Shelley: The Pursuit (93 page)

Shelley’s visits to the casino, rare as they were, apparently gave him more pleasure than they did Mary or even Claire. Shelley was much amused that although they looked forward to their outings so much, neither of the girls, when it came to the point, would actually dance: ‘I do not know whether they refrain from philosophy or protestantism.’
⁴¹
He himself had no such scruples, though he told Peacock mockingly that there was pitifully little chance of being swept off one’s feet: ‘the women being far removed from anything which the most liberal annotator could interpret into beauty or grace, and apparently possessing no intellectual excellencies to compensate the deficiency. I assure you it is well that it is so, for the dances, especially the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it would be a little dangerous to the newly unfrozen senses and imagination
of us migrators from the neighbourhood of the pole. As it is — except in the dark — there could be no peril.’
⁴²

But these frivolities barely rippled the surface of his days at the Casa Bertini. He luxuriated in the remoteness of everyday affairs, especially affairs in England, and hardly paused to note the news of the Westminster elections, or the political apostasy of the ‘beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth!’ The generally favourable run of reviews which Mary’s
Frankenstein
was receiving, and his own pillorying in the
Quarterly
as a civil and religious pervert, evoked slightly more interest; but the anticipation of Peacock’s
Nightmare Abbey
alone aroused something like enthusiasm, and he suggested a motto from Ben Jonson, ‘Have you a stool there to be melancholy upon?’ Understanding from Peacock that the book was to be an attack on the pessimism and conservatism of modern English authors, he urged: ‘I hope you have given the enemy no quarter. Remember, it is a sacred war.’
⁴³
Later, in August, having received vague forewarning from Peacock, or having himself guessed that his own circle was involved, he wrote with sudden sharpness: ‘Well, what is in it? What is it? You are as secret as if the priest of Ceres had dictated its sacred pages.’
⁴⁴

The mixture of moods which his letters from Casa Bertini reflect — the sense of well-being and amused detachment, suddenly cut across by moments of irritations or self-mockery — betray the difficulty he was having through June and July with his own writing. He had come to the Bagni primarily, as he had planned in Milan, to get a major piece of work done. But beyond the few fragments already begun at Livorno, his projected drama of ‘Tasso’ yielded nothing, and Mary’s suggestion that he take up and complete
Rosalind and Helen
— which he did — neither freed his creative faculties nor satisfied them. His reading, especially in the Greeks, went ahead rapidly; but his notebooks remained empty. Finally, almost as a kind of distraction, he started to put down translations of what he was reading. Though he did not fully realize it at the time, this almost casual act was his first significant literary step since his arrival in Italy. Translation was to prove an immensely important catalyst. Not only was he to produce several translated texts, excellent and highly significant in their own right; but a number of his own works were to be triggered by, or actually based upon, translations.

Shelley’s reading of the Greek dramatists had given way by the end of June to reading Plato. Restlessness at being unable to write had set in, and on the first Saturday in July he hired a horse and rode alone down the long winding valley of the Lima as far as Lucca, where rivers combine and become the Serchio. It was a distance of about eighteen miles, but Shelley covered it in the course of the long evening, stopped the night, and returned on Sunday, when they all went to the casino. During this interlude, a plan had suddenly formed in his mind to
translate the
Symposium
, and by Thursday the 9th he was at work. Occasionally reading sections to Mary as he went, he continued for a week, and by Friday the 17th he had completed a rough draft. He started off again to ride to Lucca, this time taking Claire with him, but she fell off her horse and they had to go back to the Casa Bertini to recover. The next day the trip was made successfully. Mary’s journal is not explicit on the point, but judging by the distance of the ride, and Claire’s evident inexpertise, it seems likely that she and Shelley spent the night together at Lucca, and returned the next day, as Shelley had done alone the week previously. Claire’s riding technique at least was not improved, for she fell off her horse again in August.
⁴⁵

Shelley now handed the whole of his text over to Mary, who began a careful transcription on Monday the 20th. Discussion of various points of social and literary background, many of which were obscure to Mary, led him on to consider writing an introductory essay. This he found more difficult, and he was still adding to it and clarifying it on 16 August, when outside events called his attention away.

Shelley’s
The Banquet Translated from Plato
, together with his introduction, ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’, are the two works which of his whole output show most clearly his qualities as a pure scholar. When Hogg referred to the summer at Marlow as ‘a mere Atticism’, it is by these two works that one can assess the real value of that essentially gentlemanly classicism. The value is high. Shelley’s translation shows him perfectly in control of the overall sweep of the philosophic dialogue, masterly with the more impassioned sections of Socrates’s and Agathon’s speeches, and with a considerable gift for drawing out the individual character and style of each speaker. The general directness and limpidity of his style, while retaining a certain elegant formality, especially in its rhythms, is particularly pleasing. A comparison with Jowett’s great Victorian translation, and a popular modern one by W.D. Rouse, shows how Shelley holds the Attic balance between pedanticism and breezy familiarity, even at the most mundane level.
[5]
It has also been noted how the translations reflected the milieu in which they were made, and how, in this too, Shelley’s version is especially rich with the resonances of lived experience: ‘Jowett, for instance, somehow imparts to his Alcibiades the atmosphere together with the locutions of an English undergraduate,
while Shelley’s Alcibiades carries about him, with something of a Byronic air and with an incommunicable verve and charm and freshness, the atmosphere of an accomplished man of the world, a spoilt darling of the gods.’
⁴⁶
Where Shelley is occasionally inaccurate, in more philosophic passages, it is because he has preferred to abandon the use of Scapula’s Greek lexicon, and rely on the interpretation given by Plato’s great Renaissance student, Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin text Shelley had alongside him at Casa Bertini as he worked.
⁴⁷

Shelley’s interest in Plato had existed since he was introduced to him as an hermetic and subversive text by Dr Lind at Eton. One of the most interesting facts about Shelley’s translation is that both he and Mary still regarded the text as controversial. The
Symposium
had the reputation of being improper to the point of indelicacy, and despite Thomas Taylor’s translation (1792) it was still academically suspect in the English universities. Plato was not included in the papers set for the Humanities at Oxford until 1847.
⁴⁸
Mary wrote privately to Mrs Gisborne that ‘Shelley translated the Symposium in ten days (an anecdote for Mr Bielby). It is a most beautiful piece of writing — I think you will be delighted with it — It is true that in many particulars it shocks our present manners, but no one can be a reader of the works of antiquity unless they can transport themselves from these to other times and judge not by our but by their morality.’
⁴⁹
It was not Plato’s idealism, but the homosexual undertone to the whole work which called forth this
caveat
. Shelley quite appreciated the force of this, and his ‘Discourse’ was mainly concerned with putting the matter into its historical perspective. He explained to Peacock that it was a ‘subject to be handled with that delicate caution which either I cannot or I will not practise in other matters, but which here I acknowledge to be necessary. Not that I have any serious thoughts of publishing either this discourse or the
Symposium
, at least till I return to England, when we may discuss the propriety of it.’
⁵⁰

The thought of Shelley discussing the
propriety
of a publication is surprising, and has led to some speculation that the subject of homosexuality was a particularly delicate one for Shelley himself. But Shelley’s estimate of publication difficulties was perfectly correct. Editorial caution on the part of Moxon and Leigh Hunt allowed only a mutilated version of each to be published in the official edition of Shelley’s prose in 1840, despite Mary’s struggle to retain a reasonably open text.
[6]
The mutilated version of both, with glaring omissions,
continued in all editions into the present century,
⁵¹
and was mistakenly used by psychologist-critics as
prima facie
evidence of Shelley’s ‘suppressed homosexuality’, the argument being that he could not face translating certain sections.
⁵²
As it is, the full text of Shelley’s ‘Discourse’ from his own manuscript, and the full text of
The Banquet
, from Mary’s own transcription of August 1818 first appeared in a limited scholars’ edition of 100 copies, printed ‘for private circulation’ in 1931.
⁵³

Shelley’s fascination with Plato influenced his work throughout his years in Italy, especially between 1818 and 1820. He also translated Plato’s
Ion
, part of his
Phaedo
, and several epigrams. It is a main element in the development of his thought, especially in politics, religious scepticism and that special mixture of moral and psychological speculation which Shelley called metaphysics. Yet Shelley was at no point completely converted to ‘Platonism’, any more than he had been previously to Godwinism. His attitude from the start was critical and comparative. He selected, disregarded and explored as he went: it is precisely that sense of the
historical relativity
of ideas and social values which Plato brought to Shelley, for which he is most important. The combination of logic and poetry in Plato especially delighted him, and led him to the comparison with Bacon’s essays. Yet even in the introductory ‘Discourse’, Shelley was always careful to define Plato’s virtues against a background of critical reservations. ‘[Plato’s] views into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, only because they are profound; and though his theories respecting the government of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatise which do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the human mind . . . . The dialogue entitled The Banquet was selected by the translator as the most beautiful and the most perfect among all the works of Plato.’
⁵⁴
Moreover it is clear from Shelley’s subsequent remarks on Plato, that he approached the
Symposium
as much as a great piece of Greek poetry as as a piece of philosophic dogma. ‘Plato was essentially a poet,’ he wrote some three years later, ‘the truth and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include under determinate forms the varied pauses of his style.’
⁵⁵
The observation on prose rhythm is interesting, for the corresponding rhythm of Shelley’s translation is part of his most striking achievement, and distinguishes it from later versions.

Apart from its literary value, the main interest of Shelley’s translation and commentary on Plato derives from the broad and steady light which it throws
on Shelley’s own theories and personal feelings about sexual love. There is no other text anywhere in his writing which shows these so clearly.

In the first place, Shelley examined the problem of homosexuality.

The passion which [the Greek] poets and philosophers described and felt seems inconsistent with this latter maxim [
i.e. according to nature
], in a degree inconceivable to the imagination of a modern European. But let us not exaggerate the matter. We are not exactly aware — and the laws of modern composition scarcely permit a modest writer to investigate the subject with philosophical accuracy, — what the action was by which the Greeks expressed this passion. I am persuaded that it was totally different from the ridiculous and disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on the subject, at least except among the more debased and abandoned of mankind. It is impossible that a lover could usually have subjected the object of his attachment to so detestable a violation or have consented to associate his own remembrance in the beloved mind with images of pain and horror.
⁵⁶