Yet the criticism was also working more slowly, at a deeper level of Shelley’s mind. He brooded on it, though he appears to have spoken to nobody for the time being. Mary records that he visited the galleries constantly on his own, during these mid-October days. The weather was beginning to break up in earnest now, and though the temperature in Florence remained fairly mild, the wind began to get up in the afternoons, and high cloud raced across the sky from the west, sweeping in from the sea beyond Pisa. Shelley went for walks along the banks of the Arno thinking of everything that the Quarterly attack represented, thinking of his own exile, his ‘passion for reforming the world’, his apparent impotence to help the downtrodden people of England, the disasters of his private life and inevitably, at 27, the beginning of the end of his youth. He had noticed, with a slight shock, that he already had premature threads of grey hair. Yet everything was still to be done. His walks sometimes took him beyond the city walls into the wooded regions by the river, where the autumnal leaves streamed among the silver grey trunks of birch and plane trees. He carried a new notebook with him.46 On the seventh page, he jotted a fragmentary entry:
Twas the 20th of October
And the woods had all grown sober
As a man does when his hair
Looks as theirs did grey & spare
When the dead leaves
As to mock the stupid
Like ghosts in…47
The 20th was a Tuesday. On one of the following days, towards the end of the week, he again took the notebook out, and began a second fragment, jotted down at the other end. It was a longer piece altogether, elegiac, but less pessimistic in tone, with the line length extended, and the rough couplet altered to the English terza rima. After twenty-three lines it too faltered and came to a halt, ending:
And this is my distinction, if I fall
I shall not creep out of the vital day
To common dust nor wear a common pall
But as my hopes were fire, so my decay
Shall be as ashes covering them. Oh, Earth
Oh friends, if when my has ebbed away
One spark be unextinguished of that hearth
Kindled in…48
It was now the weekend of 23–24 October. On Sunday Shelley again went to Delesert’s reading-room, and saw there a copy of Reynolds’s satirical pastiche of Wordsworth’s poem of the same title, ‘Peter Bell II’.49 Shelley’s scorn and confidence were returning; moreover he had a poem in the making.
On Monday morning, 25 October, he began a cold but angry letter to the editor of the Quarterly, drafting it in what usually served as his fair-copy notebook.50 ‘Sir. . . .I hereby call upon the Author of that Article or you as his responsible agent publickly to produce your proofs of that assertion [to the disadvantage of my personal character], or as you have thrust yourselves forward to deserve the character of a slandered, to acquiesce also in. . . .’ But the letter would not do, and he threw down his pen.
On Monday afternoon he went for another solitary walk along the Arno, and watched in the sky above Casciano the gathering of a violent storm against the clear cold blue. The wind was hard from the west. When he returned to the Palazzo Marini he had his poem. ‘This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno…on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.’51
Shelley picked up the same pen52 with which he had been writing to the Quarterly, turned the notebook upside down, and entered a clean draft of his poem. He dated it at the head ‘Oct 25’, and gave its title.53 But he was still having a little trouble with the last stanza, and pulling a second notebook at random on to his table, he ran through another draft across two pages. The lines seemed almost right:
… Those ashes from an unextinguished hearth . . .
… For through my lips to the frozen earth . . .
. . . O Wind
When winter comes Spring lags not far behind…54
Then, in triumph and defiance, he scrawled below in Greek a tag from Euripides, as if he had just won a tremendous victory ..’55 ‘By virtuous power, I a mortal, vanquish thee a mighty god.’ The poem was complete.
I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Clear themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the univers
e
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
The last week of October and the first of November continued for Shelley in a whirl of creative and business activity. He seemed to find time for everything. The arrangements to organize the financing of Henry Reveley’s steamboat had run into unexpected complications connected with Shelley’s account at Brookes in London, which was suddenly found to be overdrawn. A cheque for fifty pounds in Italian sequins had already been forwarded to Livorno as a first payment towards the steamboat expenses on 21 October, with a promise of £200 to follow immediately. On 28 October, much to his surprise, he received the bill of £200 back from his English agent explaining that it had been bounced by Brookes. Explanatory letters flew off to Maria Gisborne and Henry, while inquiries and demands were sent post-haste to his solicitor Longdill, to Peacock and to his faithful financial adviser and aid in London, Horace Smith. Due to carelessness between Sir Timothy, Whitton and Longdill, Shelley’s annuity had simply not been paid into his London account. Smith rapidly put all this to rights by the end of November.56 Reveley’s £200 eventually reached him before Christmas. Meanwhile Shelley sent him improving letters, ‘let you & I try if we cannot be as punctual and business like as the best of them’, and urged the importance of Reveley learning to write a good business letter. He also advised Mr Gisborne, through Henry, of the inadvisability of keeping his family’s investments in British state bonds ‘at this crisis of approaching Revolution’.57
Meanwhile he did his best to support Mary through her fourth pregnancy, and relenting on her account, to make movements towards helping Godwin who had been convicted in the autumn of owing £1,500 in arrears on his rent at Skinner Street. Claire was not forgotten either, and inquiries went out to the new vice-consul at Venice during the Hoppners’ absence in Switzerland, asking about Allegra’s health and education, ‘and where Lord Byron is, or where he is next expected to be’.58 A plan even began to form in his mind about making a rapid visit to England after Christmas, travelling on his own. Both from the point of view of politics and poetry, London seemed to be the most interesting place in the world to be; and with so many people anxious to see him — Hunt, Peacock, Hogg, certainly Godwin and probably Ollier, not to mention Mr Harris of Covent Garden — it no longer seemed such a hostile spot. Of course there was the problem that Mary was set against the idea, from the first moment that he vaguely mentioned it to her.59
This same week, the week after the writing of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, and the week before the expected arrival of Mary’s baby, saw the composition of the 152 stanzas of Peter Bell the Third. It was in Shelley’s words, ‘a very heroic poem’, and intended like The Mask, but for different reasons, for immediate publication; though to Ollier he wrote that ‘perhaps no one will believe in anything in the shape of a joke from me’.60 Shelley had read Hunt’s witty review of both Wordsworth’s original ‘Peter Bell’, and Hamilton Reynolds’s smart parody, ‘Peter Bell II’ at Livorno in the Examiner.61 But it was not until he read the originals at Delesert’s that the idea for a third Peter Bell came into his mind. He wrote the whole work, poem and preface, and pseudo-pedantic footnotes, in a wild spirit of mockery and seriousness combined. It had much of the tone and élan of his comic transformation of the Quarterly’s attack in his letter to Ollier.
The core of Peter Bell the Third is a political attack on Wordsworth, and to a lesser extent Coleridge: ‘He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound . . . and now dull — oh so very dull! it is an ultra-legitimate dullness.’ It was written at breakneck speed, more than twenty stanzas a day, as Shelley explained in his preface. ‘Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; the orb of my moonlike genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad . . .’62
It is dedicated, under a pseudonym, to Tom Moore, and turns satirically upon the issues of public reputation and fame which Shelley was in fact deeply concerned about. Shelley’s manner is both comic, and strangely sad:
Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges,[6] you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns; when St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians. I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, Miching Mallecho.63
The poem has the rough, rapid-moving, colloquial surface of The Mask, though its satire, being less forceful and single-minded, is also lighter and nimbler, moving to the attack simultaneously on several points. It has genuine wit, and it is the one poem of Shelley’s life where one can clearly discern the acrid elegance of Pope. It is in seven parts, entitled severely: ‘Death’, ‘The Devil’, ‘Hell’, ‘Sin’, ‘Grace’, ‘Damnation’ and ‘Double Damnation’. The poem is set throughout — in as much as it has a location — in a kind of nightmare London, a Zoroastrian double of the real city. Half-familiar figures and distortions flit past including Coleridge lost in Germanic reveries, Cobbett inciting the mob to a festival of murder, several of Lord Liverpool’s ministry, the Prince Regent, Sir William Drummond, reviewers, lawyers, bishops and society ladies all swept along in a wild phantasmagoria of lost souls, ‘a pestilence-stricken multitude’. The most strange and Protean of all is the protagonist Peter, who is sometimes clearly Wordsworth pinned with an acute critical phrase — ‘turned to a formal puritan, a solemn and unsexual man’; sometimes he is a kind of composite poet, a Wordosoutheridge betraying both his political and poetical creed; and sometimes he is even Shelley himself crucified in the reviews:
Then seriatim, month and quarter,
Appeared such mad tirades. — One said —
‘Peter seduced Mrs. Foy’s daughter,
Then drowned the mother in Ullswater,
The last thing as he went to bed.’. . .
One more, ‘Is incest not enough?
And must there be adultery too? . . .
By that last book of yours WE think
You’ve double damned yourself to scorn;
We warned you whilst yet on the brink
You stood. From your black name will shrink
The babe that is unborn.’64
But this was mockery that ran almost masochistically close to the bone. Yet the best of the work, and the best is very good indeed, lies in the two short sections: No. 3, ‘Hell’; and No. 5 — ‘Grace’. Both have an extraordinary kind of intellectual gaiety, which flourishes amid the grimness of the setting. The writing of ‘Hell’ has an unflinching eye, which seems both childlike and lethal. Hell is of course London.
Hell is a city much like London —
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity. . . .
There is a ***, who has lost
His wits, or sold them, none knows which;
He walks about a double ghost,
And though as thin as Fraud almost —
Ever grows more grim and rich.
There is a Chancery Court; a King;
A manufacturing mob; a set
Of thieves who by themselves are sent
Similar thieves to represent;[7]
An army; and a public debt. . . .
There is a
great talk of revolution —
And a great chance of despotism —
German soldiers — camps — confusion —
Tumults — lotteries — rage — delusion —
Gin — suicide — and methodism;. . .
There are mincing women, mewing,
(Like cats, who amant miserè,)
Of their own virtue, and pursuing
Their gentler sisters to that ruin,
Without which — what were chastity?. . .[8]
And all these meet at levees; —
Dinners convivial and political; —
Suppers of epic poets; — teas,
Where small talk dies in agonies; —
Breakfasts professional and critical. . . .
At conversazioni — balls —
Conventicles — and drawing-rooms —
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 82