Books: Percy Bysshe Shelley

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In the spring of 1819 the Shelleys settled in Rome, where the poet
proceeded with the composition of "Prometheus Unbound". He used to write
among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled
of all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of flowers and
shrubs described in his incomparable letter of March the 23rd to
Peacock. Rome, however, was not destined to retain them long. On the 7th
of June they lost their son William after a short illness. Shelley loved
this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours without
taking rest. He was now practically childless; and his grief found
expression in many of his poems, especially in the fragment headed
"Roma, Roma, Roma! non e piu com' era prima." William was buried in the
Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley had written a description to
Peacock in the previous December. "The English burying-place is a green
slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I
think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the
sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with
the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves
of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil
which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly
of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were
to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and
so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion."

Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they established themselves
at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn. Here Shelley began and finished
"The Cenci" at the instance of his wife, who rightly thought that he
undervalued his own powers as a dramatic poet. The supposed portrait of
Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affected his
imagination, and he fancied that her story would form the fitting
subject for a tragedy. It is fortunate for English literature that the
real facts of that domestic drama, as recently published by Signor
Bertolotti, were then involved in a tissue of romance and legend. During
this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family. Mrs. Gisborne's
son by a previous marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer, and Shelley
conceived a project of helping him build a steamer which should ply
between Leghorn and Marseilles. He was to supply the funds, and the
pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne family. The scheme
eventually fell through, though Shelley spent a good deal of money upon
it; and its only importance is the additional light it throws upon his
public and private benevolence. From Leghorn the Shelleys removed in the
autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th of November, the present Sir
Percy Florence Shelley was born. Here Shelley wrote the last act of
"Prometheus Unbound", which, though the finest portion of that unique
drama, seems to have been an afterthought. In the Cascine outside
Florence he also composed the "Ode to the West Wind", the most
symmetrically perfect as well as the most impassioned of his minor
lyrics. He spent much time in the galleries, made notes upon the
principal antique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study.
The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the month of January,
1820, they took up their abode at Pisa.

1819 was the most important year in Shelley's life, so far as literary
production is concerned. Besides "The Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound",
of which it yet remains to speak, this year saw the production of
several political and satirical poems--the "Masque of Anarchy",
suggested by the news of the Peterloo massacre, being by far the most
important. Shelley attempted the composition of short popular songs
which should stir the English people to a sense of what he felt to be
their degradation. But he lacked the directness which alone could make
such verses forcible, and the passionate apostrophe to the Men of
England in his "Masque of Anarchy" marks the highest point of his
achievement in this style:--

Men of England, Heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!

Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fall'n on you.
Ye are many, they are few.

"Peter Bell the Third", written in this year, and "Swellfoot the
Tyrant", composed in the following autumn, are remarkable as showing
with what keen interest Shelley watched public affairs in England from
his exile home; but, for my own part, I cannot agree with those critics
who esteem their humour at a high rate. The political poems may
profitably be compared with his contemporary correspondence; with the
letters, for instance, to Leigh Hunt, November 23rd, 1819; and to Mr.
John Gisborne, April 10th, 1822; and with an undated fragment published
by Mr. Garnett in the "Relics of Shelley", page 84. No student of
English political history before the Reform Bill can regard his
apprehensions of a great catastrophe as ill-founded. His insight into
the real danger to the nation was as penetrating as his suggestion of a
remedy was moderate. Those who are accustomed to think of the poet as a
visionary enthusiast, will rub their eyes when they read the sober lines
in which he warns his friend to be cautious about the security offered
by the English Funds. Another letter, dated Lerici, June 29, 1822,
illustrates the same practical temper of mind, the same logical
application of political principles to questions of public economy.

That "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci" should have been composed in
one and the same year must be reckoned among the greatest wonders of
literature, not only because of their sublime greatness, but also
because of their essential difference. Aeschylus, it is well known, had
written a sequel to his "Prometheus Bound", in which he showed the final
reconciliation between Zeus, the oppressor, and Prometheus, the
champion, of humanity. What that reconciliation was, we do not know,
because the play is lost, and the fragments are too brief for supporting
any probable hypothesis. But Shelley repudiated the notion of
compromise. He could not conceive of the Titan "unsaying his high
language, and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary."
He therefore, approached the theme of liberation from a wholly different
point of view. Prometheus in his drama is the human vindicator of love,
justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and
creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prometheus is the mind of man
idealized, the spirit of our race, as Shelley thought it made to be.
Jove is the incarnation of all that thwarts its free development. Thus
counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental antitheses
of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate. They give the
form of personality to Shelley's Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already
expressed in the first canto of "Laon and Cythna"; but, instead of being
represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into
the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry. Prometheus resists
Jove to the uttermost, endures all torments, physical and moral, that
the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly
expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the
spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives; Jove disappears; the
burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace
and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes
in the emancipation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain,
but sings alternate love-songs with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus
is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia. Asia,
withdrawn from sight during the first act, but spoken of as waiting in
her exile for the fated hour, is the true mate of the human spirit. She
is the fairest daughter of Earth and Ocean. Like Aphrodite, she rises in
the Aegean near the land called by her name; and in the time of
tribulation she dwells in a far Indian vale. She is the Idea of Beauty
incarnate, the shadow of the Light of Life which sustains the world and
enkindles it with love, the reality of Alastor's vision, the breathing
image of the awful loveliness apostrophized in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," the reflex of the splendour of which Adonais was a part. At the
moment of her triumph she grows so beautiful that Ione her sister cannot
see her, only feels her influence. The essential thought of Shelley's
creed was that the universe is penetrated, vitalized, made real by a
spirit, which he sometimes called the spirit of Nature, but which is
always conceived as more than Life, as that which gives its actuality to
Life, and lastly as Love and Beauty. To adore this spirit, to clasp it
with affection, and to blend with it, is, he thought the true object of
man. Therefore the final union of Prometheus with Asia is the
consummation of human destinies. Love was the only law Shelley
recognized. Unterrified by the grim realities of pain and crime revealed
in nature and society, he held fast to the belief that, if we could but
pierce to the core of things, if we could but be what we might be, the
world and man would both attain to their perfection in eternal love.
What resolution through some transcendental harmony was expected by
Shelley for the palpable discords in the structure of the universe, we
hardly know. He did not give his philosophy systematic form: and his new
science of love remains a luminous poetic vision--nowhere more
brilliantly set forth than in the "sevenfold hallelujahs and harping
symphonies" of this, the final triumph of his lyrical poetry.

In "Prometheus", Shelley conceived a colossal work of art, and sketched
out the main figures on a scale of surpassing magnificence. While
painting in these figures, he seems to reduce their proportions too much
to the level of earthly life. He quits his god-creating,
heaven-compelling throne of mythopoeic inspiration, and descends to a
love-story of Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not sustain
the visionary and primeval dignity of these incarnated abstractions;
nor, on the other hand, has he so elaborated their characters in detail
as to give them the substantiality of persons. There is therefore
something vague and hollow in both figures. Yet in the subordinate
passages of the poem, the true mythopoeic faculty--the faculty of
finding concrete forms for thought, and of investing emotion with
personality--shines forth with extraordinary force and clearness. We
feel ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker while we read the
description of Oceanus, and the raptures of the Earth and Moon.

A genuine liking for "Prometheus Unbound" may be reckoned the
touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry. The
world in which the action is supposed to move, rings with spirit voices;
and what these spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than
any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own heart's
song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are hymns in "Prometheus",
which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from
meaning, the substance of a new ethereal music; and yet, although their
verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance
for those who understand. Shelley scorned the aesthetics of a school
which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is
so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to
whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man
whose sense of hearing is too gross for the tenuity of a bat's cry. A
voice in the air thus sings the hymn of Asia at the moment of her
apotheosis:--

Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them,
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds, ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee whereso'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; none beholds thee.
But thy voice sounds low and tender,
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost for ever!

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!

It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly
Turneresque; and there is much in "Prometheus Unbound" to justify this
opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows
are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated
from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of
many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.
Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.
The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and
beyond it. "I seek," he says himself, "in what I see, the manifestation
of something beyond the present and tangible object." For him, as for
the poet described by one of the spirit voices in "Prometheus", the bees
in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,--

Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom,
more perfectly before us than that picture does? (Forman, volume 2 page
181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the
little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act? (Forman, volume 2
page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have illustrated
this drama. He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the
trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and
the charioted Hour. Prometheus, too, with his "flowing limbs," has just
Blake's fault of impersonation--the touch of unreality in that painter's
Adam.

Passing to "The Cenci", we change at once the moral and artistic
atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is
absent. Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded. Instead of
soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In
exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into
the sphere of dreadful passions--all the agony, endurance, and
half-maddened action, of which luckless human innocence is capable. To
tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed. Her father, a
monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by
imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage. At last her patience ended;
and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness
in living man, she wrought his death. For this she died upon the
scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided
in the execution of the murder. The interest of "The Cenci", and it is
overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two
chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into
greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality. Perhaps Shelley intended
this--as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of
figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to
my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention,
in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty,
Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a
contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old
Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for
Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with
an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the
uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine
weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of
Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through
extraordinary suffering in circumstances of exceptional horror--the
innocence of a noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its
wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the
merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full
height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger,
and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her
sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action,
the glance of self-assured purity with which she annihilates the
cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her
tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful
dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate
and powerful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it
is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the
other world, as once he came to her on earth.

Shelley dedicated "The Cenci" to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven
in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work,
and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more
sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was
very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peacock requesting him
to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O'Neil, he thought, would play the
part of Beatrice admirably. The manager, however, did not take this
view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even
submitted to an actress like Miss O'Neil. Shelley's self-criticism is
always so valuable, that it may be well here to collect what he said
about the two great dramas of 1819. Concerning "The Cenci" he wrote to
Peacock:--"It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and
opinions which characterize my other compositions; I having attended
simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable
the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree
of popular effect to be produced by such a development." "'Cenci' is
written for the multitude, and ought to sell well." "I believe it
singularly fitted for the stage." "'The Cenci' is a work of art; it is
not coloured by my feelings, nor obscured by my metaphysics. I don't
think much of it. It gave me less trouble than anything I have written
of the same length." "Prometheus", on the other hand, he tells Ollier,
"is my favourite poem; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and
feed him with fine ink and good paper"--which was duly done.
Again:--"For 'Prometheus', I expect and desire no great sale; Prometheus
was never intended for more than five or six persons; it is in my
judgment of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and
is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it; it is
original, and cost me severe mental labour." Shelley was right in
judging that "The Cenci" would be comparatively popular; this was proved
by the fact that it went through two editions in his lifetime. The value
he set upon "Prometheus" as the higher work, will hardly be disputed.
Unique in the history of literature, and displaying the specific
qualities of its author at their height, the world could less easily
afford to lose this drama than "The Cenci", even though that be the
greatest tragedy composed in English since the death of Shakespeare. For
reasons which will be appreciated by lovers of dramatic poetry, I
refrain from detaching portions of these two plays. Those who desire to
make themselves acquainted with the author's genius, must devote long
and patient study to the originals in their entirety.

"Prometheus Unbound", like the majority of Shelley's works, fell
still-born from the press. It furnished punsters with a joke, however,
which went the round of several papers; this poem, they cried, is well
named, for who would bind it? Of criticism that deserves the name,
Shelley got absolutely nothing in his lifetime. The stupid but venomous
reviews which gave him occasional pain, but which he mostly laughed at,
need not now be mentioned. It is not much to any purpose to abuse the
authors of mere rubbish. The real lesson to be learned from such of them
as may possibly have been sincere, as well as from the failure of his
contemporaries to appreciate his genius--the sneers of Moore, the
stupidity of Campbell, the ignorance of Wordsworth, the priggishness of
Southey, or the condescending tone of Keats--is that nothing is more
difficult than for lesser men or equals to pay just homage to the
greatest in their lifetime. Those who may be interested in studying
Shelley's attitude toward his critics, should read a letter addressed to
Ollier from Florence, October 15, 1819, soon after he had seen the vile
attack upon him in the "Quarterly", comparing this with the fragments of
an expostulatory letter to the Editor, and the preface to "Adonais".
(Shelley Memorials, page 121. Garnett's Relics of Shelley, pages 49,
190. Collected Letters, page 147, in Moxon's Edition of Works in one
volume 1840.) It is clear that, though he bore scurrilous abuse with
patience, he was prepared if needful to give blow for blow. On the 11th
of June, 1821, he wrote to Ollier:--"As yet I have laughed; but woe to
those scoundrels if they should once make me lose my temper!" The
stanzas on the "Quarterly" in "Adonais", and the invective against Lord
Eldon, show what Shelley could have done if he had chosen to castigate
the curs. Meanwhile the critics achieved what they intended. Shelley, as
Trelawny emphatically tells us, was universally shunned, coldly treated
by Byron's friends at Pisa, and regarded as a monster by such of the
English in Italy as had not made his personal acquaintance. On one
occasion he is even said to have been knocked down in a post-office by
some big bully, who escaped before he could obtain his name and address;
but this is one of the stories rendered doubtful by the lack of precise
details.

CHAPTER 6.

RESIDENCE AT PISA.

On the 26th of January, 1820, the Shelley's established themselves at
Pisa. From this date forward to the 7th of July, 1822, Shelley's life
divides itself into two periods of unequal length; the first spent at
Pisa, the baths of San Giuliano, and Leghorn; the second at Lerici, on
the Bay of Spezia. Without entering into minute particulars of dates or
recording minor changes of residence, it is possible to treat of the
first and longer period in general. The house he inhabited at Pisa was
on the south side of the Arno. After a few months he became the
neighbour of Lord Byron, who engaged the Palazzo Lanfranchi it order to
be near him; and here many English and Italian friends gathered round
them. Among these must be mentioned in the first place Captain Medwin,
whose recollections of the Pisan residence are of considerable value,
and next Captain Trelawny, who has left a record of Shelley's last days
only equalled in vividness by Hogg's account of the Oxford period, and
marked by signs of more unmistakable accuracy. Not less important
members of this private circle were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Elleker
Williams, with whom Shelley and his wife lived on terms of the closest
friendship. Among Italians, the physician Vacca, the improvisatore
Sgricci, and Rosini, the author of "La Monaca di Monza", have to be
recorded. It will be seen from this enumeration that Shelley was no
longer solitary; and indeed it would appear that now, upon the eve of
his accidental death, he had begun to enjoy an immunity from many of his
previous sufferings. Life expanded before him: his letters show that he
was concentrating his powers and preparing for a fresh flight; and the
months, though ever productive of poetic masterpieces, promised a still
more magnificent birth in the future.

In the summer and autumn of 1820, Shelley produced some of his most
genial poems: the "Letter to Maria Gisborne", which might be mentioned
as a pendent to "Julian and Maddalo" for its treatment of familiar
things; the "Ode to a Skylark", that most popular of all his lyrics; the
"Witch of Atlas", unrivalled as an Ariel-flight of fairy fancy; and the
"Ode to Naples", which, together with the "Ode to Liberty", added a new
lyric form to English literature. In the winter he wrote the "Sensitive
Plant", prompted thereto, we are told, by the flowers which crowded Mrs.
Shelley's drawing room, and exhaled their sweetness to the temperate
Italian sunlight. Whether we consider the number of these poems or their
diverse character, ranging from verse separated by an exquisitely subtle
line from simple prose to the most impassioned eloquence and the most
ethereal imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Every chord of the
poet's lyre is touched, from the deep bass string that echoes the
diurnal speech of such a man as Shelley was, to the fine vibrations of a
treble merging its rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary
ears. One passage from the "Letter to Maria Gisborne" may here be
quoted, not for its poetry, but for the light it casts upon the circle
of his English friends.

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