Shelley

Chapter II. Principal Writings

The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a very peculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he never dreamed merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate his dreams into acts. The practical side of him was so strong that he might have been a great statesman or reformer, had not his imagination, stimulated by a torrential fluency of language, overborne his will. He was like a boat (the comparison would have pleased him) built for strength and speed, but immensely oversparred. His life was a scene of incessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters, diaries, and pamphlets, his translations from Greek, Spanish, German, and Italian, and remembering that he died at thirty, and was, besides, feverishly active in a multitude of affairs, we fancy that his pen can scarcely ever have been out of his hand. And not only was he perpetually writing; he read gluttonously. He would thread the London traffic, nourishing his unworldly mind from an open book held in one hand, and his ascetic body from a hunch of bread held in the other. This fury for literature seized him early. But the quality of his early work was astonishingly bad. An author while still a schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, written for the most part when he was seventeen years old, called 'Zastrozzi', the mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants, is eloquent of its nature. This was soon followed by another like it, 'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are adaptations from the German [2] or not, these books are merely bad imitations of the bad school then in vogue, the flesh-creeping school of skeletons and clanking chains, of convulsions and ecstasies, which Miss Austen, though no one knew it, had killed with laughter years before.[3] "Verezzi scarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of horror"--that is the kind of stuff in which the imagination of the young Shelley rioted. And evidently it is not consciously imagined; life really presented itself to him as a romance of this kind, with himself as hero--a hero who is a hopeless lover, blighted by premature decay, or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to all eternity. This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental verse and prose, much of it more or less surreptitiously published, which the researches of specialists have brought to light, and which need not be dwelt upon here.

[2 So Mr. H. B. Forman suggests in the introduction to his edition of Shelley's Prose Works. But Hogg says that he did not begin learning German until 1815.]

[3 'Northanger Abbey', satirising Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, was written before 1798, but was not published until 1818.]

But very soon another influence began to mingle with this feebly extravagant vein, an influence which purified and strengthened, though it never quite obliterated it. At school he absorbed, along with the official tincture of classical education, a violent private dose of the philosophy of the French Revolution; he discovered that all that was needed to abolish all the evil done under the sun was to destroy bigotry, intolerance, and persecution as represented by religious and monarchical institutions. At first this influence combined with his misguided literary passions only to heighten the whole absurdity, as when he exclaims, in a letter about his first disappointed love, "I swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me--never will I forgive Intolerance!" The character of the romance is changed indeed; it has become an epic of human regeneration, and its emotions are dedicated to the service of mankind; but still it is a romance. The results, however, are momentous; for the hero, being a man of action, is no longer content to write and pay for the printing: in his capacity of liberator he has to step into the arena, and, above all, he has to think out a philosophy.

An early manifestation of this impulse was the Irish enterprise already mentioned. Public affairs always stirred him, but, as time went on, it was more and more to verse and less to practical intervention, and after 1817 he abandoned argument altogether for song. But one pamphlet, 'A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote' (1817), is characteristic of the way in which he was always labouring to do something, not merely to ventilate existing evils, but to promote some practical scheme for abolishing them. Let a national referendum, he says, be held on the question of reform, and let it be agreed that the result shall be binding on Parliament; he himself will contribute 100 pounds a year (one-tenth of his income) to the expenses of organisation. He is in favour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolish aristocracy and monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the hands of men rendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery; and he proposes that the payment of a small sum in direct taxes should be the qualification for the parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, was not in the sphere of practical politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how far Shelley was from being a vulgar theory-ridden crank to whom the years bring no wisdom.

Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that "intolerance" was the cause of all evil, and, in the same flash, that it could be destroyed by clear and simple reasoning. Apply the acid of enlightened argument, and religious beliefs will melt away, and with them the whole rotten fabric which they support--crowns and churches, lust and cruelty, war and crime, the inequality of women to men, and the inequality of one man to another. With Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it at once. The first thing, since religion is at the bottom of all force and fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason for believing in Christianity. This was easy enough, and a number of impatient argumentative pamphlets were dashed off. One of these, 'The Necessity of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might also be usefully attacked:--there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is described. In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find

  "Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
   Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
     And the bright beaming stars
     That through the casement shone."

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