Shelley: The Pursuit (82 page)

The preface to
Laon and Cythna
, was now completed; although it is only 3,000
words long, it touches many essential matters, and it shows that behind the sustained and perhaps overdrawn creative effort of the summer, an intense critical process had been at work. It represents the first emergence of his mature thought as a writer, and contains the seed of nearly all the literary arguments he was later to develop in his separate essays.

His description of his own education as a poet, while being a remarkable statement of the Romantic position, is also interesting for its emphasis on physical experience and travel.

There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities . . . . The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition. I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war; cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolate thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its most comprehensive sense; and have read the Poets and the Historians and the Metaphysicians whose writings have been accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth, as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine . . . . How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not . . . .
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Most striking about this affirmation is its sweeping, measured, prose reminiscent of the authorised version of the Bible; and its quality of dauntless dignity containing neither self-aggrandisement or self-pity. It has an almost heroic note. The quality of confidence, and the old missionary note of
Queen Mab
,
[5]
is repeated and amplified, in Shelley’s declaration of intent, about writing ‘in the cause of liberal and comprehensive morality’.

I have made no attempt to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument. I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those inquiries which have led to my moral and political creed, and that of some of the sublimest intellects in the world. The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto, which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind . . . .
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From 1817 onwards Shelley relied more frequently than before on prose to advance the ‘methodical and systematic argument’ for altering the present government of mankind.

Finally, in his preface, Shelley tried to make some overall assessment of the social, political and spiritual climate in which he now wrote. His assessment is essentially post-Godwinian. His analysis shows strongly the influence of discussions with Byron in 1816, and Hunt and Peacock and to some extent Hazlitt in 1817. It is not only historically mature, but we can now see that it was also extremely perceptive.

. . . those who now live have survived an age of despair.

The French Revolution may be considered as one of those manifestations of a general state of feeling among civilised mankind produced by a defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions. The year 1788 may be assumed as the epoch of one of the most important crises produced by this feeling . . . . The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state according to the provisions of which one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.

Such is the lesson which experience teaches us now. But, on the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tenderhearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of an age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics, and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief I have composed the following Poem.
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On
2 November Shelley returned alone to London, and on the 8th he took temporary lodgings for a month at 19 Mabledon Place, off the Euston Road, where Mary joined him, leaving the children with Claire at Marlow. Mary and Shelley were now both busy in the task of supervising their respective works for publication. For the fortnight that Mary remained much time was spent dining and taking tea with the publishers Ollier and Hookham; and also with the Godwins, the Hunts and the Baxters. There was one visit to Mabledon Place on the 18th from Keats and Walter Coulson. After the 19th, the guard changed, and Mary returned to Marlow while Claire came up to London; she and Shelley dined together at the Godwins on the 24th.

Whatever Shelley wrote to Mary or Byron of his sickness and depression, he was deeply excited about the forthcoming publication of his poem, which Ollier now agreed should appear around Christmas time. The domineering self-confident attitudes in company that he had manifested at Hunt’s in the spring, were again in evidence. When Henry Crabb Robinson dined at Godwin’s on 6 November, he found Shelley very much at home. ‘I went to Godwin’s,’ he recorded in his diary that evening, ‘Mr Shelley was there. I had never seen him
before. His youth, and a resemblance to Southey, particularly in his voice, raised a pleasing impression, which was not altogether destroyed by his conversation, though it was vehement, and arrogant, and intolerant. He was very abusive towards Southey, who he spoke of as having sold himself to the Court. And this he maintained with the usual party slang . . . . Shelley spoke of Wordsworth with less bitterness, but with an insinuation of his insincerity, etc.’
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As the author of
Laon and Cythna
, Shelley had committed himself to a public political statement, and ‘party slang’ and radical politics occupied much of his talk and thought throughout November, and was the occasion of his second Hermit of Marlow pamphlet. This was the best political pamphlet he ever wrote.

The idea was triggered off in an unexpected way. At the Crabb Robinson dinner Shelley heard that Princess Charlotte, the much-loved only daughter of the much-hated Prince Regent, had died suddenly in childbirth that morning. Public mourning was officially declared. This event ironically coincided with the trial of the Pentridge Revolution leaders, and their conviction and execution at Derby on 8 November.

Shelley had been following the trial closely in the
Examiner
and other more radical journals. The case was notorious both in liberal and working-class circles. The jury had been picked, the prosecution were assigned ten lawyers and the defence only two, and all the prisoners were held for weeks previously on a bread and water diet with no visitors permitted. Most disturbing of all, though the man’s name appears nowhere in the transcripts of the trial, it was widely known that one of the ring-leaders and anchor-men of the insurrection was the government spy Oliver.
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Jeremiah Brandreth was convicted of high treason, and with two other insurrectionists, Isaac Ludlam and William Turner, they were publicly hanged and quartered on 8 November. Contrary to popular belief, these men were not ‘half-starved, illiterate, and unemployed’ labourers.
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Brandreth was a stern, self-educated Baptist, who had probably served as a Luddite captain in 1812. Turner was a 47-year-old stonemason, a man of steady and independent character who had served during the war in Egypt. Ludlam was a Methodist preacher, and part-owner of a local stone quarry. They were all examples of the new wave of self-educated and politically conscious working class from whom Cobbett, Carlile and Samuel Bamford had also sprung.
[6]

Shelley
was immediately struck by the grim discordance between the official reception given to the two pieces of news; the death of the three Pentridge conspirators, and the death of Princess Charlotte. Turning the matter over in his mind, he had already begun to think in terms of a pamphlet, when on the evening of the 11th he and Mary walked along the Marylebone fields from Mabledon Place to take tea with Hunt in Lisson Grove. Godwin and Charles Ollier also dropped in on Hunt, and in the political discussion that followed Shelley’s plan was well received. He began his pamphlet,
An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte
the same evening and writing with intense concentration continued it the following day. By midday on the 12th he had most of it finished, and hurried off the manuscript to Ollier. ‘I enclose you what I have written of a pamphlet on the subject of our conversation the other evening. I wish it to be sent to press without an hours delay . . . the printer can go on with this & send me a proof & the rest of the manuscript shall be sent before evening.’ Shelley thought the subject ‘tho treated boldly is treated delicately’, and hoped Ollier would have no objections.
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He wrote on during the afternoon, and walked over with Mary and the completed manuscript as he had promised in the evening. He had given it a subtitle, a famous revolutionary jibe from Tom Paine:
We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird
. Paine had been attacking Burke’s sentimental eulogy on the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793, when the Revolution was in danger. Shelley was attacking the attention given to the Princess’s death, when political liberty itself was dying.

On the Death of Princess Charlotte
is the last political pamphlet Shelley ever wrote in England. It bears the distinctive mark of a single, rapid, informed and passionate reaction to a public issue of moment. It goes straight to its mark, without philosophical extenuations, and is brilliantly readable. Shelley’s real target was, as before, the urgent need for sweeping political reform; but now he added to this the need for economic reform as well. Like the preface to
Laon and Cythna
, it shows for the first time Shelley’s attitudes reaching their mature formulation. It is outstanding in his political writing for its flexibility and directness of style. Shelley used the lurid data of the popular press with immense effect. Thus he makes his main, and of course seditious, political point:

On the 7th November, Brandreth, Turner and Ludlam ascended the scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less, because it seems he killed a man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to murder. On the
word of a dying man, Brandreth tells us, that ‘OLIVER brought him to this’ — that ‘but for OLIVER, he would not have been there.’ See, too, Ludlam and Turner, with their sons and brothers and sisters, how they kneel together in a dreadful agony of prayer. Hell is before their eyes, and they shudder and feel sick with fear lest some unrepented or some wilful sin should seal their doom in everlasting fire. With that dreadful penalty before their eyes — with that tremendous sanction for the truth of all he spoke, Turner exclaimed loudly and distinctly
while the executioner was putting the rope round his neck
, ‘THIS IS ALL OLIVER AND THE GOVERNMENT’.
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