The opening scene shows Adam and Eve, Cain and his sister-wife Adah, Abel and his sister-wife Zillah, preparing to offer sacrifices and prayers to Jehovah. Cain asks his parents some of the questions that had puzzled Byron in his schooldays: Why did God invent death? If Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, why had God planted that forbidden tree so prominently in the Garden of Eden; and why should the desire for knowledge be accounted a sin? Why, in punishment for Eve’s modest collation, had the Omnipotent decreed labor as the lot and death as the fate of all living things? What is death? (No one had yet seen it.) Cain is left rebelliously brooding while the rest go to their tasks of the day. Lucifer (Lightbearer) appears, takes over the stage as in Milton, and calls himself proudly one of those
Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that
His evil is not good.
Adah returns and pleads with Cain to rejoin his relatives in the field; he has neglected his share of the day’s work; she has done it for him, and now invites him to an hour of love and rest. Lucifer taunts her by describing love as a lure to reproduction, and predicts the centuries of toil, strife, suffering, and death awaiting the multitudes that will trace their existence to her womb…. Cain and Abel prepare their altars; Abel sacrifices the first of his flock; Cain offers fruit, but, instead of a prayer, asks again why the Omnipotent has permitted evil. Abel’s sacrificial lamb is consumed in a bright flame that ascends to heaven; Cain’s altar is overthrown by an angry wind that scatters his fruit in the dust. Furious, he tries to demolish Abel’s altar. Abel resists; Cain strikes him; Abel dies. Adam reproaches Eve as the primal source of sin; Eve curses Cain; Adah pleads for him: “Curse him not, mother, for he is my brother / And my betrothed.” Adam bids Cain leave them and never return; Adah accompanies Cain into banishment. Since Abel had died childless, all humanity (Byron concludes) was Cain’s progeny, and bears his mark in secret instincts finding vent in violence, murder, and war.
Cain seems at times an essay in defiance by a schoolboy atheist who has not read Ecclesiastes; and yet at times the drama rises to an almost Miltonic power. Walter Scott, to whom the Mystery was dedicated, praised it; as Goethe, losing for a moment his Olympian perspective, said, “Its beauty is such as we shall not see a second time in the world.”104 In England its publication was met with a furor of criticism and horror: here, it seemed, was another Cain, but a worse murderer—killing the faith that had sustained a thousand generations. Murray warned Byron that he was rapidly losing readers for his works.
The portrait of Cain’s faithful Adah gave another proof of tender elements in Byron’s character; but his treatment of Allegra and her mother showed a tougher strain. The once happy child, now four years old, had been saddened by the distances that separated her from both her parents; and she felt that the Hoppners were wearying of her. Byron sent for her to come to Ravenna; and yet he could hardly ask her to live with him and his menagerie in the palace of the man who was becoming audibly uncomfortable with his horns. After much thought he put her into a convent at Bagnacavallo, twelve miles from Ravenna (March 1, 1821). There, he presumed, she would have companionship, be out of his way, and receive some education. That this would be Catholic did not disturb him; on the contrary he felt that it would be a tragedy for the girl to grow up without a religion in an Italy where every woman was a pious Catholic even in her amours. After all, if one must be a Christian, better go all the way, take the Apostles’ Creed, the Mass, and the saints, and be a Catholic. “It is my wish,” he wrote on April 3, 1821, “that Allegra should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion.”105 When Allegra was ready for marriage he would settle upon her a fortune of four thousand pounds, and she would have no difficulty in finding a husband.
This was convenient for Byron, but when the news of it reached Claire Clairmont she protested passionately, and begged that Shelley get the child restored to her. Shelley undertook to go to Ravenna and see how Allegra was faring. He arrived there on August 6, 1821, and was cordially received by Byron. He wrote back to his wife: “Lord Byron is very well, and was delighted to see me. He has … completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led in Venice.”106 Byron told him that political conditions would soon compel him to move to Florence or Pisa; he would take Allegra with him, and she would be close to her mother. Shelley was content with this, and turned his attention to something more immediately affecting himself.
He was dismayed to learn that Allegra’s nurse Elise (whom he had dismissed from his service in 1821) had told the Hoppners that he had had secret sexual relations with Allegra’s mother; that Claire, in Florence, had borne his child, which he had at once placed in a foundling asylum; furthermore, that Shelley and Claire had treated Mary shamefully, even to his beating her. The astonished poet wrote at once to Mary (August 7), asking her to write to the Hoppners denouncing these tales; Mary did, but sent her letter to Shelley for his approval; he showed it to Byron, and apparently relied on him to give it to Hoppner. Shelley was disappointed to find that Byron had known of the rumors, and had apparently believed them. The famous friendship began to cool, and cooled further when Byron moved from Ravenna to Pisa, leaving Allegra in her convent.
That change was the result of mixing love and revolution. In July, 1820, Teresa’s father, Count Ruggero Gamba, had secured from the Papal Curia a writ awarding her a separation from her husband, with regular payments of alimony from him, on condition that she live with her parents. She moved accordingly, and Byron, still living in the Guiccioli palace, became a frequent visitor to the Gamba household. He was delighted to find that Gamba and his son Pietro were leaders in the Carbonari, a secret organization plotting to overthrow Austrian rule in north Italy, papal rule in middle Italy, and Bourbon rule at Naples over the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”—i.e., south Italy and Sicily. Byron, in “The Prophecy of Dante” (1819), had already appealed to the Italian people to rise and free themselves from Hapsburg or Bourbon rule. By 1820 Austrian spies suspected him of paying for weapons to be delivered to the Carbonari; and a royalist poster set up in Ravenna called for his assassination.107 On February 24, 1821, the Carbonari insurrection failed; its leaders fled from those parts of Italy under Austrian, papal, or Bourbon rule. Count Gamba and son went to Pisa; on Byron’s advice Teresa soon followed them; and on November 1, 1821, Byron arrived there, and settled in the Casa Lanfranchi on the Arno, where Shelley had already rented rooms for him. Now would come the final test of their friendship.
XIII. CONTRASTS
The two poets had now reached the fullness of their development. The elder had still some cantos of Don Juan to compose; these are so bitter in their hostility to England that even a Gallic taste can find them immoderate. The Vision of Judgment (October, 1821) is also mercilessly satirical, but Southey’s prior A Vision of Judgment (April, 1821) had provoked retaliation by calling Byron the leader of the “Satanic” school in English poetry; Byron cut him up with gusto and skill. In these final compositions he moved away from the romantic self-pitying melancholy of Childe Harold toward a more classic pose of reason and humor judging all—but moderation still escaped him. His letters—especially those to Murray—show a maturer mood, for there his caustic wit was tempered with critical self-scrutiny, as if he had discovered that modesty opens a door to wisdom.
He was modest about his poetry. “I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion…. I prefer the talents of action—of war, or the senate, or even of science—to all the speculations of those mere dreamers.”108 He praised Shelley as a man, but thought much of his verse to be childish fantasy. He was anxious to be valued as a man rather than as a poet. He was painfully conscious of his appearance. He preferred riding to walking, for his right foot distracted attention from his handsome face. Dietetically his life was an alternation between eating to obesity and dieting to debility; so in 1
806 his five feet eight and a half inches weighed 194 pounds; by 1812 he was down to 137; by 1818 he had swelled to 202. He was proud of his sexual achievements, and sent mathematical reports of them to his friends. He was a man of emotion; often lost his temper or self-control. His intellect was brilliant but unsteady; “the moment Byron reflects,” said Goethe, “he is a child.”109
In religion he began as a Calvinist; in Childe Harold he spoke of the Papacy with old-Protestant vigor as “the Babylonian whore.”110 In his twenties he read philosophy, liked Spinoza, preferred Hume, and declared, “I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”111 In 1811 he wrote to a proselytizing friend, “I will have nothing to do with your immortality”; ten years later he wrote, “Of the immortality of the soul it appears to me that there can be little doubt.”112 In Italy he fell in with the climate and the people, and began to think Catholically; when the Angelus rang he longed to share the peace that seemed for a moment to settle upon all native souls; “I have often wished that I had been born a Catholic.”113 Toward the end (1823) he talked, as in boyhood, of predestination and God.114
Having in adolescence lost his religious belief, and having found no moral mooring in literature or philosophy, he had no fulcrum from which to offer resistance to the sensations, emotions, or desires that agitated him. His free and agile intellect found persuasive reasons for yielding, or his temperament gave reason no time to display the wisdom of social restraints. Apparently he curbed his homosexual inclinations, and satisfied them with warm and faithful friendships; but he yielded to the charms of his sister; and in Childe Harold he boldly told of his love for
one soft breast
Which unto his was bound by stronger ties
Than the Church links withal.115
Condemned by English society for exceeding its permitted indulgences, or failing to cover them gracefully, he declared war upon British “hypocrisy” and “cant.” He satirized the upper classes as “formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.” He condemned the exploitation of labor by the factory owners, and sometimes he called for revolution:
“God save the King!” and kings,
For if he don’t I doubt if men will longer.
I think I hear a little bird, who sings,
The people by and by will be the stronger, …
and the mob
At last all sick of imitating Job….
I would fain say, “Fie on’t.”
If I had not perceived that revolution
Alone can save the earth from hell’s pollution.116
However, on second thought, he felt no attraction to democracy. He distrusted mobs, and feared that a revolution would bring a dictatorship worse than that of king or parliament. He saw some virtue in rule by an aristocracy of birth, and longed for an aristocracy purged, reasonable, trained, and competent. He himself never forgot that he was a lord; he soon checked any assumption of egalitarian familiarity; he knew that in social relations distance lends enchantment to the view.
His view of Napoleon changed with events. Till Bonaparte crowned himself emperor, and armed and surrounded himself with titles, Byron saw him as an excellent compromise between kings and mobs. Even with baubles, and those questionable invasions of Spain and Russia, Byron prayed for Napoleon to win against the Continental monarchies. He scolded the defeated Emperor for not killing himself instead of abdicating; but when Napoleon returned from Elba the poet again prayed for his victory against the Allies. Six years later, hearing of Napoleon’s death, he mourned: “His overthrow was a blow on the head to me. Since that period we have been the slaves of fools.”117
He was a baffling mixture of faults and virtues. He could in a rage be coarse and cruel; normally he was courteous, considerate, and generous. He gave recklessly to friends in need; to Robert Dallas he transferred copyrights worth a thousand pounds; another thousand enabled Francis Hodgson to avoid bankruptcy. Teresa Guiccioli, who saw him almost daily through four years, described him as a veritable angel through nine hundred pages.118 He, far more than Coleridge, was a “damaged archangel,” carrying in his flesh the flaws of his heritage, illustrating and redeeming them with an audacity of conduct, a profusion of verse, and a force of rebel thought that overwhelmed old Goethe into calling him “the greatest [literary] genius of our century.”119
By comparison Shelley was the “ineffectual angel” of historic phrase. Not quite ineffectual; who shall say that the leaves scattered by the incantation of his verse did not deposit some of the seeds that grew into religious toleration, the liberation of woman, the victories of science in technology and philosophy, the extension of the franchise, and the reform of Parliament that made the nineteenth a “wonderful century”?
And he was a quite human angel. He had a body, and yielded to its demands at least for two elopements, not to speak of Emilia Viviani. He was thin, troubled with ailments, and with a persistent pain in the back. Of course he was exceptionally sensitive—even more than Byron—to external and internal stimuli. Recall his letter to Claire Clairmont (January 16, 1821): “You ask me where I find my pleasures. The wind, the light, the air, the smell of a flower, affect me with violent emotions.”120
Like all of us, he was especially fond of himself. He confessed to Godwin (January 28, 1812): “My egotism seems inexhaustible.”121 In taking Mary Godwin, and asking his wife Harriet to subside into a sister, he pleased his desires like any other mortal, and revealed more of himself in explaining that Harriet accorded less than Mary with his philosophy and ideals. He was modest about his poetry, rating it below Byron’s. In friendship he was faithful and considerate to the end. Byron, in reporting Shelley’s death to Murray, wrote: “You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast by comparison.”122 Hogg reported the poet as erratic, forgetting appointments and promises, and readily slipping into a meditation oblivious of time and place.123 He was generally accounted impractical, but he was not easily cozened in money matters, and he did not surrender his hereditary rights without a long struggle.
He was too high-strung to be a quite rational thinker, and too lacking in a sense of humor to question his own ideas. His constant lure was imagination; reality seemed so drear and gross compared with conceivable improvements that he tended to take refuge from reality in the Elysian Fields of his waking dreams. He proposed to do away with kings, lawyers, and priests; to convert to vegetarianism a world still in the hunting stage, and to free the love of the sexes from all trammels of law. He saw no obstacles to all this in the nature of man or in man’s biological past. “Shelley believed,” said his loving widow, “that mankind has only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none…. This opinion he entertained … with fervent enthusiasm.”124 He almost ignored history, except to idealize the Greeks, and there he ignored the slaves.
We tend to exaggerate Shelley’s simplicity because we forget that death never allowed him to mature. Because of their premature end Byron and Shelley have come down to us as Romantic poets, as very gods of the Romantic movement in England; had they lived to be sixty they would probably have become conservative citizens, and might have come down to us with a humbler place in history than their early romantic deaths have earned for them.
Indeed, by the age of twenty-eight Shelley had already cooled to a respectable moderation. In 1820 he wrote a substantial essay called A Philosophical View of Reform, which was published a year later. “Poets and philosophers,” he announced, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”:125 poets because they are the voices of imagination, which, amid many absurdities, conceive new ideas that in time stir men to experiment and advance; philosophers because they bring to social problems the habit of calm reason and the perspective of years. Like Byron and every humane spirit of the time, Shelley had been revolted by the condition of the factory workers in England, and by the cold recipes of Malthus for controlling the population but leaving wages to be
dictated by the law of supply and demand—i.e., by the number of unemployed competing for available jobs.126 He denounced both Protestantism and Catholicism for having failed to apply the spirit of Christ to the relations between rich and poor.127 He proposed to eliminate, by a levy on the rich, the national debt whose yearly interest charges required heavy taxes upon the general public.128 He pointed out that the increase of population between 1689 and 1819 had changed the proportion of voters to nonvoters, leaving the election of Parliament to an even smaller minority, practically disenfranchising the people.129 He forgave the landed aristocracy as rooted in law and time, and (perhaps with an eye to future Shelleys) he sanctioned a moderate transmission of wealth; but he scorned the rising plutocracy of manufacturers, merchants, and financiers.130 He repudiated Machiavelli’s exemption of governments from morality: “Politics are only sound when conducted on principles of morality. They are, in fact, the morality of nations.”131 He called for “a republic governed by one assembly,” but, like his mentor Godwin, advised against violent revolution.132 He defended the French Revolution, praised Napoleon Consul, repudiated Napoleon Emperor, deplored the French defeat at Waterloo.
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, written in 1821, did not find a publisher till 1840. Here the self-exiled poet, now omitting philosophers, exalted poets as the “supreme lawgivers of the world.”133 He had expressed this comforting opinion in his preface to Prometheus Unbound: “The great writers of our age are, we have reasons to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change to our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored.”134 Now he added: “Our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers [Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling—and Godwin] and poets [Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley] as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty” (1642).135