He chose therefore for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the world; but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on his fellow-creatures. He created for this youth a woman such as he delighted to imagine—full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they both, with will unvanquished, and the deepest sense of the justice of their cause, met adversity and death. There exists in this poem a memorial of a friend of his youth. The character of the old man who liberates Laon from his tower-prison, and tends on him in sickness, is founded on that of Doctor Lind, who, when Shelley was at Eton, had often stood by to befriend and support him, and whose name he never mentioned without love and veneration.
During the year 1817 we were established at Marlow in Buckinghamshire. Shelley’s choice of abode was fixed chiefly by this town being at no great distance from London, and its neighbourhood to the Thames. The poem was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for peculiar beauty. The chalk hills break into cliffs that overhang the Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech; the wilder portion of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation; and the cultivated part is peculiarly fertile. With all this wealth of Nature which, either in the form of gentlemen’s parks or soil dedicated to agriculture, flourishes around, Marlow was inhabited (I hope it is altered now) by a very poor population. The women are lacemakers, and lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they were very ill paid. The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. In the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor cottages. I mention these things—for this minute and active sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousandfold interest to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for the human race.
The poem, bold in its opinions and uncompromising in their expression, met with many censurers, not only among those who allow of no virtue but such as supports the cause they espouse, but even among those whose opinions were similar to his own. I extract a portion of a letter written in answer to one of these friends. It best details the impulses of Shelley’s mind, and his motives: it was written with entire unreserve; and is therefore a precious monument of his own opinion of his powers, of the purity of his designs, and the ardour with which he clung, in adversity and through the valley of the shadow of death, to views from which he believed the permanent happiness of mankind must eventually spring.
‘Marlow, Dec. 11, 1817.
‘I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers, and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your censures of The Revolt of Islam; but the productions of mine which you commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures me, in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the pre-cariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling—as real, though not so prophetic—as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when I consider contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinction of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. But, when you advert to my Chancery-paper, a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of cramped and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about Mandeville, which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two minutes’ thought to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable than that which grew as it were from “the agony and bloody sweat” of intellectual travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I am mistaken in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the selection of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits.’ [Shelley to Godwin.]
* * *
1I ought to except Sir W. Drumond’s Academical Questions; a volume of very acute and powerful metaphysical criticism.
2It is remarkable, as a symptom of the revival of public hope, that Mr. Malthus has assigned, in the later editions of his work, an indefinite dominion to moral restraint over the principle of population. This concession answers all the inferences from his doctrine unfavourable to human improvement, and reduces the Essay on Population to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of Political Justice.
3In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to science.
4Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined.
PRINCE ATHANASE1
A FRAGMENT
PART I
THERE was a youth, who, as with toil and travel,
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time;
Nor any could the restless griefs unravel
Which burned within him, withering up his prime
5
And goading him, like fiends, from land to land.
Not his the load of any secret crime,
For nought of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same;—
Not his the thirst for glory or command,
10
Baffled with blast of hope-consuming shame;
Nor evil joys which fire the vulgar breast,
And quench in speedy smoke its feeble flame,
Had left within his soul their dark unrest:
Nor what religion fables of the grave
15
Feared he,—Philosophy’s accepted guest.
For none than he a purer heart could have,
Or that loved good more for itself alone;
Of nought in heaven or earth was he the slave.
What sorrow, strange, and shadowy, and unknown,
20
Sent him, a hopeless wanderer, through mankind?—
If with a human sadness he did groan,
He had a gentle yet aspiring mind;
Just, innocent, with varied learning fed;
And such a glorious consolation find
25
In others’ joy, when all their own is dead:
He loved, and laboured for his kind in grief,
And yet,
unlike all others, it is said
That from such toil he never found relief.
Although a child of fortune and of power,
30
Of an ancestral name the orphan chief,
His soul had wedded Wisdom, and her dower
Is love and justice, clothed in which he sate
Apart from men, as in a lonely tower,
Pitying the tumult of their dark estate.—
35
Yet even in youth did he not e’er abuse
The strength of wealth or thought, to consecrate
Those false opinions which the harsh rich use
To blind the world they famish for their pride;
Nor did he hold from any man his dues,
40
But, like a steward in honest dealings tried,
With those who toiled and wept, the poor and wise,
His riches and his cares he did divide.
Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise,
What he dared do or think, though men might start,
45
He spoke with mild yet unaverted eyes;
Liberal he was of soul, and frank of heart,
And to his many friends—all loved him well—
Whate’er he knew or felt he would impart,
If words he found those inmost thoughts to tell;
50
If not, he smiled or wept; and his weak foes
He neither spurned nor hated—though with fell
And mortal hate their thousand voices rose,
They passed like aimless arrows from his ear—
Nor did his heart or mind its portal close
55
To those, or them, or any, whom life’s sphere
May comprehend within its wide array.
What sadness made that vernal spirit sere?—
He knew not. Though his life, day after day,
Was failing like an unreplenished stream,
60
Though in his eyes a cloud and burthen lay,
Through which his soul, like Vesper’s serene beam
Piercing the chasms of ever rising clouds,
Shone, softly burning; though his lips did seem
Like reeds which quiver in impetuous floods;
65
And through his sleep, and o’er each waking hour,
Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes,
Were driven within him by some secret power,
Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,
Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower
70
O’er castled mountains borne, when tempest’s war
Is levied by the night-contending winds,
And the pale dalesmen watch with eager ear;—
Though such were in his spirit, as the fiends
Which wake and feed an everliving woe,—
75
What was this grief, which ne’er in other minds
A mirror found,—he knew not—none could know;
But on whoe’er might question him he turned
The light of his frank eyes, as if to show
He knew not of the grief within that burned,
80
But asked forbearance with a mournful look;
Or spoke in words from which none ever learned
The cause of his disquietude; or shook
With spasms of silent passion; or turned pale:
So that his friends soon rarely undertook
85
To stir his secret pain without avail;—
For all who knew and loved him then perceived
That there was drawn an adamantine veil
Between his heart and mind,—both unrelieved
Wrought in his brain and bosom separate strife.
90
Some said that he was mad, others believed
That memories of an antenatal life
Made this, where now he dwelt, a penal hell;
And others said that such mysterious grief
From God’s displeasure, like a darkness, fell
95
On souls like his, which owned no higher law
Than love; love calm, steadfast, invincible
By mortal fear or supernatural awe;
And others,—‘’Tis the shadow of a dream
Which the veiled eye of Memory never saw,
100
‘But through the soul’s abyss, like some dark stream
Through shattered mines and caverns underground,
Rolls, shaking its foundations; and no beam
‘Of joy may rise, but it is quenched and drowned
In the dim whirlpools of this dream obscure;
105
Soon its exhausted waters will have found
‘A lair of rest beneath thy spirit pure,
O Athanase!—in one so good and great,
Evil or tumult cannot long endure.’
So spake they: idly of another’s state
110
Babbling vain words and fond philosophy;
This was their consolation; such debate
Men held with one another; nor did he,
Like one who labours with a human woe,
Decline this talk: as if its theme might be
115
Another, not himself, he to and fro
Questioned and canvassed it with subtlest wit;
And none but those who loved him best could know
That which he knew not, how it galled and bit
His weary mind, this converse vain and cold;
120
For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit
Upon his being; a snake which fold by fold
Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend
Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold;—
And so his grief remained—let it remain—untold.2
PART II
FRAGMENT I
125
PRINCE ATHANASE had one belovèd friend,
An old, old man, with hair of silver white,
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend
With his wise words; and eyes whose arrowy light
Shone like the reflex of a thousand minds.
130
He was the last whom superstition’s blight
Had spared in Greece—the blight that cramps and blinds,—
And in his olive bower at Œnoe
Had sate from earliest youth. Like one who finds
A fertile island in the barren sea,
135
One mariner who has survived his mates
Many a drear month in a great ship—so he
With soul-sustaining songs, and sweet debates
Of ancient lore, there fed his lonely being:—
‘The mind becomes that which it contemplates.’—
140
And thus Zonoras, by forever seeing
Their bright creations, grew like wisest men;
And when he heard the crash of nations fleeing
A bloodier power than ruled thy ruins then,
O sacred Hellas! many weary years
145
He wandered, till the path of Laian’s glen
Was grass-grown—and the unremembered tears
Were dry in Laian for their honoured chief,
Who fell in Byzant, pierced by Moslem spears:—
And as the lady looked with faithful grief
150
From her high lattice o’er the rugged path,
Where she once saw that horseman toil, with brief
And blighting hope, who with the news of death
Struck body and soul as with a mortal blight,
She saw between the chestnuts, far beneath,
155
An old man toiling up, a weary wight;
And soon within her hospitable hall
She saw his white hairs glittering in the light
Of the wood fire, and r
ound his shoulders fall;
And his wan visage and his withered mien,
160
Yet calm and gentle and majestical.
And Athanase, her child, who must have been
Then three years old, sate opposite and gazed
In patient silence.
FRAGMENT II
SUCH was Zonoras; and as daylight finds
165
One amaranth glittering on the path of frost,
When autumn nights have nipped all weaker kinds,
Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tossed,
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley: (A Modern Library E-Book) Page 26
