Part 3 (1/2)

'I did not insert it,' Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, 'because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.' Days of outrage have pa.s.sed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day. But they rose when human life was respected by the Minister in power; such was not the case during the Administration which excited Sh.e.l.ley's abhorrence.

The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired, those beginning

'My Father Time is old and gray,'

before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching pa.s.sage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; it might make a patriot of any man whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-creatures.

NOTE ON PETER BELL THE THIRD, BY MRS. Sh.e.l.lEY.

In this new edition I have added ”Peter Bell the Third”. A critique on Wordsworth's ”Peter Bell” reached us at Leghorn, which amused Sh.e.l.ley exceedingly, and suggested this poem.

I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the author of ”Peter Bell” is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more;--he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Sh.e.l.ley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet--a man of lofty and creative genius--quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Sh.e.l.ley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind, but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted, even as transcendently as the author of ”Peter Bell”, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness.

This poem was written as a warning--not as a narration of the reality.

He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth, or with Coleridge (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal;--it contains something of criticism on the compositions of those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Sh.e.l.ley's peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written: and, though, like the burlesque drama of ”Swellfoot”, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry--so much of HIMSELF in it--that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.

NOTE ON THE WITCH OF ATLAS, BY MRS. Sh.e.l.lEY.

We spent the summer of 1820 at the Baths of San Giuliano, four miles from Pisa. These baths were of great use to Sh.e.l.ley in soothing his nervous irritability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood.

The country around is fertile, and diversified and rendered picturesque by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The peasantry are a handsome intelligent race; and there was a gladsome sunny heaven spread over us, that rendered home and every scene we visited cheerful and bright. During some of the hottest days of August, Sh.e.l.ley made a solitary journey on foot to the summit of Monte San Pellegrino--a mountain of some height, on the top of which there is a chapel, the object, during certain days of the year, of many pilgrimages. The excursion delighted him while it lasted; though he exerted himself too much, and the effect was considerable la.s.situde and weakness on his return. During the expedition he conceived the idea, and wrote, in the three days immediately succeeding to his return, the ”Witch of Atlas”.

This poem is peculiarly characteristic of his tastes--wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery, and discarding human interest and pa.s.sion, to revel in the fantastic ideas that his imagination suggested.

The surpa.s.sing excellence of ”The Cenci” had made me greatly desire that Sh.e.l.ley should increase his popularity by adopting subjects that would more suit the popular taste than a poem conceived in the abstract and dreamy spirit of the ”Witch of Atlas”. It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours. The few stanzas that precede the poem were addressed to me on my representing these ideas to him. Even now I believe that I was in the right. Sh.e.l.ley did not expect sympathy and approbation from the public; but the want of it took away a portion of the ardour that ought to have sustained him while writing. He was thrown on his own resources, and on the inspiration of his own soul; and wrote because his mind overflowed, without the hope of being appreciated. I had not the most distant wish that he should truckle in opinion, or submit his lofty aspirations for the human race to the low ambition and pride of the many; but I felt sure that, if his poems were more addressed to the common feelings of men, his proper rank among the writers of the day would be acknowledged, and that popularity as a poet would enable his countrymen to do justice to his character and virtues, which in those days it was the mode to attack with the most flagitious calumnies and insulting abuse. That he felt these things deeply cannot be doubted, though he armed himself with the consciousness of acting from a lofty and heroic sense of right. The truth burst from his heart sometimes in solitude, and he would write a few unfinished verses that showed that he felt the sting; among such I find the following:--

'Alas! this is not what I thought Life was.

I knew that there were crimes and evil men, Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pa.s.s Untouched by suffering through the rugged glen.

In mine own heart I saw as in a gla.s.s The hearts of others...And, when I went among my kind, with triple bra.s.s Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed, To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful ma.s.s!'

I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched. But my persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination.

Sh.e.l.ley shrunk instinctively from portraying human pa.s.sion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moons.h.i.+ne or paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods,--which celebrated the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in her solitudes. These are the materials which form the ”Witch of Atlas”: it is a brilliant congregation of ideas such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much loved.

NOTE ON OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, BY MRS. Sh.e.l.lEY.

In the brief journal I kept in those days, I find recorded, in August, 1820, Sh.e.l.ley 'begins ”Swellfoot the Tyrant”, suggested by the pigs at the fair of San Giuliano.' This was the period of Queen Caroline's landing in England, and the struggles made by George IV to get rid of her claims; which failing, Lord Castlereagh placed the ”Green Bag” on the table of the House of Commons, demanding in the King's name that an enquiry should be inst.i.tuted into his wife's conduct. These circ.u.mstances were the theme of all conversation among the English. We were then at the Baths of San Giuliano. A friend came to visit us on the day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows: Sh.e.l.ley read to us his ”Ode to Liberty”; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quant.i.ty of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the 'chorus of frogs' in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous a.s.sociation suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circ.u.mstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus--and ”Swellfoot” was begun. When finished, it was transmitted to England, printed, and published anonymously; but stifled at the very dawn of its existence by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who threatened to prosecute it, if not immediately withdrawn. The friend who had taken the trouble of bringing it out, of course did not think it worth the annoyance and expense of a contest, and it was laid aside.

Hesitation of whether it would do honour to Sh.e.l.ley prevented my publis.h.i.+ng it at first. But I cannot bring myself to keep back anything he ever wrote; for each word is fraught with the peculiar views and sentiments which he believed to be beneficial to the human race, and the bright light of poetry irradiates every thought. The world has a right to the entire compositions of such a man; for it does not live and thrive by the outworn lesson of the dullard or the hypocrite, but by the original free thoughts of men of genius, who aspire to pluck bright truth

'from the pale-faced moon; Or dive into the bottom of the deep Where fathom-line would never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned'

truth. Even those who may dissent from his opinions will consider that he was a man of genius, and that the world will take more interest in his slightest word than in the waters of Lethe which are so eagerly prescribed as medicinal for all its wrongs and woe. This drama, however, must not be judged for more than was meant. It is a mere plaything of the imagination; which even may not excite smiles among many, who will not see wit in those combinations of thought which were full of the ridiculous to the author. But, like everything he wrote, it breathes that deep sympathy for the sorrows of humanity, and indignation against its oppressors, which make it worthy of his name.