First Want, then Plague came on the beasts; their food
Failed, and they drew the breath of its decay.
Millions on millions, whom the scent of blood
Had lured, or who, from regions far away,
Had tracked the hosts in festival array,
From their dark deserts; gaunt and wasting now,
Stalked like fell shades among their perilous prey;
In their green eyes a strange disease did glow,
They sank in hideous spasm, or pains severe and slow.
The fish were poisoned in the streams; the birds
In the green woods perished; the insect race
Was withered up; the scattered flocks and herds
Who had survived the wild beasts’ hungry chase
Died moaning, each upon the other’s face
In helpless agony gazing; round the City
All night, the lean hyaenas their sad case
Like starving infants wailed; a woeful ditty!
And many a mother wept, pierced with unnatural pity.68
The macabre implication of this last image, the mothers weeping for the starving hyenas, presages the fate which is about to overrun all society. The whole system of nature breaks down. Oppression is unnatural, so it actually destroys Nature.
There was no food, the corn was trampled down,
The flocks and herds had perished; on the shore
The dead and putrid fish were ever thrown;
The deeps were foodless, and the winds no more
Creaked with the weight of birds, but, as before
Those winged things sprang forth, were void of shade;
The vines and orchards, Autumn’s golden store,
Were burned; — so that the meanest food was weighed
With gold, and Avarice died before the god it made.
There was no corn — in the wide market-place
All loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold;
They weighed it in small scales — and many a face
Was fixed in eager horror then: his gold
The miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold
Through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain;
The mother brought her eldest-born, controlled
By instinct blind as love, but turned again
And bade her infant suck, and died in silent pain.69
The small, exact verbal touches are specially noticeable, such as the winds that ‘creaked’ with the birds. Such stories of famine, forced prostitution, even cannibalism, had been rife in the parts of France which Shelley had travelled through in 1814, utterly ravaged by the post-Revolutionary wars. Shelley now shows plague, sickness and mental derangement sweeping through the streets of the city. This is the final breakdown of both outer and inner order. There is a brief glimpse of a familiar, fiendish doppelgänger.
It was not hunger now, but thirst. Each well
Was choked with rotting corpses, and became
A cauldron of green mist made visible
At sunrise. Thither still the myriads came,
Seeking to quench the agony of the flame,
Which raged like poison through their bursting veins;
Naked they were from torture, without shame,
Spotted with nameless scars and lurid plains,
Childhood, and youth, and age, writhing in savage pains.
It was not thirst but madness! Many saw
Their own lean image everywhere, it went
A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe
Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent
Those shrieking victims; some, ere life was spent,
Sought, with a horrid sympathy, to shed
Contagion on the sound; and others rent
Their matted hair, and cried aloud, ‘We tread
On fire! the avenging Power his hell on earth has spread!’70
The texture of the verse and imagery here has finally become coarse. It borders on the sensational, as Shelley pushes towards the ultimate extremities, and one feels the deliberate straining. Nevertheless, there is a power and accuracy, which presses on the surreal: the ‘lean image’ of the self, the contagion shed ‘on the sound’. In the original manuscript Shelley’s last line had read, ‘We tread On fire! Almighty God his hell on earth has spread!’71
It is at this point in Canto x, that the historical and social part of Shelley’s poem ends. The city is plunged in disease, famine, despotism and bigotry; superstitious terrors dominate the Tyrant’s court, and the ‘Priests’ are everywhere regaining control of the minds of a cowed population. Against this are set the radical and atheist values and aspirations portrayed in the personal lives of Laon and Cythna, and affirmed especially in Cantos VI and IX.
Shelley’s poem has been completely purged of any crude social optimism or ‘perfectibility’ in the popular sense. It is fundamentally a grim poem, and it presents hope and love as growing and flourishing only in the very teeth of despair and hatred. It is moreover a post-Godwinian poem, in that it is as much about counter-revolution as revolution. Though it accepts joyfully the principles and the historical achievements of the French Revolution, it rejects that revolution as a model for further political and social change.
In the brief penultimate Canto XI, Laon and Cythna part at their mountainous stronghold, and Laon goes down to the city, and bargains his own life in sworn exchange for Cythna’s. She is allowed to go unharmed to America. In Canto XII, Laon is led chained through the streets in a manner that recalls some of the executions of 1817, while a silent crowd looks on. He is taken up to be burnt alive.
I, Laon, led by mutes, ascend my bier
Of fire, and look around: each distant isle
Is dark in the bright dawn; towers far and near,
Pierce like reposing flames the tremulous atmosphere.72
At the last moment, Cythna arrives on her huge Tartarian charger, scattering the crowd in terror. She reaches the execution pyre, dismounts and without a word — but smiling — climbs to Laon’s side at the stake.
Cythna sprung
From her gigantic steed, who, like a shade
Chased by the winds, those vacant streets among
Fled tameless, as the brazen rein she flung
Upon his neck, and kissed his moonèd brow.73
Laon and Cythna are burnt together on the pyre.
There remains an epilogue of twenty-five stanzas, which returns to the schematic allegorical world of Canto I. The two lovers and revolutionaries awake to find themselves sailing rapidly down an exotic river in a glittering, translucent boat ‘one curved shell of hollow pearl’. It is skippered by a seraphic child, who is loosely connected with the child Cythna believed she gave birth to in prison. The child reports the death by suicide of Laon’s follower, the ‘Atheist and Republican’ which Shelley had to suppress, who symbolizes the vast following which has been left behind among the youth, ready to forward the cause, when the time is ripe again on earth. The boat sails into a sunlit ocean towards a visionary Hesperides.
The Revolt of Islam is the longest poem Shelley ever wrote. He intended it to be a political epic of modern revolution, but its literary model, in so far as it has one, is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. It has little in common with the historical dramas inspired directly by the French Revolution: Southey’s Wat Tyler, or Coleridge’s Fall of Robespierre. Politically, it shows little grasp of the revolutionary process, beyond the important dialectical principle that revolutionary anarchy breeds revolutionary dictatorship, a principle that every other reader of the Examiner would have subscribed to. But it shows no understanding yet of a genuinely democratic process or popular movement. Laon and Cythna are heroic leaders out of an ancient, aristocratic mould that owes more to Spenser’s mythical knights than to the world of Brandreth, or Henry Hunt, or Sir Francis Burdett. The prose of Shelley’s preface, and the political pamphlet, showed far more progressive thought and intellectual penetration than his poem. Only in th
e grotesque scenarios of Canto x, with its extraordinary expressionist picture of Nature and society collapsing under terrorism and oppression, did he find any adequate political image of his age: and it was an image of reaction, not of revolution.
The real revolution celebrated in The Revolt of Islam is a moral and social one. The heart of that revolution lies in the new kind of freedom and independent partnership expressed in the relationship between Laon and Cythna. They grow up together as equals; they talk, struggle for the cause, and make love, as equals. They attack religious belief and moral prudery, as equals. They are both sexually passionate, but both ethically and actively independent. Moreover it is the woman, Cythna, who actually triggers the revolution, not the man Laon. Shelley’s original intention to make the relationship explicitly incestuous was deliberately meant to draw maximum attention to its revolutionary and socially iconoclastic nature. The suppression of the incest theme was therefore a major blow to the ideology of the poem. The very change of title shows Charles Ollier’s wish to draw attention away from the moral to the political events. But it is this relationship which contains and celebrates all the genuinely revolutionary values in the poem: its atheism, its free love, its social equality between men and women, and its selfless dedication to the people. It is only in describing these values that Shelley’s poetry achieves its briefly sustained passages of brilliance, and successfully contains the uneasy balance between mythic and realistic presentation. Otherwise the poem is a failure. But for Shelley, paradoxically, it achieved the major breakthrough into his mature work. Written at 25, The Revolt of Islam was the last poem of his youth. It also contains the first work of his maturity.
The poem was not to prove influential, except in the sub-genre of workers’ propaganda poems written by later nineteenth-century poets such as Thomas Cooper the Chartist Rhymer, William Morris and Thomas Hood. Cooper lectured extensively on Shelley at working men’s clubs and institutes during the 1840s. He included The Revolt of Islam, as well as Byron’s Childe Harold, in the sacred roll call in his own political epic The Purgatory of Suicides. It gives some indication of Shelley’s importance as a prophetic figure in the eyes of the Chartists:
Or thou, immortal Childe, with him that saw
Islam’s Revolt, in rapt prophetic trance, —
Did fear of harsh reception overawe
Your fervid souls from fervid utterance
Of Freedom’s fearless shout? — your scathing glance
On priestly rottennes, did ye tame down
Till priests could brook that lightning’s mitigance?
Knowing your cold reward would be the frown
Of Power and Priestcraft, — ye your sternest thoughts made known.74[11]
Shelley counted a great deal on the public reception of his poem. One of the reasons which held him back from going to Italy was the hope that his literary reputation might at last be put on a sound footing. With the tantalizing example of Byron’s sweeping sales of Childe Harold before him, he longed desperately to find recognition among the liberal English readership. His submission to the editorial changes by Ollier could only be truly justified by reaching a broad audience.
It is transparently clear from his letters to Ollier how concerned he was about both the advertising and reviewing of his work. On 11 January he wrote, ‘keep it well advertized, and write for money directly the other is gone’. Four days later he sent ten pounds to Ollier ‘that no delay may take place in vigorously advertising. I think I said that I wish under the new circumstances that a copy should be sent to each of the Reviews.’76 On the 22nd he wrote yet again. ‘Don’t relax in the advertizing — I suppose at present that it scarcely sells at all. — If you see any reviews or notices of it in any periodical paper pray send it me, — it is part of my reward — the amusement of hearing the abuse of bigots.’77 At the end of the month he was still urging, ‘you ought to continue to advertise the poem vigourously’, and he added as a casual P.S. that Ollier might send the current number of the Quarterly.78 But it was all in vain. The sales were bad, and the reviews were worse, despite Hunt’s most vigorous efforts for him in the pages of the Examiner.
First, as a trailer, Hunt ran two large extracts from the poem, each over fifty lines, in the issues of 30 November 1817 and 25 January 1818. Then in February and March he ran two parts of a massive and favourable review, including a summary of the entire plot, and extensive quotation. ‘If the author’s genius reminds us of any other poets, it is of two very opposite ones, Lucretius and Dante. The former he resembles in the Daedalian part of it, in the boldness of his speculations, and in his love of virtue, of external nature, and of love itself. It is his gloomier or more imaginative passages that sometimes remind us of Dante.’79
But Hunt’s praise, though very welcome, was from the inside. His advocacy may even have hindered Shelley’s cause in wider circles, for outside the liberal camp Hunt was regarded as a genteel charlatan, and writers associated with the ‘Cockney School’ got rough handling. Keats was also to suffer from this reaction. The Monthly Magazine quoted a modest couple of stanzas of The Revolt of Islam in its March issue, merely observing that there was ‘an almost total neglect of harmonious modulation and quantity’, and leaving the rest in silence. In May the Quarterly, turning aside from a scathing review of Hunt’s ‘Foliage’ — which was dedicated to Shelley — lambasted Shelley without naming him. After referring to a disreputable career at Eton and Oxford, the anonymous reviewer (probably John Taylor Coleridge) continued: ‘according to our understandings it is not a proof of a very affectionate heart to break that of a wife by cruelty and infidelity; and if we were told of a man who, placed on a wild rock among the clouds, yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre of spire-like mountains, hanging over a valley of eternal ice and snow . . . if we were told of a man who, thus witnessing the sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to a cabin near and write atheos after his name in the album, we hope our own feelings would be pity rather than disgust; but we should think it imbecility indeed to court that man’s friendship, or to celebrate his intellect or his heart as the wisest or warmest of the age’.80 This story was retold in 1819 by both the London Chronicle and the Commercial Chronicle. In London society Shelley’s name gained currency for atheism and immorality rather than for poetry. But the Quarterly saved its main attack on The Revolt of Islam for April 1819, having prepared itself with a copy of the suppressed ‘incestuous’ edition, Laon and Cythna.
The third journal which commented in 1818 was the right-wing British Critic, which produced a masterpiece of innuendo in preference to literary comment. ‘Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley — but we will not trust ourselves with this person; Tacitus has taught us that there are some offences so flagitious in their nature, that it is necessary, for the benefit of public morals, to conceal their punishment; we leave them, therefore, to the silent vengeance which vice sooner or later must wreak upon itself.’81 It is this kind of smear journalism which must be borne in mind when considering the development of Shelley’s almost pathological hatred for reviewers.
The most penetrating review of The Revolt of Islam appeared exactly twelve months later in Blackwood’s Magazine. Sadly this was far too late to change Shelley’s feeling that the poem had done nothing but bring him hatred and notoriety. Nevertheless it shows that intelligent contemporaries could indeed appreciate his work. The review began by distinguishing sharply between Shelley’s work and the ‘Cockney School’ poetry of Hunt and the immature Keats. It commented shrewdly on ‘the silence observed by our professional critics’ which it attributed to fear, in the present political climate, of praising the literary merits of poetry which professed a radical ideology: ‘by giving to his genius its due praise, they might only be lending the means of currency to the opinions in whose service [Mr Shelley] has unwisely enlisted his energies’. Equally, Blackwood’s felt the Hunt connection had frightened off other critics, fearful of ‘public disgust’.
For his ow
n part, the Blackwood’s reviewer J. G. Lockhart,[12] carefully separated the poetry from the politics. ‘As a philosopher, our author is weak and worthless; — our business is with him as a poet, and, as such, he is strong, nervous, original; well entitled to take his place near to the great creative masters, whose works have shed its truest glory around the age wherein we live. As a political and infidel treatise, the Revolt of Islam is contemptible; — happily a great part of it has no necessary connexion either with politics or with infidelity.’ This was disingenuous, to say the least, but it served its purpose. Lockhart continued, like Hunt, by summarizing the plot and quoting extensively, but in a way that really showed a finer and more ranging appreciation. Passages were drawn from the description of the childhood love between Laon and Cythna in Canto II; the battle and arrival of the black Tartarian horse in Canto VI, ‘a power and energy altogether admirable’; and from the whole of the love-making sequence in the mountains. This last, especially, was an apt and courageous piece of reviewing. Lockhart’s commentary has not really been bettered in modern criticism. ‘It is in the portraying of this intense, overmastering, unfearing, unfading love, that Mr Shelley has proved himself to be a great poet. Around his lovers, moreover, in the midst of all their fervours, he has shed an air of calm gracefullness, a certain majestic monumental stillness, which realizes in them our ideas of Greeks . . . . struggling for freedom in the best spirit of their fathers.’82
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