Shelley: The Pursuit (117 page)

Clear themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The last week of October and the first of November continued for Shelley in a whirl of creative and business activity. He seemed to find time for everything. The arrangements to organize the financing of Henry Reveley’s steamboat had run into unexpected complications connected with Shelley’s account at Brookes in London, which was suddenly found to be overdrawn. A cheque for fifty pounds in Italian sequins had already been forwarded to Livorno as a first payment towards the steamboat expenses on 21 October, with a promise of £200 to follow immediately. On 28 October, much to his surprise, he received the bill of £200 back from his English agent explaining that it had been bounced by Brookes. Explanatory letters flew off to Maria Gisborne and Henry, while inquiries and demands were sent post-haste to his solicitor Longdill, to Peacock and to his faithful financial adviser and aid in London, Horace Smith. Due to carelessness between Sir Timothy, Whitton and Longdill, Shelley’s annuity had simply not been paid into his London account. Smith rapidly put all this to rights by the end of November.
⁵⁶
Reveley’s £200 eventually reached him before Christmas. Meanwhile Shelley sent him improving letters, ‘let you & I try if we cannot be as punctual and business like as the best of them’, and urged the importance of Reveley learning to write a good business letter. He also advised Mr Gisborne, through Henry, of the inadvisability of keeping his family’s investments in British state bonds ‘at this crisis of approaching Revolution’.
⁵⁷

Meanwhile he did his best to support Mary through her fourth pregnancy, and relenting on her account, to make movements towards helping Godwin who had been convicted in the autumn of owing £1,500 in arrears on his rent at Skinner Street. Claire was not forgotten either, and inquiries went out to the new vice-consul at Venice during the Hoppners’ absence in Switzerland, asking about Allegra’s health and education, ‘and where Lord Byron is, or where he is next expected to be’.
⁵⁸
A plan even began to form in his mind about making a rapid visit to England after Christmas, travelling on his own. Both from the point of view of politics and poetry, London seemed to be the most interesting place in the world to be; and with so many people anxious to see him — Hunt, Peacock, Hogg, certainly Godwin and probably Ollier, not to mention Mr Harris of Covent Garden — it no longer seemed such a hostile spot. Of course there was the problem that Mary was set against the idea, from the first moment that he vaguely mentioned it to her.
⁵⁹

This same week, the week after the writing of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, and the week before the expected arrival of Mary’s baby, saw the composition of the 152 stanzas of
Peter Bell the Third.
It was in Shelley’s words, ‘a
very heroic
poem’, and intended like
The Mask
, but for different reasons, for immediate publication; though to Ollier he wrote that ‘perhaps no one will believe in anything in the shape of a joke from me’.
⁶⁰
Shelley had read Hunt’s witty review of both Wordsworth’s original ‘Peter Bell’, and Hamilton Reynolds’s smart parody, ‘Peter Bell II’ at Livorno in the
Examiner
.
⁶¹
But it was not until he read the originals at Delesert’s that the idea for a third Peter Bell came into his mind. He wrote the whole work, poem and preface, and pseudo-pedantic footnotes, in a wild spirit of mockery and seriousness combined. It had much of the tone and
élan
of his comic transformation of the
Quarterly’s
attack in his letter to Ollier.

The core of
Peter Bell the Third
is a political attack on Wordsworth, and to a lesser extent Coleridge: ‘He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound . . . and now dull — oh so very dull! it is an ultra-legitimate dullness.’ It was written at breakneck speed, more than twenty stanzas a day, as Shelley explained in his preface. ‘Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; the orb of my moonlike genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad . . .’
⁶²

It is dedicated, under a pseudonym, to Tom Moore, and turns satirically upon the issues of public reputation and fame which Shelley was in fact deeply concerned about. Shelley’s manner is both comic, and strangely sad:

Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges,
[6]
you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns; when St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians. I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, Miching Mallecho.
⁶³

The poem has the rough, rapid-moving, colloquial surface of
The Mask
, though its satire, being less forceful and single-minded, is also lighter and nimbler, moving to the attack simultaneously on several points. It has genuine wit, and it is the one poem of Shelley’s life where one can clearly discern the acrid elegance of Pope. It is in seven parts, entitled severely: ‘Death’, ‘The Devil’, ‘Hell’, ‘Sin’, ‘Grace’, ‘Damnation’ and ‘Double Damnation’. The poem is set throughout — in as much as it has a location — in a kind of nightmare London, a Zoroastrian double of the real city. Half-familiar figures and distortions flit past including Coleridge lost in Germanic reveries, Cobbett inciting the mob to a festival of murder, several of Lord Liverpool’s ministry, the Prince Regent, Sir William Drummond, reviewers, lawyers, bishops and society ladies all swept along in a wild phantasmagoria of lost souls, ‘a pestilence-stricken multitude’. The most strange and Protean of all is the protagonist Peter, who is sometimes clearly Wordsworth pinned with an acute critical phrase — ‘turned to a formal puritan, a solemn and unsexual man’; sometimes he is a kind of composite poet, a Wordosoutheridge betraying both his political and poetical creed; and sometimes he is even Shelley himself crucified in the reviews:

Then
seriatim
, month and quarter,

Appeared such mad tirades. — One said —

‘Peter seduced Mrs. Foy’s daughter,

Then drowned the mother in Ullswater,

The last thing as he went to bed.’. . .

One more, ‘Is incest not enough?

And must there be adultery too? . . .

By that last book of yours WE think

You’ve double damned yourself to scorn;

We warned you whilst yet on the brink

You stood. From your black name will shrink

The babe that is unborn.’
⁶⁴

But this was mockery that ran almost masochistically close to the bone. Yet the best of the work, and the best is very good indeed, lies in the two short sections: No. 3, ‘Hell’; and No. 5 — ‘Grace’. Both have an extraordinary kind of intellectual gaiety, which flourishes amid the grimness of the setting. The writing of ‘Hell’ has an unflinching eye, which seems both childlike and lethal. Hell is of course London.

Hell is a city much like London —

A populous and a smoky city;

There are all sorts of people undone,

And there is little or no fun done;

Small justice shown, and still less pity. . . .

There is a
^***
, who has lost

His wits, or sold them, none knows which;

He walks about a double ghost,

And though as thin as Fraud almost —

Ever grows more grim and rich.

There is a Chancery Court; a King;

A manufacturing mob; a set

Of thieves who by themselves are sent

Similar thieves to represent;
[7]

An army; and a public debt. . . .

There is a great talk of revolution —

And a great chance of despotism —

German soldiers — camps — confusion —

Tumults — lotteries — rage — delusion —

Gin — suicide — and methodism;. . .

There are mincing women, mewing,

(Like cats, who
amant miserè
,)

Of their own virtue, and pursuing

Their gentler sisters to that ruin,

Without which — what were chastity?. . .
[8]

And all these meet at levees; —

Dinners convivial and political; —

Suppers of epic poets; — teas,

Where small talk dies in agonies; —

Breakfasts professional and critical. . . .

At conversazioni — balls —

Conventicles — and drawing-rooms —

Courts of law — committees — calls

Of a morning — clubs — book-stalls —

Churches — masquerades — and tombs.

And this is Hell — and in this smother

All are damnable and damned;

Each one damning, damns the other;

They are damned by one another,

By none other are they damned.
⁶⁵

Shelley’s hatred for the hypocrisies, cruelties, injustices and genteel class-layerings of metropolitan life, which first made itself shown in his early broadsheet ‘The Devil’s Walk’, had found its purest political expression in
The Mask.
Here it found a satiric one, something closer to Pope, and Byron and Peacock. But Shelley had not done with the theme in
Peter Bell the Third.
A celebrated sonnet written right at the end of 1819 as a kind of retrospective, returns to this passage, condensing it and embittering it; and the transformation of the impulse continued in later poems. The very last long poem of Shelley’s life, ‘The Triumph of Life’, still shows a continuity of theme with this section of
Peter Bell
, developing especially the idea of a grotesque ceaseless procession of vain human activity. The ultimate classical model for such writing is Juvenal.