Shelley: The Pursuit (136 page)

Every person conscious of intellectual power ought studiously to wean himself from the study and the practise of poetry, & ought to apply that power to general finance, political economy to the study in short of the laws according to which the forms of the social order might be most wisely regulated for the happiness of those whom it binds together. — These are indeed high objects, [& I pledge myself to worship Themis rather than Apollo if . . . it could be found that . . . ]
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The phrases in brackets were deleted, and eventually Shelley rejected the whole introduction; but it indicates the consistency of his thought with the previous political essays, and his determination to justify poetry (Apollo) with the same ‘high objects’ in view as the political sciences (Themis).

Yet Shelley did not merely reiterate or rephrase his previous arguments. He succeeded in moving them forward another stage, and occasionally crystallizing them with memorable felicity. But because of the patchwork nature of the
Defence
, and the improvised swirl of its argument, the fine passages come in no very evident logical order. The
Defence
, is best picked over like the anthology that it actually was. It serves as a brilliant series of provocations and challenges to further thought and study: but it is not a treatise. Like the ‘Notes on the Florentine Sculpture’, its finest remarks and
aperçus
are brief, sometimes puzzling and epigrammatic, and always full of lively imagery. It was very much a
poet’s Defence.

Of translation, Shelley wrote with all the authority and humility of a great practitioner:

. . . the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
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Of the moral function of poetry which has no didactic — or indeed, no moral — intent:

The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. . . . Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
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Of erotic writing and erotic writers, he made a firm and interesting defence. His argument is that the erotic is the last and most private stronghold of the imagination against social corruption; and that when poetry and imaginative thought generally is under great social pressure, it is to the erotic that writers retire, as to a final fortress of the individual sensibility. It is only in this sense, as evidence of a rearguard battle, that erotic writing is the product of a society in decline.

It is not what the erotic writers have, but
what they have not
, in which their imperfection consists. . . . For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom through the affections into the very appetites. . . . At the approach of such a period poetry ever adresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the world.
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Astraea was the goddess of Justice. The poison imagery of this passage is familiar.

Apart from Shelley’s defence of Milton’s Satan (as a moral being ‘far superior to his God’), the finest purely literary description concerned Dante. He saw him equally as a pure poet, as a political influence, and as an eternal force in European culture. Shelley’s language here was so charged with his peculiar radiant imagery, and the insistent almost Biblical rhythms which recall passages of
Prometheus Unbound
, that it really takes a considerable effort to hold onto the argument. Shelley believed that a great masterpiece had a quality of self-regeneration: it took on new forms and significance for its readers as it moved beyond its own time, and its own culture. This argument was wonderfully perceptive, and showed, once again, the authority of a poet and translator who had himself proved it true.

Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning, the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of
their birth and pregnant with a lightning that has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially . . . after one person and one age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
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Shelley’s
Defence
has many weaknesses and peculiarities, most of them attributable to the circumstances under which it was hurriedly assembled in March. It is frequently repetitive and verbose, and the major passages have to be unearthed, like so many nuggets, from the surrounding rhetorical
maremma.
It also has many eccentricities of argument, as the extraordinary passage in which he gravely put forward the opinion that poets have generally been the wisest, happiest and best of men, and that ‘the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence’. However, no doubt some mischievous Scythropian humour was here at work for Peacock’s benefit, for shortly afterwards he revealed among a list of poets’ minor peculiarities, ‘that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate’.
⁸⁶

The heart of his
Defence
turns on the role of poetry as a force for freedom in society. Freedom from what, or for what? Taking poetry in the most comprehensive sense, he defined this in a celebrated summary which was his final answer to Peacock’s position.

We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and economic knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. . . . We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun our conception. . . . The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has for want of the poetical faculty proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
⁸⁷

Peacock’s argument in the
Four Ages of Poetry
has usually been underestimated; it was in fact a critique of written poetry which was to have a more and more serious application as the Victorian Age drew on. Yet it is difficult to believe that Shelley’s reply is not a profound one; or that in making it, he had not indeed made himself into one of those ‘mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present’. Despite Shelley’s hurry to prepare it, Ollier did not use the manuscript when it arrived in London, and it was eventually printed along with Shelley’s other Essays in 1840.

The moment the article was dispatched with Mary’s help on 20 March 1821, Shelley turned his attention back to the state of the Italian political upheavals in which Piedmont had now joined. His letter to Peacock at the end of the month was as much about this as about the problems of poetry, and the daily attendance of Prince Mavrocordato at the Casa Aulla in a turban: ‘We are surrounded here in Pisa by revolutionary volcanoes.’ He added, with mild sleight of hand, that Claire was passing the carnival at Florence ‘& has been preter-naturally gay’.
⁸⁸
On the first of April Italian political excitements were joined by news from Greece that the Greek General Ypsilanti had raised the revolutionary standard in Wallachia, and was marching with an army, rumoured to contain 10,000 Greeks, on the northern provinces. Mavrocordato came to inform Mary and Shelley of this and of his impending departure for the scene of action. Mary was unusually ecstatic for her on a political issue, and wrote with many exclamation marks to Claire, ‘The Morea — Epirus — Servia are in revolt. Greece will most certainly be free.’ As a postscript to Mary’s letter, Shelley informed Claire that in London the Bill for Catholic Emancipation had passed its second reading by a majority of 497 to 11, and inquired after her plans for the summer. ‘
We
are yet undecided . . . say something to fix our determination.’
⁸⁹

Shelley had been giving a good deal of thought to the summer. After his severe illness of the winter, Vaccà had advised plenty of exercise — perhaps he should buy a horse? Certainly he felt the need to free himself from the decidedly socializing existence that Mary had established at Pisa. He needed an excuse for getting outside. On 15 April he summoned his two most open-air companions, Edward Williams and Henry Reveley, and went to Livorno to see what could be found. It was a modest idea, though it was to have significant consequences. But it was not a horse: it was a small boat.

Henry Reveley remembered the occasion well.
⁹⁰
‘Shelley came to me at Leghorn in an unusually excited state, and said that he was tired of walking fourteen miles backwards and forwards, and that he must have a boat of some sort, but that he had very little money to spare.’ Reveley helped them purchase a slim, ten-foot boat, with a flat bottom and a very small draught of some few inches. It was of the kind that was used by huntsmen for navigating the network of local dikes and canals through the
maremma
; a very light, strong construction made of pitched canvas stretched over a pinewood frame.
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They had a few modifications made, including the mounting of a short mast and lugger sail, with a corresponding keel fitted to the hull. This took most of the day, and after purchasing some small stores to take home to Mary and Jane Williams, Shelley
proposed that they make their maiden voyage home by moonlight to Pisa. Reveley decided to come with them for the trip, particularly as he had some local knowledge of the waterways. What happened next was very much in the order of things. About half-way through their journey, and some time towards midnight, Williams stood up in the little craft to make some adjustment, lost his balance, caught at the mast and in an instant capsized the whole boat. They were all three struggling in the dark water under the moon; Reveley swimming easily, Williams paddling in small circles, Shelley floundering and shouting.
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The section of the canal connecting Livorno and the Arno which they were then in was broad and deep, and Reveley could feel no bottom; the water was stabbingly cold.

Reveley took charge. ‘I sent Williams ashore, as he could swim a little, and then caught hold of Shelley, and told him to be calm and quiet, and I would take him on shore. His answer was: “All right, never more comfortable in my life; do what you will with me.’” Williams got Shelley ashore, but it was quite a near thing, and on crawling up the bank Shelley collapsed on his face in a dead faint, from a mixture of cold and shock. Williams revived him while Reveley manfully plunged back in and recovered the boat, which seems to have been damaged. They walked across the fields to a nearby farmhouse, knocked up the Italians, and spent the night sleeping in front of roaring fires, after a large supper. Shelley was in ‘ecstasies of delight after his ducking’ but Williams and Reveley were less amused. For some strange reason Shelley considered it a good omen.
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The next morning Shelley and Williams walked back to Pisa with their story, and Reveley nursed the boat back to Livorno for repairs. Shelley sent detailed instructions about altering the position of the rowlocks, mounting a shallow rudder and refitting the keel so that it ran the whole length of the hull.
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The skiff was also to be smartly painted, so that altogether she would make, as he told Claire, ‘a very nice little shell, for the Nautilus your friend’.
⁹⁵
He envisaged a glorious summer spent pottering up the canals with Williams from a base at San Giuliano.

The mood was broken when he got back to Pisa by tragic news: John Keats had died at Rome. An anguished letter had arrived from Hunt during his two days’ absence at Livorno. At first Shelley accepted the news with curious resignation, for he had been expecting it for some time. He wrote to Byron that evening, ‘Young Keats, whose “Hyperion” showed so great a promise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the “Quarterly Review”.’
⁹⁶
The
Quarterly
attack was always inextricably bound up in Shelley’s mind with Keats’s suffering, though in fact there was very little connection. The review had after all been published as long ago as September 1818, and there
had been many favourable notices of the
Lamia
volume of 1820 since that time.
⁹⁷