Shelley: The Pursuit

  Beside the fountain in the market-place

  Dismounting, I beheld those corpses stare

  With horny eyes upon each other’s face,

  And on the earth and on the vacant air,

  And upon me, close to the waters where

  I stooped to slake my thirst. . . .

  No living thing was there beside one woman,

  Whom I found wandering in the streets, and she

  Was withered from a likeness of aught human

  Into a fiend, by some strange misery:

  Soon as she heard my steps she leaped on me,

  And glued her burning lips to mine, and laughed

  With a loud, long, and frantic laugh of glee,

  And cried, ‘Now, Mortal, thou hast deeply quaffed

  The Plague’s blue kisses — soon millions shall pledge the draught! . . .’65

  The two passages make an interesting comparison, at the very least, in the development they show in the vividness and economy of Shelley’s writing over the intervening period of three and a half years. Yet Epipsychidion is not one of Shelley’s finished and self-sufficient works. Like Alastor, though to a far greater degree, it gains its main strength from the depth and accuracy with which he questioned his own life and mind.

  Even on the day he posted it to Ollier, there was a suggestion of regret and retraction. ‘It is a production,’ he told his publisher, ‘of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction.’66 Yet Ollier published promptly in the summer. To John Gisborne — once again in London — Shelley was to write in October a celebrated extenuation: ‘The Epipsychidion is a mystery — As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles, — you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect any thing human or earthly from me. I desired Ollier not to circulate this piece except to the σúντoι [initiated], and even they it seems are inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart. — But I intend to write a Symposium of my own to set all this right.’ But this was yet another defensive screen, and perhaps the fact that Shelley was writing to the Gisbornes affects the sarcastic form it took, and the surely ironic reference to a servant girl and her sweetheart.67

  It was only a year later, in June 1822, when Gisborne had moved much further into his confidence and was acting as his de facto literary agent in London, that Shelley withdrew this screen, admitted to ‘flesh & blood’, and spoke both more frankly and more humorously of the poem. ‘If you are anxious . . . to hear what I am and have been [‘Epipsychidion’] will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. Hogg is very droll and very wicked about this poem, which he says, he likes — he praises it and says: Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris.[5] Now that, I contend, even in Latin, is not to be permitted.’68 But whether that image of the beloved — the ‘epi-psychidion’, the ‘soul out of my soul’ as Shelley called her — was indeed unattainable and eternal, remained for Shelley, even at that late date, an open question.

  Throughout the rest of February 1821, both Shelley and Mary continued regular visits to Emilia, and Shelley arranged to write and have presented a petition on Emilia’s behalf to the Grand Duchess in Florence, begging for her release. But this was rather different from preparing an escape boat in Livorno harbour as he had suggested in his poem. In March the number of visits, according to Mary’s journal, gradually fell off. Shelley, Mary and Claire all remained in touch with Emilia through the spring until her marriage in the summer.

  As the intense focus on Emilia Viviani dissolved, and Shelley’s health also improved, his social circle continued to alter and expand. Medwin’s long-promised friends Edward and Jane Williams had finally arrived in Pisa at the end of January, and by the end of February they had established a friendly rapport with the Shelleys. The slow growth of this friendship, a gradual putting down of roots, was ultimately more promising than the whirlwind intimacies with people such as Pacchiani and Emilia, which broke quickly and exotically into blossom, and then withered in the sudden alterations of emotional sirocco and tramontana. For Mary, too, they were easier: the Williamses were, after all, English.

  Shelley’s first impressions, as he told Claire, were not distinctive. The woman was extremely pretty, with large dark eyes and a mass of dark hair but ‘apparently not very clever’. Williams himself, tall, open-faced with well-cut florid features, seemed pleasant, rather shy. He was a year younger than Shelley, and had done time at Eton, which no doubt put Shelley on his guard. But he had left at 11 and been sent straight to the Navy, from thence transferring like Medwin to the Eighth Dragoons of the East India Company. Like Medwin he had retired as a lieutenant on half pay and he had decided to knock about Europe for a few years. He was intensely attached to Jane Williams partly because, perhaps, she was not actually his married wife. They had lived for a little over a year at Geneva in a house with Medwin, before moving south at his incitement, partly to meet Medwin’s poetical cousin. It was also partly to find a discreet location for Jane to have her second baby, which was duly born on 16 March.69 Another of Williams’s connections at Geneva was a strange piratical Cornish adventurer called Trelawny. He too had heard of the poet at Pisa, and was later to come south. Williams had vague literary ambitions, and wrote stage plays that were never performed. Politically, he was liberal. But his real gift was for being extraordinarily easy, cheerful company out of doors. He was equally fond of walking, riding and sailing. When Medwin left Pisa on 27 February — to Mary’s intense relief — Williams was already established as a walking companion, and both he and Jane had dined and supped on several occasions. As the weather opened out in early March, with soft misty mornings, followed by bright invigorating days of sun and cloud and wind, Shelley and Williams walked out daily along the Arno.70

  Shelley did not neglect Claire, for letters continued to post off to Florence, and return via Mrs Mason’s. He wrote of Emilia, but now at less length; of del Rosso affairs, which still required attention; and occasionally of news from Ravenna. Byron had moved the four-year-old Allegra into a convent at Bagnacavallo.71 Shelley continued to sign himself through February and March with ‘eternal and tender regard’, though Claire could not help noticing that the letters tended to drop off in number.

  Mary’s life at this time was a good deal taken up with Prince Mavrocordato, who had emerged as her clear favourite among the new circle. In early March they had moved to new lodgings on the Lung’Arno, at the Casa Aulla, partly to celebrate the spring weather but mostly to have rooms more suitable for entertaining. Mavrocordato visited every day, and Mary gave him English lessons in exchange for lessons in classical Greek. What with the Prince, and the walks and rides with the Williamses, and occasional nights at the opera with the Masons, life was fairly kind to Mary. The worst of the business seemed to be over with Emilia, and it had become, as she told Claire, ‘a delicious season’. She added in her grave, smiling way: ‘One is not gay — at least I am not — but peaceful and at peace with all the world.’72

  Shelley did not look on Mavrocordato with Mary’s eyes, but he found him interesting on the subject of Greek politics, and discreet and distinguished in manner. The Prince was, in his own way, Mary’s answer to Emilia, and also an implicit suggestion to Shelley that ‘Italian Platonics’ could really be managed with better taste than he had contrived to do. Shelley acquiesced. He wrote to Peacock requesting two-pounds-worth of gems from Tassi’s in Leicester Square, among which he wanted a ring or cameo cut with the head of Alexander the Great. This was a present for Mavrocordato. Shelley also asked for seals to be made up with the device of a dove with outspread wings, and the Greek motto Μάυτις ἔιμί εσθλϖυ άγωυώυ, ‘I am the Prophet of Victorious Struggles’.73 His expectation of
a struggle in Greece was presently to be fulfilled. The faint air of romantic comedy which breathed over the Casa Aulla in March also reached out to Claire in Florence, who received a series of anonymous love-letters from Pisa embellished with charming sketches. Her immediate reaction was to accuse Shelley, and send the letters to the Casa Aulla for examination, but their author was never discovered.74

  The writing of Epipsychidion had freed Shelley from the difficult winter months of ill health and listless fantasy, and with the early Pisan spring of March, he was suddenly full of literary projects. He revived the idea of an historical drama on Charles 1, and began making notes on the political figures of the period, informing Ollier that this successor to The Cenci would soon be ready for the press. He had also heard that Peacock had published a scathing magazine article on the decline of English Poetry in the first number of Ollier’s Literary Miscellany. He determined to reply to it, and began to ransack his notebooks for suitable material.

  The gist of Peacock’s clever and provoking piece had initially reached Shelleyin Peacock’s latest letter in January. It was that ‘there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds; that moral, political and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public, being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community . . . [poetry] must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge’.75

  Shelley reacted sharply to this line of attack, for there were clearly moments in his own writing career when he himself believed it to be true. He told Peacock that his ‘anathemas against poetry’ had excited in him a ‘sacred rage’, and he intended to break a lance with him within the lists of a magazine.76 But he had not yet read the article itself, and he sent for it from Florence, while preparing himself in the last days of February by reading Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie77 and making draft notes on the use of the imaginative faculty in literture.78 Mary was also brought in on the undertaking, and every day from 12 to 20 March she clean-copied a new piece for the essay. Shelley was hoping to finish it in time for it to be published in the spring number of Ollier’s Miscellany, and had it planned out in two parts: a general defence of the function of imaginative literature in society; followed by a more detailed examination of the growth of modern English poetry. There was also a vague idea for a third part.79 In the event, only Part 1 was ever finished.

  Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry is, as it stands, an essay of some 10,000 words, and became the best-known piece of prose that he wrote. Yet its unique distinction is partly illusory, for it is in effect an anthology of his own previous writing. Besides extensive borrowing and adaption from his prefaces to The Revolt of Islam (1817) and Prometheus Unbound (1819), his preface to the Symposium known as ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks’ (1818), and his ‘Essay on Christianity’, the general argument of the article as a whole is largely an amplification of that set out in the first two chapters of A Philosophical View of Reform (1820). The famous peroration to the Defence on poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ comes virtually verbatim from this last essay; and the brilliant passage on Milton’s Satan is also lifted directly from the text of his ‘Essay on the Devil’.80

  Throughout the Defence, Shelley was writing of ‘poetry’ in an inclusive sense; it ranged from the literary genre per se, through the general ideas of imaginative writing, and out as far as poetry considered as a sympathetic and humane faculty — a simple responsiveness to human experience which he called the ‘poetry of life’. He continued, as in the Philosophical View to regard the issue of the function of ‘poetry’ as a moral and political one, rather than as a purely literary one. In an interesting formal introduction, written to Ollier in his role as Editor of the Miscellany, Shelley defined very carefully the position which Peacock had taken up:

  Every person conscious of intellectual power ought studiously to wean himself from the study and the practise of poetry, & ought to apply that power to general finance, political economy to the study in short of the laws according to which the forms of the social order might be most wisely regulated for the happiness of those whom it binds together. — These are indeed high objects, [& I pledge myself to worship Themis rather than Apollo if . . . it could be found that . . . ]81

  The phrases in brackets were deleted, and eventually Shelley rejected the whole introduction; but it indicates the consistency of his thought with the previous political essays, and his determination to justify poetry (Apollo) with the same ‘high objects’ in view as the political sciences (Themis).

  Yet Shelley did not merely reiterate or rephrase his previous arguments. He succeeded in moving them forward another stage, and occasionally crystallizing them with memorable felicity. But because of the patchwork nature of the Defence, and the improvised swirl of its argument, the fine passages come in no very evident logical order. The Defence, is best picked over like the anthology that it actually was. It serves as a brilliant series of provocations and challenges to further thought and study: but it is not a treatise. Like the ‘Notes on the Florentine Sculpture’, its finest remarks and aperçus are brief, sometimes puzzling and epigrammatic, and always full of lively imagery. It was very much a poet’s Defence.

  Of translation, Shelley wrote with all the authority and humility of a great practitioner:

  . . . the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.82

  Of the moral function of poetry which has no didactic — or indeed, no moral — intent:

  The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. . . . Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.83

  Of erotic writing and erotic writers, he made a firm and interesting defence. His argument is that the erotic is the last and most private stronghold of the imagination against social corruption; and that when poetry and imaginative thought generally is under great social pressure, it is to the erotic that writers retire, as to a final fortress of the individual sensibility. It is only in this sense, as evidence of a rearguard battle, that erotic writing is the product of a society in decline.

  It is not what the erotic writers have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. . . . For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom through the affections into the very appetites. . . . At the approach of such a period poetry ever adresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the world.84

  Astraea was the goddess of Justice. The poison imagery of this passage is familiar.

  Apart from Shelley’s defence of Milton’s Satan (as a moral being ‘far superior to his God’), the finest purely literary description concerned Dante. He saw him equally as a pure poet, as a political influence, and as an eternal force in European culture. Shelley’s language here was so charged with his peculiar radiant imagery, and the insistent almost Biblical rhythms which recall passages of Prometheus Unbound, that it really takes a considerable effort to hold onto the argument. Shelley believed that a
great masterpiece had a quality of self-regeneration: it took on new forms and significance for its readers as it moved beyond its own time, and its own culture. This argument was wonderfully perceptive, and showed, once again, the authority of a poet and translator who had himself proved it true.

  Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning, the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth and pregnant with a lightning that has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially . . . after one person and one age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.85