The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  As discussed by Timothy Morton, the isolated poet-character in Shelley’s Alastor (1816) enjoys an Orphic relation with animals, and relives the experience of Bougainville’s men on the Falklands: ‘the doves and squirrels would partake/ From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,/ Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks’.66 In Shelley’s fragmentary poem ‘Mazenghi’ (1818), the eponymous Florentine hero similarly achieves the kind of union with nature encouraged by the Indophile John Stewart, as he ‘Communed with the immeasurable world;/ And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,/ Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.’

  His food was the wild fig and strawberry;

  The milky pine-nuts which the autumn-blast

  Shakes into the tall grass; or such small fry

  As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;

  And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found

  Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.67

  The only animals Mazenghi eats are those that are already dead by natural causes; he thereby converts death into life. Similarly, he tames not just docile animals, but even those ‘things whose nature is at war with life’ (Shelley’s squeamish euphemism for the amphibian inhabitants of a hellish swamp), which come and ‘talk and play’ around him.68 (Shelley may have been thinking of the story related by George Nicholson of a man who, by kindness to animals, claimed that even poisonous reptiles made friends with him.)69 The evil that Shelley conceived as an aberration of nature is disarmed by Mazenghi’s union with natural laws: the food he eats is that which nature yields of its own accord. As Shelley explained in the Vindication of Natural Diet, echoing the pragmatism anciently attributed to Pythagoras, the vegetable diet is that which is simplest to procure. Isolated from the complications of urban life, Mazenghi’s only choice is to feed on readily available food; he is not so much making a self-conscious moral choice about what to eat, he just eats the ‘milky’ food provided by Mother Nature (rather like the hypothetical solitary primitive man in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality). The pine nuts are blown down by the wind, and even the fish are delivered for Mazenghi’s consumption by the waves, a symbolic power of nature, manifesting an alternative to Buffon’s insistence that fish populations should be controlled by being preyed upon.

  The power of such individuals to instil harmony in the world around them may appear to suggest that Shelley believed humans had a transcendent power to control nature. But it would be a paradox if Shelley imagined that man would reconcile himself to nature by exerting a will that transcended it. The key to understanding how Shelley imagined man could be reconciled with nature lies in the language of Queen Mab. Man does not so much abdicate his predatory power over the animals, he loses it: ‘Man has lost/ His terrible prerogative’. Shelley believed that reverting to herbivorousness was not so much an idealistic act of altruism; he thought it was a necessary obedience to natural forces. Man’s hand is forced. In both his essays on the vegetable diet, Shelly stated that in the face of the scientific evidence ‘the world will be compelled to regard animal flesh and fermented liquors as slow but certain poisons’ and thus that ‘it is scarcely possible that abstinence from aliments demonstrably pernicious should not become universal.’70 Man could not escape the natural physical laws that made meat so pernicious, and thus a universal reversion to vegetarianism was as necessary an event as the ebb and flow of the sea. Shelley thought his vegetarian arguments were merely instruments, or linguistic facets, of nature’s edicts; they did not speak of transcending nature’s laws: they were merely a product of them. By following his instructions, people would be acting under nature’s physical determination of their actions.

  The Romanticist Onno Oerlemans has shown that Shelley did not think of himself as a radical crying in the wind: he and his poetry were leaves being blown along by it. In Queen Mab Shelley compares man’s utopian reformation to the propulsion of planets orbiting under the power of nature: ‘Man, like these passive things,/ Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth:/ Like theirs, his age of endless peace,/ Which time is fast maturing,/ Will swiftly, surely come.’ In the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820) Shelley envisages himself as a messiah, prostrate before the will of nature: ‘Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!/ I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ His poems had the power to reform mankind only insofar as they too were passive instruments of nature:

  Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

  Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

  And, by the incantation of this verse,

  Scatter, as from an unextinguished heart

  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

  Oerlemans curiously asserts that ‘Shelley wrote no poetry about vegetarianism (though he occasionally refers to it in poetry written throughout his life)’.71 But vegetarianism plays a crucial role in Shelley’s major poetry, and it is the prime example of the observation that Shelley believed that his moral injunctions were merely passive instruments of nature’s laws. Indeed, realising this untangles how Shelley managed to appear both a delusional megalomaniac and simultaneously prostrate in humility before the awesome power of nature; how he seemed to sustain an archaic anthropocentrism while also battling for man to dissolve his dreadful prerogative in order to become ‘An equal amidst equals’. Humans did not need to take a moral stance that transcended nature. Under the ineluctable power of nature’s laws, mankind would be forced one day to relinquish their unnatural habits and go with the flow.

  In his next ‘vegetarian’ poem, The Revolt of Islam (1817–18), Shelley elaborated on how social and ecological revolution would be propelled by nature. The revolutionary forces (which the title implies are Hindu masses rising up against a Muslim tyrant) led by the messianic character, Laon, are compared to forces of nature like waves and river flows. In the face of their unstoppable power, the bloodthirsty tyrant, like man in Queen Mab, has no choice but to lose his tyrannical prerogative. Laon’s revolutionary forces erect an ‘Altar of the Federation’ whose pyramidical structure symbolically alludes (according to the iconography of the contemporaneous Orientalist, George Faber) to the primeval mountain from which all mankind was said to have descended – the real Eden and Ararat – and thus points to the peaceful gathering of all humans and animals in the original state of nature.72 Beneath this pyramid, the revolutionaries celebrate with a ‘banquet of the free’, modelled on the civic feasts of the French Republic, except that theirs is a vegetarian feast to which all creatures are invited to feed at the same board. Laon’s Eve-like partner, Cythna, declares:

  My brethren, we are free! The fruits are glowing

  Beneath the stars, and the night-winds are flowing

  O’er the ripe corn, the birds and beasts are dreaming –

  Never again may blood of bird or beast

  Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,

  To the pure skies in accusation steaming;

  Avenging poisons shall have ceased

  To feed disease and fear and madness,

  The dwellers of the earth and air

  Shall throng around our steps in gladness,

  Seeking their food or refuge there.73

  In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes identified mutual fear as a driving force in the war of nature. Here Shelley suggests (echoing Wordsworth) that fear results from transgressing nature’s laws, and could thus be eradicated by reverting to the diet that nature willingly ‘Pours from her fairest bosom’.74 The force of nature is not antipathy, as Hobbes averred, but harmony.

  In The Revolt of Islam, this triumphal idyll is ultimately drowned in a hideous massacre at the hands of the gathered forces of world tyranny while Laon and Cythna escape to mystical Paradise by being burnt on a pyramidical funeral pyre.75 In the following year, however, Shelley revisited similar themes in his poetic drama Prometheus Unbound, and this time the messianic individual successfully redeems the fallen world.

  By this time Shelley’s doctors had warned that his declining health would nev
er recover if he did not abandon the vegetable diet; in humiliation Shelley conceded that his experiment had gone awry. Friends had always believed that his faith in the vegetable diet was illusory. His cousin Thomas Medwin, who also wrote a biography of Shelley and himself appears to have converted to vegetarianism while resident in India, claimed that along with his ‘immoderate use of laudanum’, the Pythagorean diet crushed Shelley’s health. Thomas Love Peacock, who frequently visited the Bracknell vegetarians, thought Shelley’s vegetable diet ‘made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination’. In 1817 Shelley even asked the radical journalist Leigh Hunt and his wife Marianne to cover up his illness ‘for the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease, in the same manner … as a reformed parliament must at least be assumed as the remedy of all political evils. No one will change the diet … or reform parliament else.’ By 1821 Leigh Hunt referred jocularly to Shelley’s ‘downfall from the angelic state’ once he started eating ‘veal cutlets’. Shelley had become, in his own Indian idiom, a ‘pariah’ from the vegetarian community.76

  Correspondingly, vegetarianism plays a quieter part in Prometheus Unbound than in his earlier writing. In A Vindication of Natural Diet Shelley had followed Newton’s theory that the myth of Prometheus was an allegory for man’s fall into meat-eating. The Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound is a more complicated figure, but he nevertheless represents humanity’s Manichean struggle with the power of tyranny and corruption. By realigning his thoughts with pure nature, Prometheus, like Mazenghi, achieves an Orphic power to charm nature back into harmony.77 The rejuvenation of the earth triggered by his successful struggle climaxes in a scene of natural feeding in which all creatures live on earth’s natural bounty in a harmonious ecological cycle. The character ‘Earth’ herself declares:

  Henceforth the many children fair

  Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,

  And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,

  And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,

  Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,

  Draining the poison of despair, shall take

  And interchange sweet nutriment;

  …

  And death shall be the last embrace of her

  Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother,

  Folding her child, says, ‘Leave me not again.’78

  Violent death has been replaced with ‘natural’ death of reassimilation into the ecological cycle. Buffon and Darwin had argued that perishing naturally was worse than suffering ‘painless’ slaughter; Shelley reconceived natural death as a maternal embrace. The distinction between it and predation is the difference between sucking milk from the breast, and devouring the nurse (an image with which Shelley repeatedly toyed). Just as in Queen Mab and ‘Mazenghi’, ‘malicious beasts’ become herbivorous, ‘loathly’ reptiles become ‘mild and lovely’, and poisonous plants become sweet; kingfishers leave their prey in peace and feed on the once poisonous fruit of the deadly nightshade.79

  Once again, Prometheus’ agency in this transformation consists in aligning himself with natural forces. Mary Shelley explained that Shelley’s Prometheus ‘used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which they are virtuous through wisdom’.80 Prometheus’ cultivation of the civilised arts to drag mankind from the mire of oppressed slavery mirrors Shelley’s own belief that spreading the knowledge of scientific facts would necessarily cause people to reform their own ways. The Promethean reformer appears to have extraordinary anthropocentric power over the outer world, but he achieves this only as an instrument of necessary physical laws.

  By placing earth in the centre of the vision in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley indicates that man’s agency in global transformation is secondary to nature’s self-propelling powers. Nevertheless, the transformation requires human consent, so man is still a principal protagonist and beneficiary. Man loses his tyrannical relation to nature, but he does not lose his centrality within the ecological system. Even after making man ‘An equal amidst equals’, Shelley fantasised that animals would gather and play ‘round’ him, come to him as a protector, and dance to his music. Part of Shelley’s fear of eating meat was that it ‘animalised’ humans: his vegetarianism served the function of distancing humanity from animals – a motive that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss attributed to vegetarian cultures across the world. By keeping humans on an elevated level, Shelley avoided the attacks suffered by Joseph Ritson, and he protected himself from Buffon’s accusation that the Rousseauist vegetarians were trying to achieve ‘the humiliation of the whole [human] species’ by propounding their fable of ‘entire abstinence from flesh, of perfect tranquillity, of profound peace’.81

  Shelley’s thought was ‘ecological’ in the sense that he was interested in the relations between species, and the human place in natural cycles. But in discussions of Shelley it is vital to distinguish this from the other definition of ‘ecological’ as a synonym for a ‘biocentric’ value system which values non-human ecosystems for their own sake, in contrast to anthropocentrism. Applying the term ‘biocentric’ to Shelley unduly fades the extent to which Shelley kept humanity in the centre of his vision.82

  Mary Shelley said that Shelley responded to his failure to reform the world by walling himself into a world of poetry. Shelley himself repudiated reading his poems as didactic or providing a theoretical model for social reform. Shelley has thus been criticised for retreating into ‘interior’ radicalism, manifested in his focus on the individual and the domestic sphere. But for Shelley the ‘domestic’ was a symbol of the wider ‘dome’ of the world, and Shelley’s personal practice was supposed to exhibit to mankind the harmonious law of nature. He hoped that through him natural forces would still reform the world into a harmonious utopia. As Mary Shelley put it with a gloss of humility, ‘he hoped to induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such, did mankind themselves consent.’ Shelley’s vegetarian poetry did indeed continue to wield an influence on radical working-class movements in the nineteenth century.83 In fulfilment of his desire expressed in the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Shelley’s ‘dead thoughts’ were indeed driven across the world like leaves, when Mahatma Gandhi re-exported them to India and scattered them as inspirational ashes and sparks in the largest non-violent movement of radical liberation the world has ever seen.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Malthusian Tragedy: Feeding the World

  Nature and culture are not necessarily opposed: this was the fundamental premise of Shelley and his Bracknell friends, John Frank Newton and William Lambe. Humans could return to nature without uncivilising themselves; culture should follow natural laws. In practical terms, this meant giving up meat and returning to the natural diet. But it was the civilised arts of science and education – as Shelley’s Prometheus revealed – that would make such a change possible. In making the case for naturalising culture, the Bracknell vegetarians were following Lord Monboddo, who had shown that Rousseau’s attack on the corrupting influence of civilisation did not require humanity to return to a savage state. Monboddo thus provided the nineteenth-century vegetarians with the framework for claiming that vegetarianism was both the natural diet and the logical next step in the advance of civilisation. Society needed more cultivation, not less; in particular, argued the vegetarians, more agriculture.

  It was often assumed that humans had evolved from being fruitarian gatherers into hunters, then into shepherds and had finally invented agriculture. In the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the shift to agriculture was the ambivalent ‘great revolution’ which introduced inequality to human society: ‘property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.’ The Bracknell vegetaria
ns broadly accepted Rousseau’s theory of social evolution, although Lambe pointed out that it was also this ‘great revolution’ that enabled people to leave meat-eating behind them and cultivate enough vegetable food to return to their original herbivorous diet. ‘[T]he adherence to the use of animal food,’ said Lambe, ‘is no more than a persistence in the gross customs of savage life.’ Vegetables were the most civilised foods and the most natural.1

  Lambe’s enthusiasm for agriculture – which he shared with Shelley and Newton – grew out of an epoch-making realisation that had recently struck Europeans with deep consternation. Mushrooming populations were threatening to outstrip food production. Britain had doubled in the eighteenth century from about five million to nearly ten million people. When food shortages struck in Europe during the 1790s and 1800s, concern became all the more intense.2 Was misery and starvation the future of humanity? Had human progress reached the end of the road?

  In the quest to resolve this crisis, improving land-use efficiency became a national obsession. Robert Southey’s critique of vegetarianism was again undoubtedly instrumental in providing a focus for Lambe, Newton and Shelley: ‘The principle of abstaining from animal food is not in itself either culpable or ridiculous, if decently discussed,’ Southey conceded. ‘But ultimately it resolves itself into the political question, Whether the greater population can be maintained upon animal or vegetable diet?’ If eating vegetables was a more efficient way of using available agricultural land then there was a new and urgent reason to re-examine the practice of meat-eating.3