Shelley: The Pursuit (125 page)

However, in reality Shelley believed that after the failure of the 1817 and 1819 agitations, the likelihood of the government moving forward was already past, and that the two parties were already too polarized. This had been grimly illustrated by Peterloo, and by Cato Street. Such a consideration brought the second level of graduated response. It was quite clear: ‘If the House of Parliament obstinately and perpetually refuse to concede any reform, my vote is for universal suffrage and equal representation.’ This should be achieved by a strategy of constant legal and parliamentary confrontation, ceaseless intellectual attack and a programme of public meetings and civil disobedience. Shelley’s outline of this campaign is a most remarkable description of precisely the methods which afterwards succeeded in changing the political face of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For this purpose government ought to be defied, in cases of questionable result, to prosecute for political libel. All questions relating to the jurisdiction of magistrates and courts of law respecting which any doubt could be raised ought to be agitated with indefatigable pertinacity. Some two or three of the popular leaders have shown the best spirit in this respect;
[3]
they only want system and cooperation. The tax-gatherer ought to be compelled in every practicable instance to distrain, while the right to impose taxes . . . is formally contested by an overwhelming multitude of defendants before the common law . . . .
⁴⁸

While this campaign advanced, petitions ‘couched in the actual language of the petitioners’ should load the tables of the House of Commons. Poets, philosophers
and artists should remonstrate directly with the government, and also by writing ‘memorials’ showing the ‘inevitable connection between national prosperity and freedom, and the cultivation of imagination and the cultivation of scientific truth’. Shelley specifically named Godwin, Hazlitt, Bentham and Leigh Hunt as obvious candidates for this task; and the very book he was writing fitted into such a category.
⁴⁹

Finally the radical patriots and working-class leaders should help to organize the mass contribution to such a campaign:

He will urge the necessity of exciting the people frequently to exercise their right of assembling in such limited numbers as that all present may be actual parties to the proceedings of the day. Lastly, if circumstances had collected a more considerable number as at Manchester on the memorable 16th of August, if the tyrants command their troops to fire upon them or cut them down unless they disperse, he will exhort them peacably to risk the danger, and to expect without resistance the onset of the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the event of the fire of the artillery. . . . The soldier is a man and an Englishman. This unexpected reception would probably throw him back upon a recollection of the true nature of the measures of which he was made the instrument, and the enemy might be converted into the ally.
⁵⁰

Here, once again, was the passive resistance doctrine of
The Mask of Anarchy
, though with the shrewd addition that given all the other agitation surrounding the circumstances of such a confrontation, the common soldier was highly likely to join such a demonstration himself. This has always proved the crucial shift of power which has triggered every successful city revolution in Western and Eastern Europe since 1792.

Shelley was writing with his eye on the actualities of English politics, and he knew that other confrontations such as Peterloo could not be indefinitely sustained by passive resistance. Such acts of physical repression brought a nation to the very brink of violent revolution.

This recognition led him irresistibly to the third stage of his strategy of graduated response, which concludes Chapter III. The prospect of bloodshed and violence appalled Shelley, and the horrors of civil war and military reaction so vividly described in
The Revolt of Islam
remained with him in painful clarity, and he enumerated them once more at length. But he had always recognized that there were two chariots, and if one could not be taken, then the other was demanded by necessity. He faced and stated the conclusion with simplicity and great intellectual integrity. ‘The last resort of resistance is undoubtedly insurrection. The right of insurrection is derived from the employment of armed force to counteract the will of the nation.’
⁵¹
The essay ended on a note of muted but
determined hope and triumph. ‘When the people shall have obtained, by whatever means, the victory over their oppressors, and when persons appointed by them shall have taken their seats in the Representative Assembly of the nation and assumed the control of public affairs according to constitutional rules, there will remain the great task . . . .’
⁵²

Shelley’s
A Philosophical View of Reform
is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable political documents written by any poet of the Romantic period.
[4]
It offers not only the broad ground-plan of a coherent philosophy of political change and evolution but a particularized, humane and intelligent description of conditions in England at the end of the first crucial phase of the Industrial Revolution. It combines a clear-headed and determined commitment to radical and egalitarian principles with a vivid and practical grasp of political realities. Even more than this, in its first and its third chapters it proposes two highly original and important arguments. The first is an attempt to define the relationship between imaginative literature and social and political change. The second is in effect a blueprint for a political programme designed to achieve radical change against varying degrees of opposition and repression. In this sense the work is not merely ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, but an actual philosophy of revolution, and specifically a philosophy of
English
revolution. This ‘Octavo on Reform’ which Shelley was completing at Casa Frassi in mid-May of 1820 is one of the great examples of his powers of self-education and intellectual resilience, and of the unusually broad range of his imaginative gifts.

During the first week of May he had written to Peacock that he had little current news of immediate events except through the
Galignani’s Messenger
, a Paris paper which printed extracts from the
Courier
. ‘From those accounts it appears probable that there is but little unanimity in the mass of the people; and that a civil war impends from the success of ministers and the exasperation of the poor. I wait anxiously for your Cobbetts. . . . Cobbett persuaded you, you persuaded me, and I have persuaded the Gisbornes that the British funds are very insecure. They come to England accordingly to sell out their property.’
⁵³
After their departure, Shelley adopted a large folio encyclopedia which Reveley had left for his use, and Claire observed him wandering abstractedly through Pisa deep in one of the huge volumes, with another somehow tucked away under his arm. He was probably gathering population statistics.
⁵⁴

On 26 May, after a brief visit with Tatty to the baths at Casciano, hidden in the mountains among its sprouting chestnut trees, Shelley returned to Pisa with his finished manuscript and Mary transcribed it. He announced it carefully to
Hunt: ‘One thing I want to ask you — Do you know any bookseller who would publish for me an octavo volume entitled “A Philosophical View of Reform”. It is boldly but temperately written — & I think readable. — It is intended for a kind of standard book for the philosophical reformers politically considered, like Jeremy Bentham’s something, but different and perhaps more systematic. — I would send it sheet by sheet. Will you ask & think for me?’
⁵⁵
But Hunt did nothing, and the book was not published until one hundred years later. As far as Shelley’s later reputation as a radical poet and writer was concerned, it was perhaps the most damaging suppression of all his works, and one of the very few that Mary herself later connived at.
⁵⁶

Shelley also wrote to Hunt along the same lines about a book of poems. ‘I wish to ask you if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of
popular songs
wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers. I see you smile — but answer my question.’
⁵⁷
Again Hunt did not answer and like the octavo on reform, with which it was intended to form a pair, this anthology never appeared during Shelley’s life. Indeed these political poems were never published, as he intended, in a single collection. From Shelley’s notebooks of the period September 1819 to May 1820 it is possible to reconstruct fairly confidently what the contents of the lost volume
Popular Songs
(1820) by P.B. Shelley, would have been if it ever reached the willing hands of Carlile, or Sherwin, or even J. Johnson of St Paul’s Churchyard. The contents page would have read something like as follows (the dates of actual first publication are appended in parentheses):

‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1832)

‘Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration’ (1832)

‘Song to the Men of England’ (1839)

‘Similes for 2 Political Characters’ (1832)

‘What Men Gain Fairly’ (1839)

‘A New National Anthem’ (1839)

‘Sonnet: England 1819’ (1839)

‘Ballad of the Starving Mother’ (1926/1970)
⁵⁸

It also seems possible that Shelley might have considered putting two other more formal pieces in this collection, as they were written from the same source of inspiration and directed to the same ends. But these two more rapidly found their way into print elsewhere:

‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820)

‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820)

Even without these last two poems, the collection would have been a substantial one of more than 500 lines of verse. It was a very great loss to contemporary poetry, and perhaps to contemporary politics.

Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear? . . .

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robe ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears . . . .

With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,

Trace your grave, and build your tomb,

And weave your winding-sheet, till fair

England be your sepulchre.
⁵⁹

After months of prevarication and guarded refusals to publish on the part of Ollier and Hunt, there was evidence of Shelley’s growing anger, and by the summer of 1820 the thought of finishing with Ollier altogether had more than once crossed his mind. Hunt he would not break with, for Hunt was also a close personal friend, perhaps his closest in England, and he appreciated the difficulties of a literary editor who had his whole paper to consider in questions of prosecution. Instead, he used Hunt to vent his feelings about Ollier. ‘As to Ollier — I am afraid his demerits are very heavy — they must have been so before
you
could have perceived them . . . . I am afraid that
I
to a certain degree am in his power; there being no other bookseller, upon whom I can depend for publishing any of my works; though if by any chance they should become popular, he would be as tame as a lamb. And in fact they are all rogues.’ But even in his irritation and frustration, Shelley could not forget the political régime under which English publishers had to work. ‘It is less the character of the individual than the situation in which he is placed which determines him to be honest or dishonest, perhaps we ought to regard an honest bookseller, or an honest seller of anything else in the present state of human affairs as a kind of Jesus Christ. The system of society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations with all its superstructure of maxims & of forms before we shall find anything but disappointment in our intercourse with any but a few select spirits.’
⁶⁰
Hunt, although no doubt counting himself as a select spirit, may well have winced a little at this short blast of Shelley’s radicalism. As Shelley, no doubt, intended.

However, by the beginning of June a number of factors had combined to make Shelley more philosophical about his publications. In the first place, news had arrived that Ollier had after all brought out an edition of
The Cenci
. What is more, it was selling really quite well. It was reviewed widely through the spring and summer, and although there was a certain amount of talk about ‘a dish of carrion’, the reviews were lengthy and had a good deal of enthusiasm for the ‘power’ and ‘shocking character’ of the drama, while there were no personal attacks. Articles appeared at the end of April in the
Monthly Magazine
, the
Literary Gazette
, the
London Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review
and the
Theatrical Inquisitor
. This last was especially significant, because it catered for a broad theatre-going London audience and its reviewer wrote as one who had no previous knowledge of Shelley’s work as a poet. Moreover the review was radiant: ‘As a first dramatic effort “The Cenci” is unparalleled for the beauty of every attribute with which drama can be endowed.’
⁶¹
In May reviews followed from the
New Monthly Magazine
, the
Edinburgh Monthly Review
, the
London Magazine
, and a further panegyric from Hunt’s pen in the
Indicator
.
⁶²
Of all Shelley’s publications, this was undoubtedly proving the most popular, and there was immediate talk of a second edition. Indeed, for several weeks Shelley was under the impression that Galignani had published a pirate edition in Paris for eager continental readers; but in fact he had only advertised the London edition in his paper.
⁶³
Yet a second edition of
The Cenci
did eventually appear in 1821. Shelley had never judged his market better.