Shelley: The Pursuit (86 page)

At the last moment, Cythna arrives on her huge Tartarian charger, scattering the crowd in terror. She reaches the execution pyre, dismounts and without a word — but smiling — climbs to Laon’s side at the stake.

                                Cythna sprung

From
her gigantic steed, who, like a shade

Chased by the winds, those vacant streets among

Fled tameless, as the brazen rein she flung

Upon his neck, and kissed his moonèd brow.
⁷³

Laon and Cythna are burnt together on the pyre.

There remains an epilogue of twenty-five stanzas, which returns to the schematic allegorical world of Canto I. The two lovers and revolutionaries awake to find themselves sailing rapidly down an exotic river in a glittering, translucent boat ‘one curved shell of hollow pearl’. It is skippered by a seraphic child, who is loosely connected with the child Cythna believed she gave birth to in prison. The child reports the death by suicide of Laon’s follower, the ‘Atheist and Republican’ which Shelley had to suppress, who symbolizes the vast following which has been left behind among the youth, ready to forward the cause, when the time is ripe again on earth. The boat sails into a sunlit ocean towards a visionary Hesperides.

The Revolt of Islam
is the longest poem Shelley ever wrote. He intended it to be a political epic of modern revolution, but its literary model, in so far as it has one, is Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
. It has little in common with the historical dramas inspired directly by the French Revolution: Southey’s
Wat Tyler
, or Coleridge’s
Fall of Robespierre
. Politically, it shows little grasp of the revolutionary process, beyond the important dialectical principle that revolutionary anarchy breeds revolutionary dictatorship, a principle that every other reader of the
Examiner
would have subscribed to. But it shows no understanding yet of a genuinely democratic process or popular movement. Laon and Cythna are heroic leaders out of an ancient, aristocratic mould that owes more to Spenser’s mythical knights than to the world of Brandreth, or Henry Hunt, or Sir Francis Burdett. The prose of Shelley’s preface, and the political pamphlet, showed far more progressive thought and intellectual penetration than his poem. Only in the grotesque scenarios of Canto x, with its extraordinary expressionist picture of Nature and society collapsing under terrorism and oppression, did he find any adequate political image of his age: and it was an image of reaction, not of revolution.

The real revolution celebrated in
The Revolt of Islam
is a moral and social one. The heart of that revolution lies in the new kind of freedom and independent partnership expressed in the relationship between Laon and Cythna. They grow up together as equals; they talk, struggle for the cause, and make love, as equals. They attack religious belief and moral prudery, as equals. They are both sexually passionate, but both ethically and actively independent. Moreover it is the
woman, Cythna, who actually triggers the revolution, not the man Laon. Shelley’s original intention to make the relationship explicitly incestuous was deliberately meant to draw maximum attention to its revolutionary and socially iconoclastic nature. The suppression of the incest theme was therefore a major blow to the ideology of the poem. The very change of title shows Charles Ollier’s wish to draw attention away from the moral to the political events. But it is this relationship which contains and celebrates all the genuinely revolutionary values in the poem: its atheism, its free love, its social equality between men and women, and its selfless dedication to the people. It is only in describing these values that Shelley’s poetry achieves its briefly sustained passages of brilliance, and successfully contains the uneasy balance between mythic and realistic presentation. Otherwise the poem is a failure. But for Shelley, paradoxically, it achieved the major breakthrough into his mature work. Written at 25,
The Revolt of Islam
was the last poem of his youth. It also contains the first work of his maturity.

The poem was not to prove influential, except in the sub-genre of workers’ propaganda poems written by later nineteenth-century poets such as Thomas Cooper the Chartist Rhymer, William Morris and Thomas Hood. Cooper lectured extensively on Shelley at working men’s clubs and institutes during the 1840s. He included
The Revolt of Islam
, as well as Byron’s
Childe Harold
, in the sacred roll call in his own political epic
The Purgatory of Suicides
. It gives some indication of Shelley’s importance as a prophetic figure in the eyes of the Chartists:

Or thou, immortal Childe, with him that saw

Islam’s Revolt, in rapt prophetic trance, —

Did fear of harsh reception overawe

Your fervid souls from fervid utterance

Of Freedom’s fearless shout? — your scathing glance

On priestly rottennes, did ye tame down

Till priests could brook that lightning’s mitigance?

Knowing your cold reward would be the frown

Of Power and Priestcraft, — ye your sternest thoughts made known.
⁷⁴
[11]

Shelley
counted a great deal on the public reception of his poem. One of the reasons which held him back from going to Italy was the hope that his literary reputation might at last be put on a sound footing. With the tantalizing example of Byron’s sweeping sales of
Childe Harold
before him, he longed desperately to find recognition among the liberal English readership. His submission to the editorial changes by Ollier could only be truly justified by reaching a broad audience.

It is transparently clear from his letters to Ollier how concerned he was about both the advertising and reviewing of his work. On 11 January he wrote, ‘keep it well
advertized
, and write for money directly the other is gone’. Four days later he sent ten pounds to Ollier ‘that no delay may take place in vigorously advertising. I think I said that I wish under the new circumstances that a copy should be sent to each of the Reviews.’
⁷⁶
On the 22nd he wrote yet again. ‘Don’t relax in the advertizing — I suppose at present that it scarcely sells at all. — If you see any reviews or notices of it in any periodical paper pray send it me, — it is part of my reward — the amusement of hearing the abuse of bigots.’
⁷⁷
At the end of the month he was still urging, ‘you ought to continue to advertise the poem vigourously’, and he added as a casual P.S. that Ollier might send the current number of the
Quarterly
.
⁷⁸
But it was all in vain. The sales were bad, and the reviews were worse, despite Hunt’s most vigorous efforts for him in the pages of the
Examiner
.

First, as a trailer, Hunt ran two large extracts from the poem, each over fifty lines, in the issues of 30 November 1817 and 25 January 1818. Then in February and March he ran two parts of a massive and favourable review, including a summary of the entire plot, and extensive quotation. ‘If the author’s genius reminds us of any other poets, it is of two very opposite ones, Lucretius and Dante. The former he resembles in the Daedalian part of it, in the boldness of his speculations, and in his love of virtue, of external nature, and of love itself. It is his gloomier or more imaginative passages that sometimes remind us of Dante.’
⁷⁹

But Hunt’s praise, though very welcome, was from the inside. His advocacy may even have hindered Shelley’s cause in wider circles, for outside the liberal camp Hunt was regarded as a genteel charlatan, and writers associated with the ‘Cockney School’ got rough handling. Keats was also to suffer from this reaction. The
Monthly Magazine
quoted a modest couple of stanzas of
The Revolt of Islam
in its March issue, merely observing that there was ‘an almost total neglect of harmonious modulation and quantity’, and leaving the rest in silence. In May the
Quarterly
, turning aside from a scathing review of Hunt’s ‘Foliage’ — which was dedicated to Shelley — lambasted Shelley without naming him. After referring to a disreputable career at Eton and Oxford, the anonymous reviewer (probably John Taylor Coleridge) continued: ‘according to our understandings
it is not a proof of a very affectionate heart to break that of a wife by cruelty and infidelity; and if we were told of a man who, placed on a wild rock among the clouds, yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre of spire-like mountains, hanging over a valley of eternal ice and snow . . . if we were told of a man who, thus witnessing the sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to a cabin near and write
atheos
after his name in the album, we hope our own feelings would be pity rather than disgust; but we should think it imbecility indeed to court that man’s friendship, or to celebrate his intellect or his heart as the wisest or warmest of the age’.
⁸⁰
This story was retold in 1819 by both the
London Chronicle
and the
Commercial Chronicle
. In London society Shelley’s name gained currency for atheism and immorality rather than for poetry. But the
Quarterly
saved its main attack on
The Revolt of Islam
for April 1819, having prepared itself with a copy of the suppressed ‘incestuous’ edition,
Laon and Cythna
.

The third journal which commented in 1818 was the right-wing
British Critic
, which produced a masterpiece of innuendo in preference to literary comment. ‘Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley — but we will not trust ourselves with this person; Tacitus has taught us that there are some offences so flagitious in their nature, that it is necessary, for the benefit of public morals, to conceal their punishment; we leave them, therefore, to the silent vengeance which vice sooner or later
must
wreak upon itself.’
⁸¹
It is this kind of smear journalism which must be borne in mind when considering the development of Shelley’s almost pathological hatred for reviewers.

The most penetrating review of
The Revolt of Islam
appeared exactly twelve months later in
Blackwood’s Magazine
. Sadly this was far too late to change Shelley’s feeling that the poem had done nothing but bring him hatred and notoriety. Nevertheless it shows that intelligent contemporaries could indeed appreciate his work. The review began by distinguishing sharply between Shelley’s work and the ‘Cockney School’ poetry of Hunt and the immature Keats. It commented shrewdly on ‘the silence observed by our professional critics’ which it attributed to fear, in the present political climate, of praising the literary merits of poetry which professed a radical ideology: ‘by giving to his genius its due praise, they might only be lending the means of currency to the opinions in whose service [Mr Shelley] has unwisely enlisted his energies’. Equally,
Blackwood’s
felt the Hunt connection had frightened off other critics, fearful of ‘public disgust’.

For his own part, the
Blackwood’s
reviewer J. G. Lockhart,
[12]
carefully separated
the poetry from the politics. ‘As a philosopher, our author is weak and worthless; — our business is with him as a poet, and, as such, he is strong, nervous, original; well entitled to take his place near to the great creative masters, whose works have shed its truest glory around the age wherein we live. As a political and infidel treatise, the Revolt of Islam is contemptible; — happily a great part of it has no necessary connexion either with politics or with infidelity.’ This was disingenuous, to say the least, but it served its purpose. Lockhart continued, like Hunt, by summarizing the plot and quoting extensively, but in a way that really showed a finer and more ranging appreciation. Passages were drawn from the description of the childhood love between Laon and Cythna in Canto II; the battle and arrival of the black Tartarian horse in Canto VI, ‘a power and energy altogether admirable’; and from the whole of the love-making sequence in the mountains. This last, especially, was an apt and courageous piece of reviewing. Lockhart’s commentary has not really been bettered in modern criticism. ‘It is in the portraying of this intense, overmastering, unfearing, unfading love, that Mr Shelley has proved himself to be a great poet. Around his lovers, moreover, in the midst of all their fervours, he has shed an air of calm gracefullness, a certain majestic monumental stillness, which realizes in them our ideas of Greeks . . . . struggling for freedom in the best spirit of their fathers.’
⁸²

If Shelley had read this paragraph while he was still in England, it is conceivable that he might never have chosen exile. But it was all too late.
The Revolt of Islam
seemed to be nothing but a devastating failure. His whole life appeared to have been misdirected.

During January 1818, Shelley was again attacked by ophthalmia, probably the result of his Christmas visits to the Marlow cottagers distributing the blankets. The disease was so bad that he was virtually unable to read and had to forgo the long immersions in Gibbon and
Paradise Lost
with which he had been soothing himself. Mary brought in Hogg and Peacock to distract him, but in the evenings she banished everyone from the room and had long, serious talks with him which she noted briefly in her journal. After a few days, the ophthalmia eased, and they went for walks together by the grey Thames and Shelley began translating Homer’s ‘Hymns’.
⁸³