Shelley: The Pursuit (124 page)

Turning to his English contemporaries, whom Shelley believed passionately, and surely rightly, occupied one of the great ‘moments’ of literature, he tried to define more carefully the operations of the forces of imagination which he understood to be at work. Two points are specially remarkable about what he wrote. First, that not only poets but many other classes of imaginative writer are included in his description. Second, that the
conscious intention
of a writer, or even his formal philosophic and political loyalties, did not in the end affect their inevitable tendency to serve ‘the interests of liberty’. This was later to be the position of Marx.

The persons in whom this power takes its abode may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little tendency to the spirit of good of which it is the minister. But although they may deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve that which is seated on the throne of their own soul. And whatever systems they may have professed by support, they actually advance the interests of liberty.

It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers, whatever may be their system relating to thought or expression, without being startled by the electric life which there is in their words. They measure the circumference or sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit at which they are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it is less their own spirit than the spirit of their age.

They are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they conceive not; the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
³⁷

The idea that poets should be the legislators was not a new one. It may be found explicitly stated as early as George Puttenham’s
Arte of Englishe Poesie
(
c
. 1585), or as late as Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas
(1759). Shelley’s innovation was to see that they were ‘unacknowledged’: not merely unacknowledged by politicians and businessmen, which was obvious; but unknowing, unaware of their historical role,
themselves
. It was the writers who ‘are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished’; they
themselves
did not apprehend the true source of their inspiration and its ultimate social effect.

The most difficult, and in effect the most metaphysical idea in Shelley’s analysis, was the idea of the writer as a mirror of the future. His image is complicated: writers are ‘the mirrors of gigantic
shadows
which futurity casts upon the
present
’. There is nothing here about the conscious intention of a writer in predicting new inventions or social institutions; nor about the writer as some kind of clairvoyant. It is rather that in what the great writer produces naturally, the future pressures and contradictions and achievements of his society are
unconsciously expressed
. The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

This difficult and sophisticated idea of Shelley’s can be seen at work at a more personal level in something he wrote to Peacock during May. Commenting on Peacock’s unexpected marriage, he remarked thoughtfully: ‘I was very much amused by your laconic account of the affair. It is altogether extremely like the
denouement
of one of your own novels, and as such serves to a theory I once imagined, that in everything any man ever wrote, spoke, acted, or imagined, is contained, as it were the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.’
³⁸
The argument can be seen — itself an acorn — already emerging in the prose prefaces of
The Revolt of Islam
and
Prometheus Unbound
. Several months later Shelley used a simplified version of it as his peroration to a magazine article written for Peacock’s benefit. This was the famous passage in his
A Defence of Poetry
.

Chapter 11 of
A Philosophical View of Reform
was entitled ‘On the Sentiment of the Necessity of Change’. In it Shelley examined at length the outstanding features of the political and social conditions in England in 1819–20 which had created ‘the dilemma of submitting to a despotism which is notoriously gathering like an avalanche year by year, or taking the risk of something which it must be confessed bears the aspect of revolution’.
³⁹
He discussed the subject under several heads: the shift of the ‘real constitutional presence’ of the majority away from parliamentary representation; the corruption in the new financial system of ‘Public Credit’, the national debt and capital investment; the increase in the average daily hours of agricultural and manufacturing labour which corresponded to a severe decrease in real worth of the average daily wage; the class interest enshrined in the fashionable theories of Malthusian population control; the distinction between property acquired through ‘labour, industry, skill’ and that acquired through inheritance and capital investment; and finally the issue of universal male and female suffrage.

Shelley set out these issues with a skill and simplicity which can only be bettered in the professional writings of the Smithians and Benthamites of the period, and the pages of the
Westminster Review
. He drew conclusions from it which in their political penetration and courageous originality are rare in England until the writings of the Chartist period and the early work of Engels.
[1]

Concerning the kind of exploitation of labour through capital investment, Shelley wrote:

One of the vaunted effects of this system is to increase the national industry: that is, to increase the labours of the poor and those luxuries of the rich which they supply; to make a manufacturer [
factory hand
] work 16 hours where he only worked 8; to turn children into lifeless and bloodless machines at an age when otherwise they would be at play before the cottage doors of their parents; to augment indefinitely the proportion of those who enjoy the profit of labour . . . . The consequences of this transaction have been the establishment of a new aristocracy, which has its basis in fraud . . . an aristocracy of attorneys and excisemen and directors and government pensioners, usurers, stock jobbers, country bankers, with their dependents and descendants.
⁴⁰

Of the decline in the real ‘constitutional presence’ of the people, Shelley began from the calculation that the Cromwellian Revolution, as enshrined in the new electorate of the Long Parliament in 1641, had signified that one man in every eight carried the democratic power of the vote. This had been a good start towards ‘actual representation’. But the figure had got worse, not better, in the following 170 years. By the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, it had fallen to something in the region of one man in twenty carrying the vote. This was because ‘population increased, a greater number of hands were employed in the labour of agriculture and commerce, [unrepresented] towns rose where villages had been . . . a fourth class therefore appeared in the nation, the unrepresented multitude’.
⁴¹
By 1819 Shelley reckoned the ratio of enfranchisement had plunged to something like ‘one in several hundreds’, and that the House of Commons was so far from being even a ‘virtual representation’ of the English people that politically England could be accurately described as a despotic oligarchy. ‘. . . A sufficiently just measure is afforded of the degree in which a country is enslaved or free, by the consideration of the relative numbers of individuals who are admitted to the exercise of political rights.’ By this measure, England was neither democratic nor free, and without reform became less so every year.

One of Shelley’s most radical positions was revealed in his analysis of the ‘national debt’ which had been contracted over the period of the American and Napoleonic wars, the interest of which was being paid back in the form of national taxes at the rate of £45 million a year. Shelley argued that this money was in effect only a war investment by the rich and propertied class, and that it was neither just nor constitutional to attempt to pay off the
interest
on it by a national tax affecting all classes. There was no justice in the poor paying for the war profits of the rich. Shelley’s solution was to dissolve the debt at a stroke: no profits or interest at all should be paid, and the remaining capital sum should be dispersed among the original stock-holders and investors who would have to share their own losses: ‘It would be a mere transfer among persons of property.
Such a gentleman must lose a third of his estate, such a citizen a fourth of his money in the funds; the persons who borrowed would have paid, and the juggling and complicated system of paper finance be suddenly at an end.’
⁴²
This severely egalitarian argument reflected Shelley’s view on the fundamental injustice of vast inherited properties, and of rich personal estates created out of capital investment profits.

Private property as such, and inheritance, he accepted within certain vigorously defined limits of social justice. Only the active, productive member of society had a real right to property:

Every man whose scope in society has a plebian and intelligible utility, whose personal exertions are more valuable to him than his capital; every trades man who is not a monopolist, all surgeons and physicians and those mechanics and editors and literary men and artists, and farmers, all those persons whose profits spring from honourably and honestly exerting their own skill and wisdom or strength . . . . Labour, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably and innocently exerted are the foundations of one description of property, and all true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired.
⁴³

Against this he set the established view of property which he regarded as abhorrent:

But there is another species of property which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence, without which, by the nature of things, immense possessions of gold or land could never have been accumulated. Of this nature is the principal part of the property enjoyed by the aristocracy and by the great fundholders, the great majority of whose ancestors never either deserved it by their skill and talents, or acquired and created it by their personal labour . . . .
⁴⁴

There was only one genuine and just source of property:

Labour and skill and the immediate wages of labour and skill is a property of the most sacred and indisputable right and the foundation of all other property.
⁴⁵

With this broad analysis of the conditions of labour, wages, property and electoral franchise in England in 1819 set out, Shelley summarized the conclusions of his second chapter. There were five:

(1) That the majority of the people of England are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated.

(2) That they know this, and that they are impatient to procure a reform of the cause of their abject and wretched state.

(3) That the cause of this peculiar misery is the unequal distribution which, under the form of the national debt, has been surreptitiously made of the products of their labour and the products of the labour of their ancestors; for all property is the produce of labour.

(4) That the cause of that cause is a defect in the government.

(5) That . . . every enlightened and honourable person, whatever may be the imagined interest of his peculiar class, ought to excite them to the discovery of the true state of the case and to the temperate but irresistible vindication of their rights.
⁴⁶

It is clear from this chapter how Shelley’s powers of political thought and analysis had developed steadily from the heady days of
Proposals for an Association
and
A Declaration of Rights
(1812) and through the first dawning of an economic analysis in the Hermit of Marlow pamphlets of 1817. Far from declining into the Whig-liberal background from which he had come, Shelley had moved steadily — though sometimes painfully — into a more and more truly radical position. He had now come to realize the implications of capital exploitation, the real need for a mass democratic movement, and the necessary commitment of writers and educated men to address themselves to the people, as well as to their own class.

Shelley’s final chapter applied these considerations to the immediate political situation in the spring of 1820. It is entitled ‘Probable Means’. He was thinking in terms of a working political strategy for radicals in England over the period of perhaps the next four or five years: ‘our present business is with the difficulties and unbending realities of actual life’. The fundamental principle of the strategy is what may be called the principle of graduated response.

His first point was simply that parliamentary reform was necessary at once: ‘That representative assembly called the House of Commons ought questionless to be
immediately
nominated by the great mass of the people.’ But he was by no means certain that this immediate reform should attempt to make the franchise universal at a single stroke. He felt that the Benthamites ‘might seem somewhat immature’ in their call for immediate female suffrage. Perhaps this hesitation is surprising. But Shelley was now quite literally considering the case for universal male and female suffrage in the year 1820, and considering the lack of general education in England, it is understandable.
[2]
However: ‘should my opinion be the result of despondency, the writer of these pages would be the last to withhold
his vote from any system which might tend to an equal and full development of the capacities of all living beings’. If the government of the day should yield to even part of these demands, they should be accepted as strategically the quickest way to achieve the full reform: ‘let us be contented with a limited
beginning
. . . it is no matter how slow, gradual, and cautious be the change; we shall demand more and more with firmness and moderation, never anticipating but never deferring the moment of successful opposition . . .’.
⁴⁷
Shelley knew, as in his disagreements with Hunt, that this could be confused with a mere liberal outlook in point of day-to-day tactics. But the strategy behind it was both severely realistic and intensely radical. ‘. . . Nothing is more idle than to reject a limited benefit because we cannot Without great sacrifice obtain an unlimited one.’ Once the government could be moved, they would never be able to stop again. This was the first level of Shelley’s principle of graduated response.