Shelley: The Pursuit (114 page)

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh —

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,

Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,

Thinking every tear a gem,

Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

And the shadows of the night,

Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy

On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
¹⁴

These distinguished members of the government and the Establishment are commanded by another, even more sinister figure on a horse, a figure out of a gothic engraving, or perhaps even out of Dante’s Hell:

Last came Anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw —

‘
I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW
!’

With a pace stately and fast,

Over the English land he passed,

Trampling to a mire of blood

The adoring multitude.
¹⁵

The multitude, though trampled and killed, Shelley says, is
adoring
. Here is the first intellectual twist in a poem which underneath its hard, brilliantly active surface, contains a structure of complicated ideological reasoning. ‘Anarchy, the Skeleton’, who is the prize exhibit in the governmental masquerade of murderers, is also the insane deity who ‘bowed and grinned to everyone’ and leads the adoring multitude to an attack on the Palace, the Bank and the Tower

And was proceeding with intent

To meet his pensioned Parliament

when he is halted. Shelley meant that Anarchy, a savage god outside any human law, is already the idol of the government’s train; he could easily become the leader of the people’s too. But Shelley halts him. He is halted by a woman who lies under the horses’ hooves,

a maniac maid,

And her name was Hope, she said:

But she looked more like Despair,

And she cried out in the air:

‘My father Time is weak and gray

With waiting for a better day;

See how idiot-like he stands,

Fumbling with his palsied hands!

‘He has had child after child,

And the dust of death is piled

Over every one but me —

Misery, oh, Misery!’

Then she lay down in the street,

Right before the horses’ feet,

Expecting, with a patient eye,

Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.
¹⁶

The starkness and emotional clarity of this figure is very great. There is complete realism in that ‘patient eye’. As she lies there, something begins to
materialize between her and Anarchy: at first a mist, then a vapour, then a cloud, then a storm anvil with lightning head until finally

It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail

Brighter than the viper’s scale

and sweeps over the heads of the crowd and in an instant leaves Anarchy unhorsed and lifeless

And the prostrate multitude

Looked — and ankle-deep in blood,

Hope, that maiden most serene,

Was walking with a quiet mien
¹⁷

With this blinding deliverance, the first section of the poem ends.

In the second section, between stanzas 34 and 63, the maid talks to the crowd and gives her description first of false freedom, and then of true political freedom. She talks of food, clothes, fire, a proper home:

‘For the labourer thou art bread,

And a comely table spread

From his daily labour come

In a neat and happy home.

‘Thou art clothes, and fire, and food

For the trampled multitude —

No — in countries that are free

Such starvation cannot be

As in England now we see.

‘To the rich thou art a check,

When his foot is on the neck

Of his victim, thou dost make

That he treads upon a snake. . . .’
¹⁸

To this she adds broader considerations: protection against exploitation by wealth; justice available without money; intellectual freedom from religious bigotry; national peace; voluntary expenditure of wealth to improve bad conditions, and ‘Science, Poetry, and Thought’.

In the last section of the poem, the maid issues a celebrated call for a series of massive demonstrations of English working people to claim their political rights:

‘Let a great Assembly be

Of the fearless and the free

On some spot of English ground

Where the plains stretch wide around. . . .

‘From the corners uttermost

Of the bounds of English coast;

From every hut, village, and town

Where those who live and suffer moan

For others’ misery or their own,

‘From the workhouse and the prison

Where pale as corpses newly risen,

Women, children, young and old

Groan for pain, and weep for cold. . . .’
¹⁹

When faced with the ‘tyrants’ troops’, the artillery, the fixed bayonet, or the horsemen’s sabres

‘Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war. . . .

‘Let the laws of your own land,

Good or ill, between ye stand

Hand to hand, and foot to foot,

Arbiters of the dispute,

‘The old laws of England — they

Whose reverend heads with age are gray,

Children of a wiser day;

And whose solemn voice must be

Thine own echo — Liberty!

‘On those who first should violate

Such sacred heralds in their state

Rest the blood that must ensue,

And it will not rest on you . . .’
²⁰

This heroic but yet stoic belief in the power of the mass demonstration, using passive resistance as an instrument of political change, is remarkable enough in itself, as far as the evolution of Shelley’s radical thought is concerned. There would be very few outside the circles of the working-class radical leadership who would have come anywhere near avowing such a policy publicly. Yet this is not quite the end of the poem. There is one more twist, which leaves it not on a note of stoicism, but one of triumphant solidarity with the underprivileged, oppressed and unrepresented, against the
élite
class in power. These are the last three stanzas, which refer back again to Peterloo itself:

‘And that slaughter to the Nation

Shall steam up like inspiration,

Eloquent, oracular;

A volcano heard afar.

‘And these words shall then become

Like Oppression’s thundered doom

Ringing through each heart and brain,

Heard again — again — again —

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number —

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you —

Ye are many — they are few.’
²¹

Shelley worked hard on the poem, anxious to get it published in England as soon as possible. It was one of those crises which a writer must seize. On 21 September, in another short note to Peacock, he remarked merely: ‘What an infernal business this of Manchester! What is to be done? Something assuredly. Henry Hunt has behaved I think with great spirit & coolness in the whole affair.’
²²
[2]
He did not mention
The Mask
, though by now it was virtually complete.

In fact Shelley seems to have been working largely in secret. Nothing shows Mary’s remoteness from him, busy with her own
Mathilda
, more than the emptiness of her journal at this time. There are references to Shelley reading Calderón, taking tea with Madame Merveilleux du Plantis and her daughter Zoïde, and discussing the move to Florence for Mary’s approaching lying in. The domestic life crept on.
²³
Afterwards, Mary wrote that she remembered hearing him sometimes in the house repeating the stanzas beginning ‘My Father Time is old and gray’, and admired them, although she did not know to what poem they belonged.
²⁴

Finally Shelley announced that he had a poem called ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ for posting to Hunt at the
Examiner
. Mary was given the manuscript to fair copy, and with Shelley’s corrections added at the last moment, it was taken to Florence on the 23rd and put on the mail. He took Charles Clairmont with him, and also arranged for them all to take lodgings for the winter in Madame du Plantis’s house, starting in October.

Shelley returned to Villa Valsovano on Saturday, 25 September, tired, and feeling very unwell. Mary wrote that the weather was beginning to fluctuate: sometimes too hot to go out at midday, sometimes as cold as Christmas in England. The wind shifted, and came in from every side, and there were ‘no fireplaces & stone floors’. The Italians seem to take no precaution against the cold, ‘except holding a little earthenware pot with charcoal in it in their hands’.
²⁵

During the last days at Villa Valsovano, Shelley again retired into his tower. Mary spent her time packing, and visiting Maria Gisborne. Mr Gisborne, much to her relief, had set out on a trip to England before the weather broke, intending to inquire after prospects in London for Henry. She warned the Hunts in a letter of his impending arrival, adding miserably that her own ‘life & freshness’ was lost to her, ‘on my last birthday when I was 21 — I repined that time should fly so quickly . . . now I am 22 . . . I ought to have died on 7th June last’.
²⁶
She did not show this letter to Shelley.
²⁷

Three days later Shelley also wrote to the Hunts from his tower. He was in high spirits again. ‘Ollier tells me that the Quarterly are going to review me; I suppose it will be a pretty morsel, and as I am acquiring a taste for humour and drollery I confess I am curious to see it.’ He discussed the merits of Boccaccio at length, laughing and half approving of his system of love, and ending in a positive dumb-show of exclamation marks. ‘Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life considered in its social relations. His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine . . . He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, Stoical, ready made and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one little remark or rather maxim of his, the application of which might do some good to the common narrow-minded conceptions of love? “Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnuova, come fa la luna.” If you show this to Marianne give my love to her and tell her that I don’t mean xxxxx . . . — !!?? [
sic
]’ Of Mary, he wrote simply, ‘We expect Mary to be confined towards the end of October, and one of our motives in going to Florence is to have the attendance of Mr Bell, a famous Scotch surgeon, who will be there . . . The birth of a child will probably relieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression.’ The impersonal use of ‘we’ may have puzzled the Hunts.
²⁸