Something of this contradiction made itself felt in Shelley’s inability to find a name for the work. Finally, he allowed Peacock to read it, and asked his opinion. Peacock’s choice, with its careful derivation, shows how well he understood Shelley’s difficulties, and also passes an implicit comment on Shelley’s character. ‘He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude”. The Greek word αλαστωρ is an evil genius, κακδáιμωυ though the sense of the two words is somewhat different, as in . . . Aeschylus. The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed “Alastor” to be the name of the hero of the poem.’27 The distinction between ‘daimon’, the classical concept of the supernatural spirit either benevolent or neutral towards man, and the ‘kaka-daimon’, the specifically evil and pursuing spirit, was to become important to Shelley in his own increasingly sophisticated catalogue of wraiths and fiends.
Poetically, the main advance of the poem was the flexibility of the verse, and Shelley’s new-found ability to suggest scenes and landscapes which corresponded to mental atmospheres he wanted to define. Besides these gains, the advance in constructive skill is not very great, and the language suffers from lack of density and directive power. Although much of the description is distinctly overwrought, with that curious suggestion of the Baroque, which in his finest work is tightened to a much wirier, plainer line, there are places where his scenarios presage the direct simplicity of his mature style. Yet Milton’s epic drone is still overpoweringly loud.
At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight.
But Shelley got closest to what he was after, and achieved his most sustained passage in the contrasting descriptions of the Arab maiden of reality and the visionary dancing girl of the erotic dream. Here he stated clearly the main dilemma of the poem, the choice between sexual reality and sexual fantasy.
Alastor in this sense is a presentation of adolescent sexuality. The poem itself is purely an exploration of such a state but, when taken within the context of the preface, the prose fragments ‘On the Science of Mind’, and the essays ‘On Life’ and ‘On Love’, it is clear that Shelley was intending to present it as a critique of such a ‘situation of the human mind’. However the terms of this critique, and the form in which such a wider community of human sympathies might be reached, do not appear in the poem. His ambiguous attitude to sexual narcissism also appears in the terminology of the essay ‘On Love’, where the object of love yet remains merely the ‘anti-type’ of that ideal self or ‘prototype’ to be discovered within the lover’s own heart. The beloved remains, in other words, an ideal projection of the self, which by definition must be unchanging, self-sufficient and therefore ultimately sterile. The terms of this contradiction are set out with surprising frankness in the picture of the two girls. The first, the Arab maiden, represents what one may call domestic sexuality, a genuine human relationship which the Poet’s dreaming ‘self-centred seclusion’ cruelly frustrates:
Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,
Her daily portion, from her father’s tent,
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole
From duties and repose to tend his steps: —
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love: — and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.28
The main peculiarity of this portrait is the completely slavish function Shelley assigns to the girl, an inarticulate servant to the Poet’s vagaries. Later he was to write consistently and powerfully that the sexual relationship could only be satisfactory when the woman was herself completely liberated from social and intellectual servitude.
The second portrait, of the dancing girl, is clearly related to that of the Arab maiden, whom the Poet had left to continue his journeying through ‘Arabie, And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’. She is in fact the same girl, but conjured up in dream and gradually and subtly distorted into an object of exclusively sexual desire. The dream ends in what are clearly the sensations and motions of orgasm, and the Poet’s detumescent feelings of waste and emptiness on waking immediately afterwards are brilliantly evoked. The description may well suggest why in his prose writings Shelley had consistently shied away from pursuing some of the more intimate dream-tracks into the caverns of his mind. The passage is the most sustained and successful piece of work in the poem, depending notably on radiating images of light and music, and powerfully active, driving verbs.
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought . . . .
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire: wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while,
Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.
Roused by the shock he started from his trance —
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood.29
Considered together, these two passages represent a considerable intellectual and artistic advance. Shelley had indeed managed to penetrate far upstream in his own mind, and one begins to understand the force of the image he gave to
the difficult process, ‘like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind’. A directly autobiographical interpretation is possible, for one can see in turn the shadowy reference first to Harriet, then to Mary and finally, perhaps to Claire. These have indeed been attempted exhaustively by scholars, but they are not in the end satisfactory: Shelley wrote the poem precisely in order to distance himself from his own lived experience. More general observations do however throw light on his own psychological development. The Poet rejects sexual experience in the waking, domestic world, and the girl is turned away, speechless, panting and frustrated. But in the fantasy world, in the world of ‘dream’ or ‘waking reverie’ or ‘trance’ or ‘vision’, the sexual experience, and specifically the sexual act — what Shelley called in Queen Mab the ‘sexual connection’ — is celebrated and indulged.
Shelley was in two minds about condemning this. In the overall context of Alastor composition, he condemns it as not only socially inadequate but also destructive, opening the poet to the ‘furies’. Yet within the poem the ambiguity remains. One remembers his recommendation to Mary about ‘kissing the insubstantial image’ when they were separated. It was a subject to which he was to return frequently, but there is one passage, part of a prose essay written three years later in Italy, which is immediately relevant. It came in the preface to his translation of Plato’s Symposium and was suppressed by Mary in her edition of 1840. Shelley is somewhat circumspectly discussing modes of the ‘sexual act’ which might take place without physical penetration. The context is homosexuality, but this is not significant here.
If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associate themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires; and even that in some persons of an exalted state of sensibility that a similar process may take place in reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist . . . .30
Clearly, the second Alastor passage is his first attempt to describe such an ‘involuntary consequence of a state of abandonment’. There were to be many subsequent ones in his work, and it became one of his most powerful images. It is one of the triumphs of Alastor that Shelley succeeded in isolating this split in sexual nature as he had experienced it, and further, implied that it was a type or metaphor for a universal ‘split’ between the actual and the ideal, between the act and the desire. It was not merely the metaphor, either; it was part of the condition itself.
Another suggestive thing about the dream is the passive role which it assigns to the Poet in the sexual encounter. It is the girl who ‘Folded his frame in her dissolving arms’. Throughout it is the female figures who are active, and more or less aggressive, and the Poet who is passive and receptive. This also was to become a feature of later descriptions, and may have something to do with the context of the dream or reverie itself.
When Mary edited Alastor, it is suggestive that she tried to draw a veil across the subject matter and implications of the poem, and referred instead to the general difficulties of Shelley’s life in 1814 and 1815. Following her lead, most critics have been prepared subsequently to look at the poem in vague terms of a ‘search for ideal beauty and ideal truth’.31 Mary wrote in 1839, ‘This is neither the time nor the place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends brought home to him the sad realities of life. Physical suffering had also considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward; inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul than to glance abroad, and to make, as in Queen Mab, the whole universe the object and subject of his song.’32
Alastor was finished by the end of autumn, and Shelley did not attempt to pursue his introspection any further. He turned instead to concentrate on his Greek reading, which now widened to include his introduction to Homer, the historians Thucydides and Herodotus, and several Greek lyric poets. He was also teaching Mary, and his book-lists to Lackington, Allen and Co., include Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bacon’s Essays and Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary.
Outside events were pressing once again, mainly in the shape of Godwin, who began to write to him directly once more on 11 November about a £250 debt to a certain Hogan who threatened to sue him.33 Claire almost certainly came back from Ireland before Christmas, and she seems to have shuttled rapidly between the Godwins at Skinner Street, Shelley’s old flat in Arabella Road and Bishopsgate. We know from Godwin’s diary that she spent the New Year, 1816, with Shelley and Mary, and it is clear from the cheques which he paid out to her that Shelley regarded her as his own responsibility. In March alone he drew her three cheques totalling £41.34 In the six months between October 1815 and March 1816, Claire had received cash equivalent to one-third of the money Shelley was paying his wife Harriet annually. Harriet herself had applied for an increase in Shelley’s annuity, but he had turned her down, and demanded custody of his daughter Ianthe by way of reply. In return the Westbrooks threatened to bring him to court on settlement proceedings and expose his atheism. On both sides these seem to have been strategic moves in the hope of obtaining more funds from Sir Timothy, rather than genuinely intended threats. At any rate, there was no reaction from Field Place, stalemate was reached, and no further advances were made on either side. There is no evidence that Shelley attempted to visit his children, or make any special provision for them. Nor is there anything on record at this time to show he had any particular feeling or attachment for either Ianthe or Charles. This is significant in the light of Shelley’s subsequent actions in the winter of 1816-17.
Encouraged by Mary and Peacock, Shelley decided to publish his first volume of poetry, consisting largely of the title poem, Alastor, with its preface, and the other introspective poems of the previous summer. His sonnets to Wordsworth, and on the fall of Bonaparte were also included. The opening lyric section to Queen Mab — ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep!’ — in prudently edited form, filled out the end of the collection, together with a shorter but rather more daring statement of atheism, also taken from Queen Mab, and re-entitled ‘Superstition’. Finally there were two charming pieces of translation which hinted at the increasingly serious and agile scholarship upon which Shelley was embarked. The first was from the Greek of Moschus; and the second a sonnet from Dante. The Dante, which is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, shows how quickly Shelley recognized and assimilated what was congenial to his temper in a foreign author. The longing for a community of intimate friends, combined with the surprising and perfectly Shelleyan image of a magic airship, is brilliantly caught in one of the few and one of the best sonnets he ever wrote: ‘Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti’ —
Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmèd sails should fly
With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,
And that no change, nor any evil chance
Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be,
That even satiety should still enhance
Between our hearts their strict community:
And that the bounteous wizard then would place
Vanna and Bice and my gentle love,
Companions of our wandering, and would grace
With passionate talk, wherever we might rove,
Our time, and each were as content and free
As I believe that thou and I should be.35
Shelley also translated a sonnet from Cavalcanti to Dante, which was not published until 1876, in which another bitterer facet of Dante’s relationship is revealed:
Once thou didst loathe the multitude
Of blind and madding men — I then loved thee —
I loved thy lofty songs and that sweet mood
When thou wert faithful to thyself and me . . . .
Again and yet again
Ponder my words: so the false Spirit shall fly
And leave to thee thy true integrity.36
Shelley chose to translate it because of its obvious connection with his attitude to Wordsworth; and also, perhaps, in a more oblique way, to his old and unreliable friend Hogg.[7]
In December 1815 Shelley sent the manuscript of this slim volume to Samuel Hamilton, printers, in Weybridge, Surrey, for 250 copies to be run off. On 6 January, with high hopes, he sent a complete set of unbound sheets — all but the title page and last sheet — to John Murray at Albemarle Street, in the hope that no less than Byron’s publisher might consent to bring the work out under their imprint. Sadly, Murray did not make any offer; but by the first week in February, Shelley had managed to get two lesser publishers to take on the book jointly; Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy of Paternoster Row, and Carpenter & Son, of Old Bond Street. It is significant that Thomas Hookham, also of Old Bond Street, did not take on Alastor, for the personal breach caused by the events of 1814 was not really healed, nor would it ever be. Shelley suffered unnecessarily from this, for he never achieved another close or long-standing friendship with his publishers, and, especially after he had left London, this was to mean that his manuscripts were never treated with any particular care or enthusiasm. As for the Weybridge printer, his bill was still unpaid in July 1820.
Counting Queen Mab, but not counting the juvenile novels and poems, Shelley was to publish ten separate volumes of work during his lifetime. The last seven of these appeared only in the final three years of his life, when Shelley was isolated from his reading public, in Italy. The first three alone appeared in England while he was still living there, and Alastor is the second of these. As Queen Mab remained for several more years an underground poem, the critical and public reception of Alastor thus takes on very considerable importance. In the event, the book sold badly, and the reviews were scanty, uncomprehending and hostile. In April 1816, the Monthly Review carried a brief paragraph, without quotation from any of the poems, in which the anonymous reviewer remarked: ‘We perceive, through the “darkness visible” in the which Mr Shelley veils his subject, some beautiful imagery and poetical expressions; but . . . we entreat him, for the sake of his reviewers as well of his other readers (if he has any), to subjoin to his next publication an ordo, a glossary, and copious notes, illustrative of his allusions and explanatory of his meaning.’37 Relatively, this was good-natured, although the stupid sarcasm of the closing jab — after the extensive Notes of Queen Mab — must have wounded Shelley. In May, the British Critic, a stolid Tory cudgel, decided to give its reviewer a little space for a facetious interlude, and it genially quoted from Alastor: ‘we are therefore not a little delighted with the nonesense which mounts, which rises, which spurns the earth, and all its dull realities’. Extracting the Narcissus passage, where the Poet gazes through his hair at his own image in the stream, the reviewer commented: ‘Vastly intelligible. Perhaps, if his poet had worn a wig, the case might have been clearer . . .’38