Shelley: The Pursuit (105 page)

Walking back from the Forum one evening he entered in his notebook on the imperial destruction of Jerusalem:

Titus is represented standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous members of his triumphant army, and the magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged.

The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the imagery almost ceased with the lapse of fifty generations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer’s family, now a mountain of ruins.

The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habitation for owls and dragons. The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory. Rome is no more than Jerusalem.
⁹

The Forum was itself too populated with tourists, and too close to No. 300 Corso to serve as one of Shelley’s open-air studies; but by walking on for some
thirty minutes, over the Palatine hill, leaving the Circo Maximo and the Tiber on his right hand, he could reach the fantastic, jungled ruins of the Termi di Caracalla. As he had done at Marlow, he made this expedition into the wilderness the beginning of his writing routine every morning, with his pockets stuffed with books, portable pen and ink, and one of his small sketching notebooks bound in black leather.
[2]
The huge Baths of Caracalla, which could accommodate over 1,500 people, had been begun by Septimus Severus in AD 206 and continued to serve the Romans as bathing place, gymnasium, sports club and community centre until the Goths cut the aqueducts in the sixth century. Completely ruined by the nineteenth century, they still retained massive surrounding walls, and huge fragments of brick archways and vaulting, many of them towering over 200 feet into the air. These were entirely overgrown with plants and shrubs, but were still secure enough to be climbed by one or two remaining staircases. The effect was like an enormous hanging garden. The floor of the ruins was covered with the red clay of Rome, through which pieces of brilliantly coloured mosaic glowed after rain. Shelley made this deserted but luxuriant site his headquarters, and soon found he could disappear within its labyrinth for as long as he chose, climbing high into some aerial grove, perched among the blossom. He took up the
Prometheus
drama once more and later he wrote his preface, ‘This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and the thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.’
¹⁰

To Peacock at the end of March, he attempted in a long descriptive passage to capture the extraordinary atmosphere of the baths, which was producing on him an almost mystical effect.

Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled with flowering shrubs whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, & tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one rapidly travelling along the plain. The perpendicular walls resemble nothing more than that cliff in Bisham wood which is overgrown with wood, & yet is stony & precipitous — you know the one I mean, — not
the chalk pit, but the spot which has that pretty copse of fir trees & privet bushes at its base, & where Hogg & I scrambled up & you — to my infinite discontent — would go home.

He went on to explain how one could ascend by ‘an antique winding staircase’, dangerously open to the precipice at many turns, and come out some hundred feet up on the summit of the walls.

Here grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle & the myrtelus & bay & the flowering laurustinus whose white blossoms are just developed, the wild fig & a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks thro the copse wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of these immense labyrinths . . . . Around rise other crags & other peaks all arrayed & the deformity of their vast desolation softened down by the undecaying investiture of nature. Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey.
¹¹

For Shelley, Rome presented overwhelming evidence, both literal and symbolic, that the schema which he had dimly revealed in the colossal wreck of Ozymandias was a permanent and historic truth. Power and imperialism
were
destroyed. The forces of human love and freedom, and of Nature, which he regarded as allies, did in the end reassert themselves, just as the beautiful and innocent white blossoms of the laurustinus covered over the desolation of Caracalla. Fresh from his terrible experiences at Naples, which had brought him to the verge of breakdown, the recovery of this vision swept over him with the force and conviction of a religious revelation. It was this force, this empassioned wish-fulfilment, that he tried to structure and express in the poetic drama of
Prometheus Unbound
. He found himself writing now, not as an English tourist but as a Greek visionary. He wrote on a Greek text, with a Greek theme and within a Greek
upaithric
temple of Nature.

Once he began writing, Shelley wrote as ever, with immense speed. Only four weeks after their arrival in Rome, he notified Peacock: ‘My Prometheus Unbound is just finished, & in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters & mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; & I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.’
¹²

The myth of Prometheus the fire-bringer and liberator of mankind was already a familiar force in the liberal culture of the nineteenth century, quite apart from the poems of Goethe and Byron. The success of Mary Shelley’s own modernization of the myth clearly demonstrated its popular currency to Shelley. Politically too, the myth of Prometheus had always been present in the
‘progressive philosophy’ of rationality and revolution which had swept over Europe since the date of Shelley’s own birth. The French Revolutionaries had been Promethean by adoption. Shelley was acutely conscious of his predecessors, but he intended to reconstruct the Aeschylean drama in a new form.

. . . I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement . . . . [he] is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature . . . .
¹³

Jupiter (God) was to be conceived as wholly evil, Prometheus (Satan) as a type of human perfection. There were to be none of the slow, monumental moral dawnings of Aeschylus, or the central and strictly speaking tragic recognition of necessity by Prometheus. Shelley’s schema would be more melodramatic, but also more rigid: two totally alienated moral principles would oppose each other within a Manichean framework. The universe was to be polarized into the extreme gnostic oppositions, dark and light, tyranny and freedom, Ahrimanes and Oromazes.

Moreover, Shelley wanted to attempt something new in his use of poetic language. He wrote:

The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed.

To this he added a literary observation which confirms that his Italian reading had been creatively important.

This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets . . . were in the habitual use of this power.
¹⁴

Physically external images which express mental states and processes, dominate the language of the poem. There is a sense in which the whole action is metaphysical rather than physical, and in which the setting of the drama is not so much the universe at large but the dome of a single human skull, so that the
ruins of Caracalla sometimes seemed to him like an immense cranial chamber. The technique of using a physical scene as ‘evocation’ of a mental state was one Shelley had first discovered and used in
Alastor
four years previously and perfected in ‘Julian and Maddalo’. But now Shelley wanted to go one stage further, as he believed the Greeks had done. He wanted his poetry to be so highly wrought that a physical image, while attaining completeness in itself,
simultaneously
offered meanings at several other levels. He wanted a mythic image, for example, to present also a psychological, or political, or modern scientific meaning: or perhaps all three at once. When the Furies come to torment Prometheus in Act 1, they first announce themselves purely in terms of mythic action:

First Fury
. We are the ministers of pain, and fear,

And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,

And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue

Through wood and lake some struck and throbbing fawn,

We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live . . . .
¹⁵

But very soon, they threaten Prometheus with psychological torment and their language begins to carry a strictly
medical
meaning as well as the mythic one:

. . . we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,

And foul desire round thine astonished heart,

And blood within thy labyrinthine veins

Crawling like agony.
¹⁶

The physiological suggestiveness of these lines, the implications of the adrenalin ‘shock’ to the heart and the literally ‘monstrous’ invasion of venereal infection through the delicate network of the blood system (an image conceived as long ago as ‘Mont Blanc’) give the Furies of guilt and remorse a wholly new and contemporary presence. The medical base of this image was to be characteristic of the whole poem, whose other major image sources are also from the natural sciences: geology, climatology and electrophysics especially.

Some of these new ‘multiple’ images are so brilliantly sustained that they threaten to detach themselves from the text. In the second act, two fauns sit on a rock at the entrance to Asia’s cave, and question each other about the nature of the animating forces within the universe. (One thinks of Shelley and Byron at the Diodati.) ‘Canst thou imagine where those spirits live Which make such delicate music in the woods?’ one asks. The second faun’s reply is not only a speculation about the creative forces within Nature — ‘the music in the woods’ — but also about the creative forces within the mind. At a mythic level, Shelley
draws upon the sprite world of Shakespeare’s
Tempest
; but he simultaneously achieves a wonderful psychological image of the ‘act of creation’ in man. It is interesting to note that it is presented as an act of pure elated ‘play’. The image is also given a scientific base. This is drawn from the action of marsh gas rising from within submerged and decomposing vegetation as a result of solar radiation and igniting on contact with the air. Shelley had doubtless observed this phenomenon many times in the
maremma
surrounding Naples and Livorno. Strictly speaking this is methane, a gas formed from decaying organic matter, which spontaneously combusts on contact with oxygen. The phenomenon is sometimes known as will ’o the wisp or
ignis fatuus
, but Shelley’s image can also be transcribed: CH
₄
+ O
₂
:

I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,

The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun

Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave

The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,

Are the pavillions where such dwell and float

Under the green and golden atmosphere

Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;

And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,

The which they breathed within those lucent domes,

Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,

They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,