality. We shall never know by what curious premonition John Taylor Coleridge found his biblical image:

  Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of mighty waters closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him: — for a short time are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin — finally, he sinks ‘like lead’ to the bottom, and is forgotten. So it is now in part, so shortly will it be entirely with Mr Shelley.42

  This fortissimo passage was given a final cadenza of domestic innuendo, in which reference is made to the ‘disgustin
g picture’ of Shelley’s private life over which the reviewer chose to draw a veil. ‘It is not easy’, concluded the Quarterly, ‘for those who read only, to conceive how much low pride, how much cold selfishness, how much unmanly cruelty are consistent with the laws of this “universal” and “lawless love”.’ This was intended to be the last twist of the knife. For Shelley at Delesert’s it was certainly the most unpleasant one.[5]

  It so happened on this particular afternoon that a certain Lord Dillon ‘observed at Delesert’s reading room, a young man very earnestly bent over the last “Quarterly”. When he came to the end, he straightened up suddenly and burst into a convulsive laughter, closed the book with an hysteric laugh, and hastily left the room, his Ha! Ha’s! ringing down the stairs.’43 The fiendish laugh that had troubled the Presbyterians of Glasgow on the Sabbath ten years previously had not become any more discreet.

  Shelley was shaken more than he cared to admit, but he was not outwardly cast down. Hearing on 14 October that Peacock had doubts about The Cenci which he had just read, he wrote bluffly to Maria Gisborne: ‘he don’t much like it — But I ought to say, to blunt the edge of his criticism, that he is a nursling of the exact & superficial school in poetry’. This was true enough.44 On the following day, he wrote directly to Ollier about the attack in the Quarterly, ‘well aware’ that it was by Southey: it was ‘all nothing’ — ‘trash’ — particularly that ‘lame attack on my personal character, which was meant so ill’. He was determined to show Ollier that he could ride out such stuff, and he composed an excellent comic improvisation on the coup de grâace. ‘I was amused too with the finale; it is like the end of the first act of an opera, when that tremendous concordant discord sets up from the orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once. It describes the result of my battle with their Omnipotent God; his pulling me under the sea by the hair of my head, like Pharaoh; my calling out like the devil who was game to the last; swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a French postillion on Mount Cenis; entreating everybody to drown themselves; pretending not to be drowned myself when I am drowned; and, lastly, being drowned.’45 Ollier no doubt was convinced.