Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

  And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould

  Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

  Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

  With a spirit of growth had been animated!

  Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,

  Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,

  And at its outlet flags huge as stakes

  Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes. . . .

  For Winter came: the wind was his whip:

  One choppy finger was on his lip:

  He had torn the cataracts from the hills

  And they clanked at his girdle like manacles30

  In these verses, Shelley felt that Spring was indeed far behind, and they contain much of the personal anger, revulsion and despair that he refused to acknowledge or give way to in his letters.

  Another lengthy but unfinished poem, dated in April, was an even more grotesque and shapeless piece of writing, ‘A Vision of the Sea’. It describes a tempest in which a boat — for a perhaps autobiographical reason carrying wild tigers, together with the familiar figure of a mother with child at breast — is wrecked and overwhelmed. The stormy sea is inhabited by sea-snakes and sharks. The whole fragment reads like a piece of ‘automatic’ or dream writing. Vaguely one can distinguish familiar shapes, like Henry Reveley’s steam-boat used as image to describe a tiger and a sea monster fighting in the foam:

  the whirl and the splash

  As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash

  The thin winds and soft waves into thunder; the screams

  And hissings crawl fast o’er the smooth ocean-streams,

  Each sound like a centipede.31

  The painful and empty brilliance of this excruciated writing was perhaps partly symptomatic of the kind of ‘bad nervous attacks’ which Mary noted briefly in her journal and letters during these weeks.32 These probably took the form of hysterical outbreaks, usually preceded by particularly bad and vivid nightmares, of the kind that Mary much later described in detail in 1822; or the sort of sudden overwhelming nervous seizures which Shelley himself alluded to during his work on the ‘Catalogue of Dreams’ in 1815. There is no indication that they were epileptic; or even the kind of nephritic convulsions Thornton Hunt had once witnessed at Hampstead, but they give some indication of the hidden strains under which he was living.

  Shelley slowly returned to the political theme, and picked up the thread of A Philosophical Review of Reform, continuing it into three chapters, which together form a substantial essay of 20,000 words. At the same time, he began to draft as a kind of parallel text, a formal ‘Ode to Liberty’. It began by celebrating the Spanish Rebellion, and then described the growth of Liberty throughout human history from the pre-Promethean period, to Athens, and finally to the revolutions in France, South America and Europe during Shelley’s own lifetime. The prose work and the poem cross at several points, and Shelley worked steadily at both for the rest of April and May. The essay was ready for a prospective publisher by 26 May, when Shelley again wrote to Hunt about it.33 The ode was sent to Ollier for inclusion in the Prometheus volume.

  By a philosophical view, Shelley meant that he intended to study the world history of political change and revolution, and the corresponding evolution in men’s ideas concerning their own intellectual, social and religious freedom. He believed that the gradual emergence of Liberty in human thought and institutions was a recognizable ‘law’ of social development. This had nothing to do with a belief in material progress, nor did it discount the fact that terrible political ‘winters’ and cycles of tyrannical and bloody reaction frequently intervened. Shelley normally identified such periods of reaction with the triumph of imperialisms which included the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish Slave Empire in South America and the Indies, the Turkish Empire and the European despotisms of the eighteenth century.

  Nevertheless the gradual change to more and more liberated forms of life and government he believed to be a historical necessity, and as such capable of study and acceleration. This broad argument forms the substance of his first chapter, and it includes in its scope reference to China, India, Persia, North and South America, the Jews in Palestine, the Turks, Greece, Syria and Egypt; and France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The argument settled most sharply on Europe as the current focus of historical change, and within Europe, on England — ‘the particular object for the sake of which these general considerations have been stated’. England, Shelley believed, was to be considered in this sense ‘at a crisis in its destiny’.34 In this first chapter Shelley also stated his belief in the connection — again, philosophically speaking, the necessary connection — between periods of national upheaval and social revolution, and periods of outstanding literary greatness. ‘For the most unfailing herald, or companion, or follower, of an universal employment of the sentiments of a nation to the production of beneficial change is poetry, meaning by poetry an intense and impassioned power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and nature.’35

  Shelley was not in sociological terms, very specific about the nature of this connection. He did not say that great literature actually produced great revolutions; or vice versa. He seemed rather to feel that the two ran a mysteriously parallel course — ‘herald, or companion, or follower’ — and that the common factor was not so much direct social causation or didactic intent, but a certain quality of imaginative power, as it were, ‘let loose’.

  This was a controversial assertion, for there is clearly a case for arguing the opposite, that great periods of literature are only produced by periods of national stability which frequently occur in the very midst of an authoritarian or imperialist régime. Shelley cited as part of his historical case, the great dramatists and philosophers of fourth-century Athens; ‘Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great writers of the age of Elizabeth and James 1st’; the painters and poets of the Italian republics of the Lombard league before the domination of the Medicis in Florence; and finally the English poets and philosophers of his own age, which he defined as dating from the French Revolutionary period of the 1790s. There is too some evidence that Shelley felt the four books of the New Testament and some of the earliest Apostolic and Apocalyptic writings, all produced in Asia Minor during the first century AD, also served in this argument and ‘heralded’ the collapse of the Roman Empire.36 Altogether he makes this a powerful position, and it may subsequently be found developed in the work of later nineteenth-century theorists of literature and society, notably Arnold, Taine and Marx.

  Turning to his English contemporaries, whom Shelley believed passionately, and surely rightly, occupied one of the great ‘moments’ of literature, he tried to define more carefully the operations of the forces of imagination which he understood to be at work. Two points are specially remarkable about what he wrote. First, that not only poets but many other classes of imaginative writer are included in his description. Second, that the conscious intention of a writer, or even his formal philosophic and political loyalties, did not in the end affect their inevitable tendency to serve ‘the interests of liberty’. This was later to be the position of Marx.

  The persons in whom this power takes its abode may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little tendency to the spirit of good of which it is the minister. But although they may deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve that which is seated on the throne of their own soul. And whatever systems they may have professed by support, they actually advance the interests of liberty.

  It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers, whatever may be their system relating to thought or expression, without being startled by the electric life which there is in their words. They measure the circumference or sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit at which they are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it is less their own spirit than the s
pirit of their age.

  They are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they conceive not; the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.37

  The idea that poets should be the legislators was not a new one. It may be found explicitly stated as early as George Puttenham’s Arte of Englishe Poesie (c. 1585), or as late as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). Shelley’s innovation was to see that they were ‘unacknowledged’: not merely unacknowledged by politicians and businessmen, which was obvious; but unknowing, unaware of their historical role, themselves. It was the writers who ‘are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished’; they themselves did not apprehend the true source of their inspiration and its ultimate social effect.

  The most difficult, and in effect the most metaphysical idea in Shelley’s analysis, was the idea of the writer as a mirror of the future. His image is complicated: writers are ‘the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’. There is nothing here about the conscious intention of a writer in predicting new inventions or social institutions; nor about the writer as some kind of clairvoyant. It is rather that in what the great writer produces naturally, the future pressures and contradictions and achievements of his society are unconsciously expressed. The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

  This difficult and sophisticated idea of Shelley’s can be seen at work at a more personal level in something he wrote to Peacock during May. Commenting on Peacock’s unexpected marriage, he remarked thoughtfully: ‘I was very much amused by your laconic account of the affair. It is altogether extremely like the denouement of one of your own novels, and as such serves to a theory I once imagined, that in everything any man ever wrote, spoke, acted, or imagined, is contained, as it were the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.’38 The argument can be seen — itself an acorn — already emerging in the prose prefaces of The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound. Several months later Shelley used a simplified version of it as his peroration to a magazine article written for Peacock’s benefit. This was the famous passage in his A Defence of Poetry.

  Chapter 11 of A Philosophical View of Reform was entitled ‘On the Sentiment of the Necessity of Change’. In it Shelley examined at length the outstanding features of the political and social conditions in England in 1819–20 which had created ‘the dilemma of submitting to a despotism which is notoriously gathering like an avalanche year by year, or taking the risk of something which it must be confessed bears the aspect of revolution’.39 He discussed the subject under several heads: the shift of the ‘real constitutional presence’ of the majority away from parliamentary representation; the corruption in the new financial system of ‘Public Credit’, the national debt and capital investment; the increase in the average daily hours of agricultural and manufacturing labour which corresponded to a severe decrease in real worth of the average daily wage; the class interest enshrined in the fashionable theories of Malthusian population control; the distinction between property acquired through ‘labour, industry, skill’ and that acquired through inheritance and capital investment; and finally the issue of universal male and female suffrage.

  Shelley set out these issues with a skill and simplicity which can only be bettered in the professional writings of the Smithians and Benthamites of the period, and the pages of the Westminster Review. He drew conclusions from it which in their political penetration and courageous originality are rare in England until the writings of the Chartist period and the early work of Engels.[1]

  Concerning the kind of exploitation of labour through capital investment, Shelley wrote:

  One of the vaunted effects of this system is to increase the national industry: that is, to increase the labours of the poor and those luxuries of the rich which they supply; to make a manufacturer [factory hand] work 16 hours where he only worked 8; to turn children into lifeless and bloodless machines at an age when otherwise they would be at play before the cottage doors of their parents; to augment indefinitely the proportion of those who enjoy the profit of labour . . . . The consequences of this transaction have been the establishment of a new aristocracy, which has its basis in fraud . . . an aristocracy of attorneys and excisemen and directors and government pensioners, usurers, stock jobbers, country bankers, with their dependents and descendants.40

  Of the decline in the real ‘constitutional presence’ of the people, Shelley began from the calculation that the Cromwellian Revolution, as enshrined in the new electorate of the Long Parliament in 1641, had signified that one man in every eight carried the democratic power of the vote. This had been a good start towards ‘actual representation’. But the figure had got worse, not better, in the following 170 years. By the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, it had fallen to something in the region of one man in twenty carrying the vote. This was because ‘population increased, a greater number of hands were employed in the labour of agriculture and commerce, [unrepresented] towns rose where villages had been . . . a fourth class therefore appeared in the nation, the unrepresented multitude’.41 By 1819 Shelley reckoned the ratio of enfranchisement had plunged to something like ‘one in several hundreds’, and that the House of Commons was so far from being even a ‘virtual representation’ of the English people that politically England could be accurately described as a despotic oligarchy. ‘. . . A sufficiently just measure is afforded of the degree in which a country is enslaved or free, by the consideration of the relative numbers of individuals who are admitted to the exercise of political rights.’ By this measure, England was neither democratic nor free, and without reform became less so every year.

  One of Shelley’s most radical positions was revealed in his analysis of the ‘national debt’ which had been contracted over the period of the American and Napoleonic wars, the interest of which was being paid back in the form of national taxes at the rate of £45 million a year. Shelley argued that this money was in effect only a war investment by the rich and propertied class, and that it was neither just nor constitutional to attempt to pay off the interest on it by a national tax affecting all classes. There was no justice in the poor paying for the war profits of the rich. Shelley’s solution was to dissolve the debt at a stroke: no profits or interest at all should be paid, and the remaining capital sum should be dispersed among the original stock-holders and investors who would have to share their own losses: ‘It would be a mere transfer among persons of property. Such a gentleman must lose a third of his estate, such a citizen a fourth of his money in the funds; the persons who borrowed would have paid, and the juggling and complicated system of paper finance be suddenly at an end.’42 This severely egalitarian argument reflected Shelley’s view on the fundamental injustice of vast inherited properties, and of rich personal estates created out of capital investment profits.

  Private property as such, and inheritance, he accepted within certain vigorously defined limits of social justice. Only the active, productive member of society had a real right to property:

  Every man whose scope in society has a plebian and intelligible utility, whose personal exertions are more valuable to him than his capital; every trades man who is not a monopolist, all surgeons and physicians and those mechanics and editors and literary men and artists, and farmers, all those persons whose profits spring from honourably and honestly exerting their own skill and wisdom or strength . . . . Labour, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably and innocently exerted are the foundations of one description of property, and all true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired.43

  Against this he set the established view of property which he regarded as abhorrent:

  But there is another species of property which has
its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence, without which, by the nature of things, immense possessions of gold or land could never have been accumulated. Of this nature is the principal part of the property enjoyed by the aristocracy and by the great fundholders, the great majority of whose ancestors never either deserved it by their skill and talents, or acquired and created it by their personal labour . . . .44

  There was only one genuine and just source of property:

  Labour and skill and the immediate wages of labour and skill is a property of the most sacred and indisputable right and the foundation of all other property.45

  With this broad analysis of the conditions of labour, wages, property and electoral franchise in England in 1819 set out, Shelley summarized the conclusions of his second chapter. There were five:

  (1) That the majority of the people of England are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated.

  (2) That they know this, and that they are impatient to procure a reform of the cause of their abject and wretched state.

  (3) That the cause of this peculiar misery is the unequal distribution which, under the form of the national debt, has been surreptitiously made of the products of their labour and the products of the labour of their ancestors; for all property is the produce of labour.

  (4) That the cause of that cause is a defect in the government.

  (5) That . . . every enlightened and honourable person, whatever may be the imagined interest of his peculiar class, ought to excite them to the discovery of the true state of the case and to the temperate but irresistible vindication of their rights.46

  It is clear from this chapter how Shelley’s powers of political thought and analysis had developed steadily from the heady days of Proposals for an Association and A Declaration of Rights (1812) and through the first dawning of an economic analysis in the Hermit of Marlow pamphlets of 1817. Far from declining into the Whig-liberal background from which he had come, Shelley had moved steadily — though sometimes painfully — into a more and more truly radical position. He had now come to realize the implications of capital exploitation, the real need for a mass democratic movement, and the necessary commitment of writers and educated men to address themselves to the people, as well as to their own class.