Shelley: The Pursuit (115 page)

Shelley’s good spirits, despite uncertain health, were produced by the knowledge of the quality of his work which was now reaching London for publication. Indeed the posting of
The Mask
at the end of September 1819 marks the most critical single moment of his entire professional career. Hunt had already received ‘Julian and Maddalo’, posted in August; manuscript copies of
Prometheus
had gone both to Peacock and Ollier earlier in September, and a clean-copy of
The Cenci
had been posted ahead of the printed edition to Peacock on 21 September. Thus, four major works, the fruit of Shelley’s first eighteen months in Italy, were all arriving in London virtually within a few days of each other. In retrospect one can see that everything turned on Hunt’s acceptance of
The Mask
for immediate publication in the
Examiner
as Shelley intended.

The question was whether Shelley’s work would now finally reach a broad readership. The publication of
The Mask
would undoubtedly have had explosive effect, all the more because it was to be first detonated among a liberal rather than a strictly radical readership. Even among the radicals, who saw published in September Hone’s pamphlet
The Political House that Jack Built
with vicious illustrations by Cruikshank, as part of the massive wave of post-Peterloo protest, the absolutely explicit attack and power of Shelley’s poem would have struck home with unique impact. Moreover it spoke to the people in the street, not merely to the reviewer or the politician or the Hampstead drawing-room. The very roughness of the verse, the deliberate ruggedness of grammar and style, pushed aside the dillettante and the littérateur.

This was a significant legal point. When Sir Francis Burdett, as part of his Peterloo protest, sent to the press an open letter, ‘To the Electors of Westminster’, he was subsequently prosecuted for seditious libel and convicted. In directing the jury at Leicester to convict, Mr Justice Best made what is one of the most significant literary and political distinctions of the age: ‘If you find in [his writing] an appeal to the passions of the lower orders of the people, and not having a tendency to inform those who can correct abuses, it is a libel.’
²⁹
In other words, if such a composition as Burdett’s was addressed to the ruling classes, it was allowable; if it was addressed to the working classes, it was libellous. There can be no doubt into which category Shelley’s
The Mask of Anarchy
fell. Burdett was eventually sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and fined £2,000. This was only for sending a letter to the papers.

If therefore Shelley’s poem had been printed in the
Examiner
, as he intended, there would undoubtedly have been a violent public controversy, and almost certainly a prosecution. But besides being a highly tendentious work,
The Mask
is also a great poem, and Shelley’s name would at last have begun to be generally known in liberal and radical circles and among the discerning of every political colour in England. With the beginnings of a real public reputation, it was quite possible that Harris, the director of Covent Garden, would have accepted
The Cenci
at least for a short run, and the two other major poems already on their way to Ollier, ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and
Prometheus Unbound
would surely have found a ready audience and promising sales.

In the event, exactly the reverse happened. Hunt, after consultation with his brother John Hunt, put
The Mask of Anarchy
aside. It was never published in Shelley’s lifetime. Following this, and despite Peacock’s good offices, both Covent Garden and apparently Drury Lane turned down
The Cenci
— a dangerous subject by an unknown author. ‘Julian and Maddalo’ was never published in Shelley’s lifetime either.
Prometheus Unbound
appeared much later in 1820, almost unnoticed except among a handful of reviewers. It sold hardly a score of copies. The chance of popular recognition, so near in the autumn of 1819, and certainly never nearer, slipped from Shelley’s fingers, through the prudence of friends and publishers.

Why did Hunt not publish
The Mask
? The short answer is clearly that he feared political prosecution. He feared with good reason. 1819 marked the height of the government’s attack on the free press, and there were no less than seventy-five prosecutions for seditious or blasphemous libel during that year.
³⁰
They resulted in heavy or crippling fines, and prison sentences ranging between a few months and five years. Hunt himself had done time as a guest of His Majesty’s Hospitality ten years previously; his brother John Hunt, the managing editor of the
Examiner
, was to serve a sentence of twelve months for attacking the monarchy in 1820. But on this occasion, Hunt was no longer prepared to risk his neck, and at the moment of crisis and decision he revealed his true colours as a liberal rather than a committed radical.

When he brought out
The Mask of Anarchy
in 1832, to coincide with the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill, he explained his decision of 1819 in these words. ‘I did not insert it because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.’
³¹
In other words, that the man in the street might recognize that Shelley had written a radical poem; and the Home Office also. But Hunt genuinely thought that the time was not ripe to inflame the ‘people at large’
[3]
, and that Shelley’s belief in passive resistance was incompatible at that time with massive democratic demonstrations.

Nevertheless one notes the roll-call of those who did protest and were prosecuted as a result of Peterloo; among many, Samuel Bamford, Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright, Sir Charles Wolseley, James Wroe of the
Manchester Observer
, a fearless pamphleteer Joseph Swann of Macclesfield (who was sentenced to four and a half years, which he served in chains), and above all Richard Carlile, now editor of the most notable radical paper of the period, the
Republican
.
[4]
Yet in every case these men were prosecuted for material that they themselves had both written and caused to be published. One cannot blame Hunt if his author was not in England. Shelley was not there to stand by his editor, and to take legal responsibility on his own shoulders; or indeed to choose alternative means of publication. It was Shelley’s own self-exile in Italy, his failure to be on the spot, that provided the ultimate cause of the critical sequence of failed publications in late 1819 and early 1820. This in turn was to dictate the obscure fortunes of the remaining works printed in his lifetime. But these things were not clear to Shelley for many months. On the contrary, he now felt on the offensive, for the moment of crisis had found him prepared. There was a brief interlude of house-moving and resettling for the winter.

On 30 September, Shelley’s household, with the addition of Charles, left the Villa Valsovano. They took leave of Mrs Gisborne and Henry, with many promises concerning the steamboat, and set out on the road for Pisa and Florence. As the carriage began to bounce eastwards over the rough track, the dog Oscar leapt after it and ran alongside, his slender tail wagging, and his bright teeth smiling up to where Mary sat, eight months pregnant and trembling slightly, with the strain of travel.
³²

‘Poor Oscar!’ wrote Shelley later to Mrs Gisborne. ‘I feel a kind of remorse to think of the unequal love with which two animated beings regard each other, when I experience no such sensations for him as those which he manifested for us. His importunate regret is however a type of ours as regards you. Our memory — if you will accept so humble a metaphor — is forever scratching at the door of your absence.’
³³

At Pisa, they broke their journey briefly to call upon another expatriate lady, a Mrs Mason who lived in the Via Managonella. Like Aemilia Curran, she had Godwinian and Irish republican connections. She was married, and her house, the Casa Silva at Pisa, was to become in the spring one of Shelley’s most important addresses in Italy. The roads to Florence were very bad, and Mary found the going exhausting, so they stopped one night at Pisa, and another at Empoli, finally arriving on 2 October. They moved in at once to their apartment in Madame du Plantis’s house, the Palazzo Marini at No. 4395 Via Valfonda, near Santa Maria Novella. Mary found the rooms comfortable and secure, and she was glad to hear that there were other English people in the building. She sent a note to Livorno, telling Mrs Gisborne of their safe arrival, and asking for several of their books — Cobbett, Byron’s
Childe Harold
and
The Revolt of Islam
— to be sent to Mrs Mason at Pisa, together with half a pound of ‘the very best green tea’. On second thoughts, she crossed
The Revolt
off the list. ‘Clare & Shelley send their best love to you & I would say to Henry but that would not do from the young lady so take out her name & only
remember her kindly
to him as well as my self.’
³⁴

During their first week in Florence, they went out on visits to the ballet and the opera, and Claire arranged for more music lessons. Mary could not long manage these excursions, and she stayed more and more on the sofa and in bed. Charles flirted with Zoïde du Plantis, and Shelley with an amused and practised eye observed that Zoïde was ‘not so fair but I fear as cold as the snowy Florimel in Spenser [and] is in & out of love with Charles as the winds happen to blow’.
³⁵
For the time being Charles was in a ‘high state of transitory contentment’, but he was intending to leave in November for further study in Vienna.

Shelley was much by himself. After a preliminary tour round Florence he decided to concentrate on the Uffizi Gallery, and he concocted ‘a design of studying [it] piecemeal’ through the winter. His solitary visits became almost as regular as those to the Forum and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome had been. His aim, he said, was to observe especially in the sculpture the rules by which ‘that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension’ was realized in external form.
³⁶
Later he assembled an interesting series of manuscript notes on the subject.

But politics and the English Revolution remained steadily in the forefront of his mind. In these weeks of October and November, he produced a whole series of brilliant political ballads, songs and elegies in which the enormous energy and angry directness of
The Mask
continued to flow and coruscate. These are some of the best short poems Shelley ever wrote. He also wrote a full-length verse satire on contemporary English poetry and politics; and in early November a long open letter for the
Examiner
attacking the prosecution of Richard Carlile for sedition. He was reading Clarendon’s three-volume
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
, and also Plato’s
Republic
.
³⁷

The impulse which the horror of the Peterloo massacre had given Shelley was now immeasurably deepened and intensified by the discovery of a savage personal attack in the
Quarterly
. The two pieces of violence — although to an outsider totally disconnected in kind — fused in his mind with the most extraordinary and creative force. Public and private sufferings were made identical in the heat of his imagination.

Shelley had already heard from both Hunt and Ollier of the review of
The Revolt of Islam
in the
Quarterly
for April 1819 and he had written for a copy from Livorno. But before this arrived, he came across the article unexpectedly one afternoon in the second week of October at Delesert’s English Library.

The article is long
³⁸
and the author, John Taylor Coleridge, a distant relative of the poet and a man who had been at school with Shelley at Eton, had clearly assembled a personal dossier on his subject. There are explicit references in the piece to Shelley’s misery at school, his expulsion from Oxford, his friendship with Godwin, and his withdrawal of
Laon and Cythna
-the ‘incestuous’ version — from circulation. On this last, the reviewer wrote with both texts before him, and made considerable and not unjustified play with Shelley’s ‘wholly prudential’ but still blasphemous alterations, and his penchant for incest. He also accused him of plagiarizing Wordsworth. It seems too that the reviewer knew of the existence of
Queen Mab
, and the ‘Hermit of Marlow’ pamphlets, and had made inquiries about Shelley’s relationships with Harriet, Mary and Claire between 1814 and 1816.

Some of this background detail was so close that Shelley was convinced for the rest of his life that the writer responsible was his former acquaintance and early confidant Robert Southey.
³⁹
Who else, he wondered, could have written: ‘[Mr Shelley’s] speculations and his disappointments [began] in early childhood, and even from that period he has carried about with him a soured and discontented spirit — unteachable in boyhood, unamiable in youth, querulous and unmanly in manhood — singularly unhappy in all three.’ Who else could have paternally decided that ‘[Mr Shelley] is really too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world, but the little world within his own breast’?
⁴⁰
The
Quarterly’s
actual criticism of Shelley’s poetry was marginal, even flattering; its main case was against his ‘theories’, political, social, religious and sexual. There is an unmistakable air of gusto in the way it reduced Shelley’s radicalism
ad absurdum
. Taylor Coleridge was arguing from the very heart of the
Quarterly
belief in sound government, law and order, the social hierarchies, institutionalized religion and benevolent but firm paternalism. He intended to attack Shelley both as an individual and as a political and philosophic
type
, a new and dangerous species of post-Jacobin democrat and leveller. Far from making his article a mere piece of philistine viciousness, this gives it genuine social interest, the more so when one considers that the
Quarterly
was the most widely read and most authoritative review of the day. The article was not, as Hunt liked to make out, a mere lampoon.