Shelley: The Pursuit (140 page)

The attempt to combine overwhelming personal feelings with the high, marmoreal style of a public monument did not succeed. At best, Shelley produced the rhetoric of a funeral oration — complete with Judaic-Christian echoes of the Burial Service from the Book of Common Prayer — rather than the poetry of a funeral elegy. Alone among Shelley’s poems, it has a mannerism and pomposity of style that strike one as curiously reminiscent of the Baroque.

When he sent a copy of the little Pisan edition to Byron in July, his covering note showed that despite his claims to have written his best piece of composition, he was only too aware of the central weakness of the work, a weakness of conception: ‘I need not be told that I have been carried too far by the enthusiasm of the moment; by my piety, and my indignation, in panegyric. But if I have erred, I console myself by reflecting that it is in defence of the weak — not in conjunction with the powerful. And perhaps I have erred from the narrow view of considering Keats rather as he surpassed
me
in particular, than as he was inferior to others: so subtle is the principle of self?’
¹¹

That ‘principle of self’ is the problem of the poem in a nutshell; and it is also why the imported Platonism of the last five stanzas has the same straining, thinness of tone associated with a far less mature and more blatant work, the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. The poem seeks to celebrate the indestructible life of the creative spirit, in art and in nature; yet its personal drive and its most intense images tend always towards consummation and death.

Nevertheless, there are isolated passages of immense strength and genuine poignancy scattered throughout
Adonais.
There are moments where Shelley seems to have found that balance of high formality and intense emotion which he so admired in ‘Hyperion’ and in which he was conscious — perhaps too conscious — of competing with ‘Lycidas’.

He will awake no more, oh, never more! —

Within the twilight chamber spreads apace

The shadow of white Death, and at the door

Invisible Corruption waits to trace

His extreme way to her dwelling-place;

The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe

Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface

So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law

Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
¹²

The wonderfully exact use of such a word as ‘extreme’; and the enormous sinister force in the use of the personifications — a skill that he had been maturing from his Lechlade poem of 1815, through the
Mask of Anarchy
and into
Epipsychidion
— these show Shelley’s powers at their height. It continued spasmodically in some of the Spring imagery of the second section of the poem, ‘Grief has made young Spring wild’. Without apparently the least effort of phrase or sharpness of adjective, individual lines seem to tap a prototypic force close to the original signification of Adonis as fertility god:

The amorous birds now pair in every brake,

And build their mossy homes in field and brere;

And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.
¹³

There is also an extraordinary power of sadness in the passage where he finally discovered the great elegiac phrase he had not quite been able to develop in the poem to his little son William:

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world. . . .
¹⁴

The stanzas of homage to the young poets Chatterton, Sir Philip Sidney and Lucan are also deeply moving.

Writing of the poem after his own death, Mary observed that ‘there is much in the
Adonais
which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny. . . .’
¹⁵
But this confuses, though understandably, a sentimental half-truth with the real degree to which Shelley was at the time forcing the myth of Keats’s death to express his own almost unbearably bitter feelings.
More and more, the extent to which his great poetry and writing of the autumn and winter of 1819–20 had been suppressed or ignored or turned aside was borne in on him. The prospect of renewed friendship with Byron, outstandingly the most successful English poet of the age, had especially brought this home, and was half exposed in the abjectness and self-effacement of the comments on his own work in letters to Byron of May and June. His claims to be ‘morbidly indifferent’ to praise or blame rang most painfully false. Nor had the sense of social persecution softened with time. But in none of Shelley’s private correspondence is this made quite so agonizingly clear, as in certain passages of his prose preface to
Adonais.
This had originally been conceived of as a critical defence of ‘Hyperion’, yet that was not how it turned out the moment Shelley put pen to paper at San Giuliano:

As a man, I shrink from notice and regard; the ebb and flow of the world vexes me; I desire to be left in peace. Persecution, contumely, and calumny have been heaped upon me in profuse measure; and domestic conspiracy and legal oppression have violated in my person the most sacred rights of nature and humanity. The bigot will say it was the recompense of my errors; the man of the world will call it the result of my imprudence; but never upon one head. . . .
¹⁶

This was no apologia for ‘Hyperion’, it was
pro vita sua.
Strangely enough it was John Taaffe, the bore, the bringer of guinea pigs and bad verses, who thoughtfully and gently saved Shelley from this further humiliation. An exchange of letters in early July shows that having been given the proofs to read, Taaffe persuaded Shelley to cancel this and several other passages of the preface, and indeed almost convinced him to omit some of the more naked pieces of self-description in the poem.
¹⁷

The sheets of the finished edition, in its elegant Didot type, were shipped from Livorno without further delay in mid-July. But Shelley retained several bound up copies for personal distribution: to the Gisbornes, to Byron, to Claire, to Joseph Severn in Rome; and no doubt to Emilia, the Masons, and other friends in Pisa. ‘The poet & the man are two different natures,’ he explained to the Gisbornes, ‘though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, & incapable of deciding upon each other’s powers & effects by any reflex act.’
¹⁸
Perhaps this was, as in the case of
Epipsychidion
, just another line of defence and extenuation of the personal element in his work. Or perhaps it was true:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
¹⁹

In the middle of the printing arrangements for
Adonais
, news of another form of extramural publication reached Shelley from London. One of the pirate working-class publishers had brought out a cheap popular edition — of
Queen Mab.

This interesting news — a ‘droll circumstance’ was Shelley’s first reaction — reached him from London in a letter from Horace Smith who treated the whole matter as an unfortunate impropriety. The pirate was a certain William Clark of Cheapside, who specialized in printing cheap editions of ‘dangerous’ radical authors, especially Tom Paine, Palmer and Volney. He had come across a copy of Shelley’s private edition of
Queen Mab
of 1813, and secretly set it up in print again. It was at once noticed by three radical working-class papers: the
Aurora Borealis
, Benbow’s
John Bull’s British Journal
, and none less than Wooler’s own
British Gazette
, which wrote a long approving article on 6 May. ‘. . . the work has ever been one for which earnest enquiry has been made; and imperfect copies in manuscript have fetched extraordinary prices. A bookseller has at last been found.’
²⁰
A flurry of reviews followed in the larger circulation papers of the literary middle class, notably in the
Literary Gazette
, the
Monthly Magazine
and the
Literary Chronicle
.
²¹
As in the case of
Swellfoot the Tyrant
, a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately followed, and Clark after selling some fifty copies was forced to take it off the market. But it was this courageous act of piracy that brought Shelley’s work once more to the attention of Richard Carlile, and it was as a result of Clark’s edition of 1821 that Carlile’s various editions of 1822, 1823, 1826 and 1832 followed, together with Watson and Heatherington’s ‘Chartist’ edition of 1839, and Shelley’s name was assured currency in the working movement for the next twenty years.
[1]

This was precisely the kind of publication that much of Shelley’s best work required; a fact which Shelley vaguely recognized in his chronic dissatisfaction with Ollier, and his spasmodic attempts to publish through different channels. His reaction to the piracy was complicated, and contradictory, for he was drawn
two ways, both alarmed and delighted. His immediate reaction to Ollier, his official publisher, was to dismiss the whole thing angrily. ‘I have not seen [
Queen Mab
] for some years, but inasmuch as I recollect it is villainous trash . . . pray give all manner of publicity to my disapprobation of this publication.’
²²
But in a few days he told John Gisborne about it with something close to relish: ‘. . . Queen Mab, a poem written by me when very young, in the most furious style, with long notes against Jesus Christ, & God the Father and the King & the Bishops & marriage & the Devil knows what, is just published by one of the low booksellers in the Strand, against my wish & consent, and all the people are at loggerheads about it. — Horace Smith gives me this account. You may imagine how much I am amused.’ He added that for the sake of a dignified appearance, ‘& really because I wish to protest against all the bad poetry in it’, he had instructed Ollier to disclaim it formally and applied for a legal injunction.
²³

Public letters of formal disclaimer duly followed to Hunt, as editor of the
Examiner
, and to Ollier for insertion in the
Morning Chronicle.
‘I fear it is better fitted to injure than to serve the cause of freedom.’ But as far as an injunction was concerned, Shelley found himself in the same position as Southey, when one of his early radical pieces,
Wat Tyler
, was similarly honoured: because the edition was pirated there was no legal resource except direct prosecution of the bookseller himself. The irony was not lost on Shelley; but unlike Southey, he had no deep objections to the piracy; the one thing that might have upset him, the original dedication to Harriet Shelley, had been tactfully omitted by Clark. As for the furore, he felt beyond any but its most indirect effects in Italy. What more could they do to his reputation? To Claire he remarked stoically on ‘the abuse which all the government prints are pouring forth on me’, but concluded: ‘I enjoy & am amused with the turmoil of these poor people; but perhaps it is well for me that the Alps & the Ocean are between us.’
²⁴
Later, in September, he quietly asked Horace Smith, and independently Hunt, to procure copies for him: ‘I should like very well to see it.’
²⁵
In fact, he had considerable interest in his earliest offspring.

The weather was now getting hotter, and the July days slipped past easily, and Shelley was soothed with the idea of
Adonais
sailing towards England. Boating in the skiff continued on the triangle between San Giuliano, Pisa and Pugnano. Mary noted fireflies and the cicada in her journal. The after-dinner walks and discussions with the Williamses now formed almost their only regular social recreation. The Gisbornes were preparing to move permanently to London, and Shelley’s main contact with them consisted in buying, or helping to sell, secondhand furniture. Shelley managed to procure several useful items for himself including classical books, a German dictionary for Claire and a microscope and a target pistol.