Shelley: The Pursuit (116 page)

Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws — this would put an end to felonies and misdemenours at a blow; he would abolish the rights of property, of course there could thenceforward be no violation of them, no heart-burnings between the poor and the rich, no disputed wills, no litigated inheritances… he would overthrow the constitution, and then we should have no expensive court, no pensions or sinecures… no army or navy; he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles… marriage he cannot endure, and there would at once be a stop put to the lamented increase of adulterous connections amongst us, whilst repealing the canon of heaven against incest, he would add to the purity and heighten the ardour of those feelings with which brother and sister now regard each other; finally, as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in our religion. . . .

This is at least intelligible; but it is not so easy to describe the structure, which Mr Shelley would build upon this vast heap of ruins. ‘Love’, he says, ‘is the sole law which shall govern the moral world’; but Love is a wide word with many significations, and we are at a loss as to which of them he would have it now bear. We are loath to understand it in its lowest sense, though we believe that as to the issue this would be the correctest mode of interpreting it. But this at least is clear, that Mr Shelley does not mean it in its highest sense: he does not mean that love, which is the fulfilling of the law, and which walks after the commandments, for he would erase the Decalogue, and every other code of laws.
⁴¹

This attack puts the
Quarterly
position very well, especially in its definition of the ‘highest love’, and also shows what it most feared. Like few other reviews it was prepared to argue
ideas
, or at least admit of their existence. It is also interesting that such an attack was written long before the reviewer could have even heard of
Prometheus Unbound
or
The Cenci
; or have expected the dramatic political development of Peterloo.

The article’s final paragraph contains a memorable attempt at a personal
coup de grâce
in the highest style. Having referred to Shelley’s ‘proud and rebel mind’, his ‘thousand sophisms’ and his ‘impurity of practice’, it delivered itself with Ozymandian finality. We shall never know by what curious premonition John Taylor Coleridge found his biblical image:

Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of mighty waters closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him: — for a short time are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin — finally, he sinks ‘like lead’ to the bottom, and is forgotten. So it is now in part, so shortly will it be entirely with Mr Shelley.
⁴²

This fortissimo passage was given a final cadenza of domestic innuendo, in which reference is made to the ‘disgusting picture’ of Shelley’s private life over which the reviewer chose to draw a veil. ‘It is not easy’, concluded the
Quarterly
, ‘for those who
read only
, to conceive how much low pride, how much cold selfishness, how much unmanly cruelty are consistent with the laws of this “universal” and “lawless love”.’ This was intended to be the last twist of the knife. For Shelley at Delesert’s it was certainly the most unpleasant one.
[5]

It so happened on this particular afternoon that a certain Lord Dillon ‘observed at Delesert’s reading room, a young man very earnestly bent over the last “Quarterly”. When he came to the end, he straightened up suddenly and burst into a convulsive laughter, closed the book with an hysteric laugh, and hastily left the room, his Ha! Ha’s! ringing down the stairs.’
⁴³
The fiendish laugh that had troubled the Presbyterians of Glasgow on the Sabbath ten years previously had not become any more discreet.

Shelley was shaken more than he cared to admit, but he was not outwardly cast down. Hearing on 14 October that Peacock had doubts about
The Cenci
which he had just read, he wrote bluffly to Maria Gisborne: ‘he don’t much like it — But I ought to say, to blunt the edge of his criticism, that he is a nursling of the exact & superficial school in poetry’. This was true enough.
⁴⁴
On the following day, he wrote directly to Ollier about the attack in the
Quarterly
, ‘well aware’ that it was by Southey: it was ‘all nothing’ — ‘trash’ — particularly that ‘lame attack on my personal character, which was meant so ill’. He was determined to show Ollier that he could ride out such stuff, and he composed an excellent comic improvisation on the
coup de grâace
. ‘I was amused too with the finale; it is like the end of the first act of an opera, when that tremendous concordant discord sets up from the orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once. It describes the result of my battle with their Omnipotent God; his pulling me under the sea by the hair of my head, like Pharaoh; my calling out like the devil who was
game
to the last; swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a French postillion on Mount Cenis; entreating everybody to drown themselves; pretending not to be drowned myself when I
am
drowned; and, lastly,
being
drowned.’
⁴⁵
Ollier no doubt was convinced.

Yet the criticism was also working more slowly, at a deeper level of Shelley’s mind. He brooded on it, though he appears to have spoken to nobody for the time being. Mary records that he visited the galleries constantly on his own, during these mid-October days. The weather was beginning to break up in earnest now, and though the temperature in Florence remained fairly mild, the wind began to get up in the afternoons, and high cloud raced across the sky from the west, sweeping in from the sea beyond Pisa. Shelley went for walks along the banks of the Arno thinking of everything that the
Quarterly
attack represented, thinking of his own exile, his ‘passion for reforming the world’, his apparent impotence to help the downtrodden people of England, the disasters of his private life and inevitably, at 27, the beginning of the end of his youth. He had noticed, with a slight shock, that he already had premature threads of grey hair. Yet everything was still to be done. His walks sometimes took him beyond the city walls into the wooded regions by the river, where the autumnal leaves streamed among the silver grey trunks of birch and plane trees. He carried a new notebook with him.
⁴⁶
On the seventh page, he jotted a fragmentary entry:

Twas the 20th of October

And the woods had all grown sober

As a man does when his hair

Looks as theirs did grey & spare

When the dead leaves

As to mock the stupid

Like ghosts in…
⁴⁷

The 20th was a Tuesday. On one of the following days, towards the end of the week, he again took the notebook out, and began a second fragment, jotted down at the other end. It was a longer piece altogether, elegiac, but less pessimistic in tone, with the line length extended, and the rough couplet altered to the English terza rima. After twenty-three lines it too faltered and came to a halt, ending:

And this is my distinction, if I fall

I shall not creep out of the vital day

To common dust nor wear a common pall

But as my hopes were fire, so my decay

Shall be as ashes covering them. Oh, Earth

Oh friends, if when my has ebbed away

One spark be unextinguished of that hearth

Kindled in…
⁴⁸

It was now the weekend of 23–24 October. On Sunday Shelley again went to Delesert’s reading-room, and saw there a copy of Reynolds’s satirical pastiche of Wordsworth’s poem of the same title, ‘Peter Bell II’.
⁴⁹
Shelley’s scorn and confidence were returning; moreover he had a poem in the making.

On Monday morning, 25 October, he began a cold but angry letter to the editor of the
Quarterly
, drafting it in what usually served as his fair-copy notebook.
⁵⁰
‘Sir. . . .I hereby call upon the Author of that Article or you as his responsible agent publickly to produce your proofs of that assertion [to the disadvantage of my personal character], or as you have thrust yourselves forward to deserve the character of a slandered, to acquiesce also in. . . .’ But the letter would not do, and he threw down his pen.

On Monday afternoon he went for another solitary walk along the Arno, and watched in the sky above Casciano the gathering of a violent storm against the clear cold blue. The wind was hard from the west. When he returned to the Palazzo Marini he had his poem. ‘This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno…on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.’
⁵¹

Shelley picked up the same pen
⁵²
with which he had been writing to the
Quarterly
, turned the notebook upside down, and entered a clean draft of his poem. He dated it at the head ‘Oct 25’, and gave its title.
⁵³
But he was still having a little trouble with the last stanza, and pulling a second notebook at random on to his table, he ran through another draft across two pages. The lines seemed almost right:

… Those ashes from an unextinguished hearth . . .

… For through my lips to the frozen earth . . .

. . . O Wind

When winter comes Spring lags not far behind…
⁵⁴

Then, in triumph and defiance, he scrawled below in Greek a tag from Euripides, as if he had just won a tremendous victory ..’
⁵⁵
‘By virtuous power, I a mortal, vanquish thee a mighty god.’ The poem was complete.

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers