A Life for our Time (2/3): the challenges of commitment

Nativity window at Trinity Church, Boston, designed by Burne-Jones and executed by Morris

Having recently purchased a book, ‘How We Might Live’ by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, that seeks to give Jane Morris due credit for her role in achievements that have been seen as entirely William’s, it seemed appropriate to republish this sequence. This is the second of three: the last will appear tomorrow. More on Jane later, I hope.

There was much that remained very positive to William Morris about his ‘conversion‘ to Socialism and his joining the Democratic Federation. Fiona MacCarthy, in her absorbing biography, writes (page 466-467):

Morris joined what he referred to as ‘the only active Socialist organisation in England’ with the deep and pervading contentment of the man who has at last found his proper métier. He writes of it in terms of the rebirth, the homecoming, the recognition that the thing so much desired has in a sense been always there.

But there were the seeds of later tensions already to be detected (page 468):

Something which distinguished him from many of his intellectually narrower new Socialist colleagues was [a] greed for new experience, Morris’s enormous Catholicity. Cobbett, the early nineteenth-century roving radical, self-educated son of a southern English farmer, was a man after Morris’s own heart in his view of the countryside, irascible but genial, and in the vigour, almost the innocence, of his response.

This did not sit well with all his new-found colleagues (page 471):

There was always to be a rift between political progressives and the aesthetic avant-guarde.

Initially though the calibre of the man carried people with him (ibid.):

But anyone could recognise Morris as a man of stature. . . . . Moreover Morris’s integrity shone out of him. Once he began to talk on any subject which interested him, he was caught up in it completely in a way that was inspiring and totally convincing.

But his new found faith changed him in many ways and confronted him with more tests and challenges than simply coping with the drudgery of activism (page 480):

In these years of his conversion Morris changed his personality . . . [His friends] evidently found Morris’s transformation baffling. The loved friend, whom they had teased and even patronized a little, now seemed removed into new realms of moral earnestness and obduracy. He had become a threatening and even fearsome figure, with the other-worldliness of the Old Testament ascetic.

. . . . Politics dominated all Morris’s conversation, to some of his old friends’ enormous irritation.

It also led him to mistake agreement on an issue for complete conversion to his cause (page 480):

Edward Burne-Jones (left) and William Morris

William de Morgan . . . complained: ‘I was rather disconcerted when I found that an honest objection to Bulgarian atrocities had been held to be one and the same thing as sympathy with Karl Marx, and that Morris took it for granted that I should be ready for enrolment.’

A conflict of priorities that would play out in Morris’s pattern of activities for the rest of his life emerged starkly in an interchange with Swinburne. His closest friend Edward Burne-Jones, known to him as ‘Ned,’ opposed Morris’s Socialism partly on the grounds that (page 481):

. . . it was out of character, an aberration in someone who was ‘before all thing a poet and an artist;’ this was Swinburne’s argument, that public protest was a dissipation of energy that an artist as an individualist could not afford.

Morris was decisively moving away from this position (page 482):

He was reaching a point at which he regarded both his poetry and his design work as irrelevant: ‘Poetry goes with the hand-arts I think, and like them has now become unreal.’ . . . . . He would not abandon his writing and his ‘pattern work:’ he still took pleasure in them. But he could no longer see them as his ‘sacred duty.’

More troubling shifts in his attitudes begin to show themselves (page 490):

Temperamentally Morris was not for violence. Many times he spoke out decisively against it. But over these months one detects in him a certain hardening of attitude, almost a resignation to armed conflict as a necessary phase.

This is the trap idealism springs upon the unwary who feel that noble ends can justify even the most heinous of means (I will shortly be reposting a sequence of articles dealing with that exact issue in more detail). Morris certainly came to see Socialism as the only way forward and this may underly his grudging acceptance of violence. In an address on ‘the condition of workers as slaves’  (page 491):

. . . ‘showed that Socialism was the only possible remedy to the evils arising from competition and the private use of capital.’

Equally troubling in terms of the characteristics of the group he had committed himself to was a tendency to split into bitterly contentious factions. The Democratic Federation offices were in Westminster Palace Chambers where tensions began to show (page 493):

Hubert Bland had been aware [of this]: ‘There was always a good deal more friction than fraternity at Palace Chambers.’ He attributed this to the innovative temperament: ‘The type of man who has the intellectual and moral courage to join a new and unpopular movement has also fully developed the faults of the qualities – obstinacy, vanity, a sort of prickly originality, and a quick impatience of contradiction.’ By the summer of 1884, bitter dissensions were coming to a head.

Morris brought his own brand of obduracy to the banquet of vanities. He wrote to one confidante (page 495):

‘As you know, I am not sanguine, and think the aims of Socialists should be the founding of a religion, towards which end compromise is no use, and we only want to have those with us who will be with us to the end.’

An interesting analogy to come from a convinced atheist, it tells us more about him perhaps than it does about religion.

The steel in his character had nothing to do with personal ambition though (page 496):

History is riddled with politicians who disclaim interest in power only to seize it as soon as it is offered. This was not true of Morris. His letters of this period show him moving towards leadership with a deep reluctance, based on his conviction that he was neither ready for nor suited to the task.

There is much that could be said about the flaws in the whole concept of leadership. For the moment it’ll have to be enough to short-hand it by saying that the problems are as much in the concept as in the men (and it was almost entirely men in those days) who donned the mantle.

Further examination of how Morris rose to these challenges and the light the Bahá’í Faith sheds on them will have to wait until the next post.

Read Full Post »

A Life for our Time (1/3): the courage of commitment

Having recently purchased a book, ‘How We Might Live’ by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, that seeks to give Jane Morris due credit for her role in achievements that have been seen as entirely William’s, it seemed appropriate to republish this sequence. This is the first of three: the second will appear on Tuesday. More on Jane later, I hope.

I felt, after the unsupported assertion I made in an earlier post of the relevance of Morris’s life to us now, I’d better return to that theme and explain some of my reasons for feeling this so strongly. I also have to acknowledge that a closer inspection of reality revealed a somewhat more complex and mixed picture even though the basic idea of it remained the same.

William Morris‘s life trajectory has a familiar feel to it, at least in my view. His move from indifference to activism, as plotted by Fiona MacCarthy in her excellent biography, is one that many of us have experienced in our own lives or vicariously in the lives of our close friends.

She summarises this on page 462:

At the beginning of 1883 Morris underwent what he was always to refer to as a ‘conversion.’ This was not, as has often been claimed, a blinding revelation. Morris himself understood, and explained very straightforwardly, the nature of a change of attitude which had been gradual and inevitable. The sequence of events of his whole life had led on logically to his espousal of the Socialist cause.

She goes on to list what the key events in that sequence were (ibid):

His pampered but solitary childhood; his edgy years at Malborough; his rejection of religion during Oxford; the emotional breakdown of his marriage; the severe epilepsy of the daughter he loved and had such hopes for; his accumulating doubts of the value of the work he had embarked on with such success and with such great enjoyment; Morris’s ‘conversion’ was a drama that had a built-in momentum and a quality of splendour. The New Testament word in Greek – metanoia, ‘mental reorientation’ – is more appropriate.

Her list gives the gist of the context but I would like to focus on some of the later elements as well as adding Iceland into the mix.

His love of craftsmanship started early and lasted all his life. It often entailed an altered state of consciousness, something modern psychology calls ‘flow‘ (page 269) and this was to be a key to the formation of his later attitude to debasing forms of work:

Morris, when illuminating and hand-lettering, entered what was almost an abstracted state, an enclosed serenity of manual activity, like the therapeutic net-making he used to do at school.

Sometimes he expressed his generosity in his most intimate personal relationships at extreme cost. Dante Gabriel Rosetti‘s long affair with Morris’ wife is well known. What is perhaps less well known are the sacrifices Morris made to ensure his wife’s happiness at the cost of his own (page 276):

He and Rosetti took Kelmscott Manor in a joint tenancy in June 1871. Early in June Janey (his wife), Rosetti and the children were installed. Morris visited frequently before setting off for Iceland . . . He was torn on departing. He wrote to Janey: ‘How beautiful the place looked last Monday: I grudged going away so; but I am very happy to think of you all happy there, and the children and you getting well.’ . . . He ended the letter ‘Live well and happy.’ It was for its time – and even in ours – a socially unusual solution and Morris’ generosity verged on sublime.

This has its roots in the Arthurian idealism of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to which Rosetti also professed to subscribe but which Morris had more genuinely internalised.

Main Entrance to Kelmscott Manor (for source of image see link)

His developing consciousness had its roots in buildings as well as crafts (page 314):

Within a radius of five miles from Kelmscott [the first house incarnating that name in Oxfordshire], Morris claimed he could point to ‘some half-dozen tiny village churches, every one of which is a beautiful work of art.’ . . . . What Morris found moving in these buildings was their apparent spontaneity, arrived at because  of their directness of intention. They were not put up to make money or impress but were built, in effect, by the people for the people . . . .

His sense of the community basis for the beauty of these structures was immensely strong.

His powerful drive to master the crafts that were the basis of the products he sold to generate his income brought him up against the harsh economic and class realities of his time. He spent months, for instance, in Staffordshire learning the vanishing art of dyeing with natural dyes (page 350):

[In Leek] Morris, the newcomer, was more sharply conscious of the social dynamics of the town and the hierarchies of the workers in the silk trade . . . . Even after the second spate of Factory Acts of the early 1870s the hours of work were long. Morris, who worked frantically, saw no harm in long hours when work itself was pleasure. Nor did he argue that unpleasant tasks could ever be eliminated totally, though in theory he insisted such tasks should be shared out. What he saw as iniquity – and after Leek attacked with a new insight of experience – was a system of production that relied on human beings carrying out tasks that by their nature were repetitive and arduous, often for longer than fifty hours a week.

The Icelandic experience was also crucial in my view, not only because of the sagas he loved so deeply and translated so devotedly and because the early history of the settlers there tracks the sturdy if rough and ready democracy of their parliament, but also for other more intensely personal things (page 371):

Jane Morris ‘The Blue Silk Dress’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (For source of image see link.)

In Iceland Morris had noticed how invalids and the mentally retarded were cared for in their families. This was the resort of poverty. But Morris, particularly after Jenny’s [his younger daughter’s] epilepsy, pursued it as a principle, maintaining that the ill should not be marginalized and proposing that incapacity itself could cause development of special counter-qualities and skills. As so often, he was a century before his time. . . .

His concern for Jenny gave him new perceptions of wider social distress and injustices and the urge to move society on beyond the reach of them. It was another of the decisive stones in Morris’ socialistic cairn.

This was often a painful path to tread and, on top of that, his early activism, mobilised for the protection of the ancient buildings he loved from what he saw as the depredations of Victorian attempts at ‘restoration,’ pained him in a different way (page 375):

How far did Morris seem himself as a public figure? May [his elder daughter] gives us the impression that public work caused him agonies of boredom and frustration. It was work ‘for which no one knew better than himself he was unsuited.’ Early in 1876 he wrote Magnússon: “I was born not to be a chairman of anything.”  Yet at this very period Morris was embarking on his long succession of chairmanships, treasurerships, enduring and even inviting the repetitive detail of committee work that went on until the weeks before his death.  . . . The truth seems to be that Morris was prepared to school himself for tasks he instinctively found dislikeable, the long-drawn-out discussions,the grind of personalities, the aridities of minutes, the tedious scrounging for subscriptions, if the end was likely to justify the effort. It was a means of channelling his new idealistic energies.

Intriguingly there is a discussion that echoes these last ideas in Crystallizations, a book about Bahá’í artists and their work. There is an essay that addresses the challenges posed by the Bahá’í administration to those of an artistic persuasion. In this chapter Ross Woodman quotes the words of someone challenged in this way (page 154):

. . . I’m still not quite sure that when I lay all my affairs in Bahá’u’lláh’s hands that means the Administrative Order. I’m not fully grounded yet. I have this lingering sense that grounded means grinded, ground down. What I really need to understand is the Will of God present to us, present among us, in the actual day to day workings of the Administrative Order. There’s still a split in me. It’s like an open wound that won’t heal.

Morris would have known exactly what she meant. The variegated threads of personal pain, intense idealism, love of beautiful artefacts and architecture, experiences at close hand of how his own class exploited others and the apparent drudgery of striving for the betterment of the world, wove themselves into a pattern of action intended to lift his society to a higher level of caring. For all its flaws, one of his most appealing prose works, News from Nowhere, captures his vision brilliantly, a vision that, for him, made all the sweat and tears worthwhile. The closing words capture some of the spirit of it, words that come to him when he has returned to the grim reality of his contemporary world after a visionary glimpse of a brighter future:

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business among them; as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen’s last mournful look seemed to say: ” No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship — but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives — men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness.”

And of course that vital work is continuing to this very day and the responsibility for it rests upon no shoulders but our own, whatever the path we tread in peace and co-operation with our fellow human beings. In a strange kind of way, even though I had forgotten about him for so long, in this aspect of his history he has been standing behind me all this time in silent encouragement as I have struggled to follow my chosen path, albeit with less energy, determination and creativity.

I believe that this kind of work is not utopian, in the sense of hopelessly idealistic. I believe such labour can achieve its goals for reasons that I have elaborated elsewhere and are rooted in my faith that this is the purpose we are created for. I also believe there is a hidden power which underlies the all-too-visible distractions of the material world it transcends and which will work with us and through us to bring this into being if only we step with confidence into the field of action and cooperate together.

This work, though, is not without its complications. In the next two posts I will be looking at how Morris’s life highlights some of these and giving a brief sketch of the light the Bahá’í Faith sheds on how to handle them.

Read Full Post »

Reality, Art & the Artist (4/15): the period of poetic maturity

Piazza del Duomo, Pisa (for source of image see link)

Whether we are considering greatness in art, or spirituality in human conduct, we need to remember that in both cases the light varies by degrees, and that even if it is brilliant, one can always aspire for it to become a bit brighter. This observation alone makes the argument of ‘good art despite bad conduct’ look suspicious, for in order to demonstrate the argument’s validity one has to state the criteria by which to distinguish between good and bad, and draw a line between the two.

(Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bahá’í World Community by Ludwig Tuman – page 99)

Given my problematic revisiting of creativity in the context of schizophrenia, it seemed a good idea to republish one of my longest sequence of posts ever, which focuses more positively on the power of art.

In the last post I quoted Hazlitt’s view from Holmes’s biography that Shelley was (page 362) a ‘philosophic fanatic.’ He described him as a ‘man in knowledge, [but] a child of feeling.’

Side Issue of Altruism

In the light of Hazlitt’s comment, it is perhaps worth mentioning here where all this maps onto my desire to understand more fully the influences that either strengthen or undermine altruism. Previous posts have examined how intense idealism creates a kind of empathic tunnel vision.

Shelley’s life poses an interesting question. In terms of his personal relationships the compass of his compassion was usually very narrow in its setting, and he often displayed a repellent inability to understand the suffering he caused. However, in terms of society it was set much wider – but there was a catch. Although nominally he strongly felt our common humanity should govern our relationships with one another, his powerful emotional identification with the oppressed, which possibly had its roots in his childhood mistreatment at the hands of authority in the public school system and the lack of protection from bullying by peers that went with it, meant that anyone he defined as an oppressor would be on the receiving end of his seething animosity and subject to remorseless duplicity.

One possible key to Shelley’s paradoxical stance of callousness to those in his immediate circle and compassion for the oppressed in general may have its roots in the trauma of his school days. Judith Herman, in her excellent treatment of this issue, Trauma & Recovery, describes something similar (page 56):

The contradictory nature of [one man’s] relationships is common to traumatised people. Because of the difficulty in modulating intense anger, survivors oscillate between uncontrolled expressions of rage and intolerance of aggression in any form. Thus, on the one hand, this man felt compassionate and protective towards others and could not stand the thought of anyone being harmed, while on the other hand, he was explosively angry and irritable towards his family. His own inconsistency was one of the sources of his torment.

When he fled into voluntary exile it is hard to determine the moral value of his flight. He feared imprisonment both because of his debts and because of his principles.

This indicates to me that unpicking the dynamics of altruism is not going to be easy. A facile attempt to distinguish between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ altruism as a way of explaining political caring, on the one hand, co-existing in the same human being with personal callousness on the other, won’t get me very far.

Print of the Peterloo Massacre published by Richard Carlile (for source of image see link)

His Later Life

Enough of that for now.

After the death of their son, affectionately called Willmouse, Mary’s grief was great indeed. Shelley held himself back (page 520):

He decided that it was best to leave her to live out her own feelings and despair by herself. He continued his reading and writing through the summer… It was a harsh but characteristic commitment to his own craft.

It is in the period after the composition of Julian & Maddallo, a poem we will be looking at in a later post and which was unpublished at the time, that the vexed problem of the paternity of the child of their Swiss companion, Elise, further intensifies Shelley’s problems at this period of his life (pages 465-475). Holmes, after a detailed examination of the evidence concludes that the child was Shelley’s.

It is also possible that Claire miscarried at the same time as Elena was born, and that Shelley could also have been the father of that child, conceived at a later date. The evidence of both these possibilities is inconclusive, but the situation in his entourage was extremely fraught, not least because Clara, his infant daughter by Mary, died at this time. The circumstances that triggered her death were exacerbated by Shelley’s preoccupation with Elena’s birth and a mysterious illness of Claire’s.

Between 1818 and 1820 Shelley’s life had been extremely nomadic, involving ‘eight residences in rather less than twenty-four months’ (Holmes – page 575). He asks, ‘was Shelley running away from something, or was he running after something?’ Not an easy question to answer. Ann Wroe, in her book Being Shelley, shares one of his friend Hogg’s insights, along with a quote from Shelley himself (pages 170-71; the quote is from The Solitary in The Esdaile Notebook edited by K N Cameron):

As Hogg saw it, Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from, whatever it was that moved him. Shelley put it better: ‘He pants to reach what yet he seems to fly.’   

It was in this period that his masterpiece of protest poetry was composed. The trigger for The Mask of Anarchy was what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre which occurred at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a peaceful crowd of 60,000–80,000 that had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. There will be more of this when I come to consider his poetry in detail.

Others have achieved this in later times in song.

When he settled in Pisa in 1820 this restless pattern was cut across but not finally appeased, Holmes felt.

An important prose work in the Pisa period was his continuation of A Philosophical Review of Reform. It touched both on the role of poetry, a theme he returned to later as a separate issue, and on the nature of political process. He speaks (page 585) of the writer tuning in to ‘the spirit of the age’ and we first hear his concept of poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

Concerning ‘the exploitation of labour through capital investment,’ Shelley influenced John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels (page 586). He saw the necessity for writers to raise the consciousness of not only the educated classes. He was also considering the issue of universal suffrage. He began to see the value of a ‘graduated response’ where small advances should not be rejected because a greater one was not currently practicable (page 590). If parliament drags its feet, he saw the value of ‘intellectual attack and a programme of public meetings and civil disobedience.’ He began to see passive resistance as a possible means of shifting the attitude of the soldiers who were acting as agents of the state in curbing protest (page 591). Holmes feels (page 592) that this document was a bold attempt ‘to define the relationship between imaginative literature and social and political change.’ It was not published for another 100 years. (This is not a record as a recent Guardian article indicates: see link).

Elena, his illegitimate daughter by Elise, died on 9 June 1820 though Shelley did not learn of it until early July (page 596), after his work on A Philosophical Review of Reform was completed.

Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (for source of image see link)

Though Shelley was still producing poetry at this point, such as The Witch of Atlas and Swellfoot, the Tyrant, Holmes comments (page 612) on what he calls ‘a steady withdrawal of creative pressure and urgency,’ though his work as a translator continued to flourish.

One of the best descriptions of Shelley’s physical appearance and the impression he made late in life comes from Byron’s mistress at the time, Contessa Teresa Guiccioli. Fiona MacCarthy comments on and quotes her in her biography of Byron (pages 401-02):

She judged him as by no means so conventionally handsome as her own lover was. His smile was bad, his teeth misshapen and irregular, his skin covered with freckles, his unkempt hair already threaded through with premature silver. ‘He was very tall, but stooped so much that he seemed to be of ordinary height; and although his whole frame was very slight, his bones and knuckles were prominent and even knobbly.’ But Shelley still had a kind of beauty, ‘an expression that could almost be described as godly and austere.’

Thomas Medwin, on meeting him again after an interval of seven years, described him as ‘emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey . . .’

Shelley’s health continued to be problematic, with painful attacks of what Medwin called ‘Nephritis’ (probably gallstones) which (page 618) caused Shelley to ‘roll on the floor in agony.’ Claire’s absence in Florence also saddened him. He missed her friendship and company.

He composed the Tower of Famine at this time and began an over-idealised relationship with Contessa Emilia Viviani (page 625), whose virtual incarceration in a convent while her parents sorted out a suitable marriage partner triggered most of Shelley’s romance electrodes, not least the combination of beauty and imprisonment.

At this time (page 626) he was also dabbling with mesmerism to ease his ‘nephritic spasms.’ It led him to speculate that, in mesmerism, ‘a separation from the mind and body took place – one being most active and the other an inert mass of matter.’ In Adonais, he was even tempted to explore the possibility of the immortality of the soul in the context of Something that looks remarkably close to an idea of God.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

Even so, any implications about the immortality of the soul would not, according to the critical consensus, have warranted a revision of his disbelief in God. My doubts about the possible simplifying myth of Shelley’s atheism are on the rise. It is as though emotionally he believed absolutely in the reality of transcendent forces to which he felt connected; intellectually he couldn’t allow himself to accept that this had anything to do with a god such as his contemporaries believed in. I find myself wondering whether in his poetry we will more consistently find belief, and in his prose more frequently a scathing scepticism: that’s something I might have to test out later.

Ann Wroe’s conclusion lends support to this possibility (page 353):

And early I had learned to scorn
The chains of clay that bound a soul
Panting to seize the wings of morn,
And where its vital fires were born
To soar . . . .

Those lines, from 1812, were Shelley’s constant conviction as a poet. As a man, he was unsure . . . . .

She also reminds us of Shelley’s own explanation of his atheism (page 280):

When he redacted The Necessity of Atheism for his notes to Queen Mab in 1813, he added a new gloss to the words ‘There is no God:’ ‘This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.’

Shelley, at this time and within a brief fortnight, wrote the 600 lines of Epipsychidion, (the title is Greek for ‘concerning or about a little soul’ from epi, ‘around’, and psychidion, ‘little soul,’ which Holmes (page 631) describes as an ‘extraordinary piece of autobiography’ and (page 632) ‘a retrospective review of his own emotional development since adolescence.’ In it he finds symbols (pages 635-636) to capture Shelley’s sense of Emily’s and Mary’s meaning in his life: Mary is the Moon, Emily the Sun while he is the Earth. He found a place for Claire also as a Comet!

Shelley’s own prose comment is illuminating (page 639), Epipsychidion:

. . . . is an idealised history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood avoid it, consists in seeking an immortal image and likeness of what is perhaps eternal.

Next comes the composition of A Defence of Poetry. A brief consideration of this must wait till we come to the post on his poetry.

Edward John Trelawny (for source of image see link)

Three things mark this closing period of Shelley’s life. In terms of his relationships the death of Claire’s daughter, Allegra, of typhus fever in April 1822 is among the most important. In terms of the unexpected manner of his dying, he celebrated the arrival of his newly built sailing boat in May.

As for his poetry, he began composing The Triumph of Life. I may come back to that when I discuss his poetry.

In June he was bizarrely requesting his friend, Trelawny (page 725), for a lethal dose of ‘Prussic Acid or essential oil of bitter almonds[1].’

There is confusion in the end about the exact circumstances of Shelley’s death on his boat off the coast of Viareggio. MacCarthy agrees with Holmes that there was a squall. However, whereas Holmes paints a picture of Shelley’s almost suicidal recklessness as being the main cause of the vessel’s sinking, she feels there is the possibility that (page 428) ‘they were rammed and sunk by a marauding vessel.’

It is perhaps fitting that his death was as ambivalent as his life.

In the next post tomorrow I will be looking at the relationship between art and the artist in general terms. This will then lead to a set of posts reviewing Shelley’s poetry before I get round to trying to develop a tentative model of the creative process I can use to help me examine other artists’ lives – even so I’m possibly being slightly over-ambitious there, I think.

Footnote:

[1] Bitter almonds contain glycoside amygdalin. When eaten, glycoside amygdalin will turn into prussic acid, a.k.a. hydrogen cyanide.

Read Full Post »

Reality, Art & the Artist (3/15): Shelley’s formative years

The Massacre at Paris 1792, a tendentious English take on the matter (for source of image see link)

Well is it with the king who keepeth a tight hold on the reins of his passion, restraineth his anger and preferreth justice and fairness to injustice and tyranny.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh – page 65)

Given my problematic revisiting of creativity in the context of schizophrenia, it seemed a good idea to republish one of my longest sequence of posts ever, which focuses more positively on the power of art.

As I indicated towards the end of the last post, as my reading of Richard Holmes’s 700 page account of Shelley’s life moved forward, though I lost none of my reservations about the man, they became balanced both by examples of his capacity for kindness at times and by the increasing depth and accessibility of his poetry.

I was also powerfully struck by how relevant his challenges and concerns still are to our world today. We also, as he was, are living in a country which watches terror abroad afraid that it will come to haunt us at home. Even though the desire for liberty had inspired the French Revolution, by the time the Jacobins gained power ruthless oppression had betrayed its original ideals, a pattern that Shelley, for reasons we’ll explore soon, became aware would tend to repeat itself. We have seen many of those repetitions take place across the world since his day, most conspicuously, but by no means only, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

As I explained last time, I will be starting with a helicopter survey of Shelley’s life. Next week I’ll be looking at some ideas about the life/art relationship in general before taking a closer look at Shelley’s poetry prior to attempting to formulate a model of creativity from the wreckage.

Early Influences

In childhood, it would seem, Shelley ruled the roost (page 3):

Bysshe, the favourite of the servants, and secure in his position as tribal chief, ran riot at Field Place [his childhood home].

His time at boarding school was a torment but he had two factors that helped him reduce the impact of the incessant bullying (page 5):

One was his imaginary world of monsters and demons and apparitions. The other was an unexpected discovery – he found he had inherited something his grandfather’s character, and had a violent and absolutely ungovernable temper once he grew angry.

The latter characteristic posed a problem for Shelley though (ibid.):

All his life, Shelley was to detest violence and the various forms of ‘tyranny’ which it produced. Yet the exceptional violence in his own character, the viciousness with which he reacted to opposition, was something he found difficult to accept about himself.

There are no reminiscences recorded by either of his parents about Shelley: all we know is that, as a child, he found his mother (page 11) ‘increasingly distant and unresponsive, and there are indications that he felt deeply rejected.’ His later relationship with his father, after the age of 18, was extremely fractious. He (page 12) ‘dramatised him as the worst kind of tyrant and hypocrite.’

While Holmes warns us to treat these ‘melodramatic’ descriptions with caution, they are very revealing about Shelley’s ‘mythopoeic faculty,’ a major factor in his later creativity. Later (page 105) Holmes indicates, in the accounts Shelley gave of his childhood, that he ‘could be very unscrupulous in adjusting the truth when the need arose,’ but that ‘it is difficult to tell how far Shelley really realised – or admitted to himself – what he was doing.’

My later reading about trauma, undertaken after I had finished this sequence, may shed further light on this. Allowing for a number of caveats, including the way his upbringing prior to boarding school had infused a degree of narcissistic entitlement into his character, it is possible that his fierce temper may be at least in part attributable to his schooling. Joy Schaverian, in her thought-provoking book Boarding School Syndrome, describes what she learnt from a patient she calls Theo, not his real name. Prior to therapy he had often withdrawn from his wife and family for reasons that were not clear to him. Only when he confronted an example of his own violence during his school days did he begin to realise more fully the dynamics of his withdrawal pattern (page 86):

He knew he could be meaner, and this became evident to him when a boy unfairly kicked him during a rugby match. The next time there was a scrum, he took the opportunity to hit that boy. This is depicted in the picture shown below. He was shocked by his own violence and deeply ashamed in telling this story. This brought to light another aspect of the rage of which he was so scared. Theo’s extreme self-control was mustered to keep this aspect of himself at bay. He was worried about how vengeful he had been on this occasion.

Schooldays

A school contemporary at Syon House described Shelley (page 13) as having ‘considerable political talent, accompanied by a violent and extremely excitable temper.’

Shelley was also fascinated by science (page 16) in a ‘speculative and imaginative’ fashion, though ‘more naturally inclined to the field of social sciences – sociology, psychology, even parapsychology – than the physical ones.’

On his return to Field Place, the home of his childhood, after two years at Syon House, we see an escalation in the problematic side of his character (page 17):

Shelley’s natural mischievousness had become more uncontrollable, his games and experiment more violent, and his authority over his sisters more domineering.

A streak of indifference to others’ feelings, even cruelty, became apparent:

Shelley suggested that he will be able to cure his [sister’s] chilblains by [a] method of electrification, but his sister’s ‘terror overwhelmed all other feelings’ and she complained to their parents. Shelley was required to desist.

At Oxford he was later to torment his scout’s son, who had learning disabilities, with the same threat of electrification. His time at Eton replicated his experiences at Syon House, if not worse (page 19) since ‘the bullying by his fellow pupils was extremely severe.’ His experiences with authority were stained with the same dye so that (page 20):

He remembered these first years at Eton with an intensity of loathing that affected many of his later attitudes towards organised authority and social conformism.

The paragraph that summarises the consequences of all this early trauma concludes (page 21):

Of the damage that the early Eton experience did to him, repeating and reinforcing the Syon House pattern and reaction, there can be little doubt. Fear of society en masse, fear of enforced solitude, fear of the violence within himself and from others, fear of withdrawal of love and acceptance, all these were implanted in the centre of his personality so that it became fundamentally unstable and highly volatile. Here seem to lie the sources of his compensatory qualities: his daring, his exhibitionism, his flamboyant generosity, his instinctive and demonstrative hatred of authority.

Mary Shelley’s late portrait by Richard Rothwell (for source of image see link)

Briefly at Oxford

In his brief time at Oxford, before being sent down for publishing a pamphlet on atheism, he developed a close friendship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, the co-author of the pamphlet. Hogg has much to say about his impressions of Shelley. There was much he could not explain (page 42):

The fascination with firearms was one of many elements in Shelley’s character which Hogg, a very down-to-earth personality despite all his masterly sarcasms, could never really account for. Another was Shelley’s almost maniac disregard, on certain occasions, for the commonplace decencies of normal public behaviour, as the time when he seized a baby out of his mother’s arms while crossing Magdalen Bridge and began earnestly to question it about the nature of its Platonic pre-existence so that he might prove a point in an argument he was having with Hogg concerning metempsychosis. A third, and even more significant facet, which Hogg all his life tended to discount as mere comic ‘fancy,’ was Shelley’s natural and sometimes overwhelming sense of the macabre.

He delighted in ‘ritual horror sessions’ throughout his life and they were a constant marker of ‘the darker side of Shelley’s personality’ (pages 260-61). It is hardly surprising then that the most famous novel his second wife, Mary, ever wrote was Frankenstein.

He was also prone (page 114) to ‘attacks of hysteria; at its most extreme this could involve a screaming fit and complete prostration, and he would have to be put to bed and nursed.’

When the relationship with his father was moving towards meltdown over Shelley’s unorthodox behaviour and atheistic views, their shared inability to empathise with each other sank their chances of reconciliation (page 59):

Shelley could see no more than theological hypocrisy and paternal treachery; while Timothy could see no more than a spoilt and overconfident son dragging the whole family into social disgrace. So they were content to wound each other in the dark.

Boris Karloff as the Monster (For source of image see link)

His Traits as an Adult

Empathy was never Shelley’s strong suit in his personal life in spite of his compassionate identification with the oppressed in the political sphere.

This lack was dramatically displayed in the tactless treatment of the Elizabeth Hitchener’s father: this lady was risking her good name by developing a close relationship with him as a married man of dubious reputation. In a letter responding to Mr Hitchener’s concerns, Shelley wrote (page 141):

‘What the world thinks of my actions ever has, & I trust ever will be a matter of complete indifference. Your daughter shares this sentiment with me, and we are both resolved to refer our actions to one tribunal only, that which Nature has implanted in us.’

Holmes’s comment says it all: ‘It was a lapse typical of Shelley, typical of his blind self-assertion and sudden explosions of high-mindedness.’ His subsequent behaviour towards her, as the relationship cooled on his side, indicated that he did not have the faintest idea about the damaging impact of all this on the life situation of a vulnerable woman of lower social status who had, up to that point, been establishing the viable foundation for a secure future. His conduct put this completely in jeopardy. I also recognise we are speaking of a nineteen-year-old youth – given the prominence of Isis/Daesh and the prevalence of narcissism, not a male age group renowned at present for its sensitivity and wisdom. However, Shelley’s conduct frequently placed him close to the extreme end of the inconsideration spectrum.

Holmes feels that the character of the monster in Mary’s Frankenstein was drawn in part from Shelley and that expressions such as (page 333) ‘ . . . misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous,’ from the monster, capture something of his psychodynamics. Shelley himself wrote of the monster (page 334):

‘Treat a person ill and he will become wicked.’ . . . . ‘It is thus that too often in society those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed by neglect and solitude of heart into a scourge and a curse.’ Implicitly, Shelley accepted his own identification as Frankenstein’s monster.

Claire Clairmont in 1819, painted by Amelia Curran (for source of image see link)

It is important to balance this with the generosity of his eventual treatment of Claire Clairmont at the time she was pregnant with Byron’s daughter (page 343). He admittedly had, unusually for him, a strong and protective connection with her, whose exact basis is hard to disentangle. Fiona MacCarthy, in her 2002 biography of Byron, is very clear (page 297-98) that ‘despite their close interdependence there was no evidence of a sexual bond between Shelley and Claire.’ There may have been such a connection at a later date, but this has not been confirmed beyond all doubt. Nevertheless, throughout the remainder of his short life he put himself out and sacrificed much to support her in her difficulties.

Shelley’s relationship with Byron was made more complex by his need to act as Claire’s advocate with Byron in terms of the future of their daughter, Allegra. Even without that, as MacCarthy indicates in her  biography of Byron (page 298), their relationship would always have been pulled in at least two directions:

They fascinated, maddened one another. Intellectually compatible they were yet poles apart, Byron upholding the traditional and factual bases of philosophical argument, Shelley pursuing the further reaches of the experimental and visionary.

It is also true that Byron found it helpful that there was someone else around whose behaviour was even more openly unconventional than his own.

As he grew older, though still only in his twenties which he never outgrew, his health was also becoming a problem. Holmes detects three aspects (page 143): ‘hysterical and nervous attacks after periods of great strain,’ symptoms of a chronic disease associated with his kidneys and bladder’ and an interconnected ‘psycho-somatic area.’

He was not completely blind to his socially destructive impulses but was rarely able to curb them. Commenting on a letter Shelley wrote to William Godwin, with whom his relationship was positive at that point, Holmes writes (page 145):

It was a warm and touching letter. In the intellectual presence of one he felt he could trust, Shelley’s sense of personal inadequacy is revealing. He was rarely able to admit his own impatience and his own bitterness of feeling; more usually he was ‘unimpeached and unimpeachable.’

Incidentally, as his closeness to Godwin increased so did his distance from Elizabeth Hitchener, a painful development for her given how costly her association with Shelley was proving: Holmes (page 175) feels his behaviour demonstrated ‘a certain callous indifference to those he has grown disenchanted with.’

Another developing friendship, this time with the satirically inclined Thomas Love Peacock, helped him begin to learn how to ‘mock his own enthusiasms’ (page 174).

There was then an incident in Tremadoc, whose exact details are difficult to disentangle. It involved gunfire at night and what seemed to Shelley and his immediate relations to be a politically motivated attempt upon his life by disaffected locals whom his behaviour had antagonised. This, combined with his reaction to the Ireland experience, meant (page 198) that ‘he never returned’ to ‘political activism again.’ From that point on ‘Shelley regarded himself as a mouthpiece rather than as an instrument for political change.’ In a famous later phrase, he became ‘the trumpet of a prophecy,’ but ‘not the sword.’

Later still there was possibly an even more critical event: the suicide of his first wife, Harriet, to which his own callous disregard for her had made a special contribution. Claire Clairmont, to whom Shelley was closer than to anyone else in the world at that point, wrote in a letter that (page 356) ‘Harriet’s suicide had a beneficial effect on Shelley – he became much less confident in himself and not so wild as he had been before.’ Holmes unpacks this by saying: ‘For Claire, it was Shelley’s recognition of his own degree of responsibility – a slow and painful recognition – which matured him.’

It was because of the pain Shelley was causing those close to him that the painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, described Shelley (page 360) as ‘hypocritical’ for criticising Wordsworth for his indifference to the suffering of trout that had been caught. Haydon, after a bruising interaction as a Christian with Shelley’s militant atheism, found him proud, ‘domineering and insensitive.’ Hazlitt, for his part, felt he was (page 362) a ‘philosophic fanatic,’ and described him as a ‘man in knowledge, [but] a child of feeling.’

His Atheism

The issue of Shelley’s atheism may not be as straightforward as many, including Holmes, have liked to think.

I feel that he was probably not atheist in the sense that Dawkins uses the word. His prose, poetry and scribbled drafts are littered with such expressions (Ann Wroe’s Being Shelley page 157) as ‘One mind, the type of all . . .,’ ‘Great Spirit,’ ‘Immortal Deity/Whose throne is in the Heaven depth of Human thought,’ or, as I have just recently read in Epipsychidion, ‘The spirit of the worm beneath the sod/In love and worship, blends itself with God.’

In an address in 2008 on The Spiritual Foundation of Human Rights, Suheil Bushrui quotes from one of the best stanzas in Shelley’s uneven Adonais to prove he was a believer in the Absolute:

Each of the founders of the world’s religions has spoken of the Absolute, the one fountain of light and moral guidance, so eloquently expressed by Shelley in Adonais, his noble elegy written on the death of his fellow poet, John Keats:

‘The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.’

I think we can be certain, though, that Shelley did not believe in the same God as his Christian contemporaries.

Perhaps the closest we can get is the description of his beliefs in Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu (page 820):

In truth, Percy’s attitude to God was more complex than the word ‘atheist’ suggests. It is not surprising that the concept was inimical to someone so opposed to an established church not merely complicit, but deeply implicated, in the social and political oppression prevalent in England at the time. On the other hand, he was tremendously attracted to the pantheist life force of Tintern Abbey, and could not resist pleading the existence of a similar power in his poetry. However, he stopped well short of believing in a benevolent deity capable of intervening in human affairs. Much of his poetry tacitly accepts the existence of a superhuman ‘Power,’ but its moral character is not always clear. . . . He could also contemplate the possibility of the universe without a creator. If any phrase were used to encapsulate his position, it might be ‘awful doubt[1]’ – a feeling of awe for the power evident in the natural world, mixed with scepticism as to whether it reveals a divine presence.

We will complete this race through Shelley’s life tomorrow.

Footnote:

[1] Mont Blanc line 77.

Read Full Post »

Reality, Art & the Artist (4/15): the period of poetic maturity

Piazza del Duomo, Pisa (for source of image see link)

Whether we are considering greatness in art, or spirituality in human conduct, we need to remember that in both cases the light varies by degrees, and that even if it is brilliant, one can always aspire for it to become a bit brighter. This observation alone makes the argument of ‘good art despite bad conduct’ look suspicious, for in order to demonstrate the argument’s validity one has to state the criteria by which to distinguish between good and bad, and draw a line between the two.

(Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bahá’í World Community by Ludwig Tuman – page 99)

On the run-in to Christmas during this difficult time in terms of the current context of political uncertainty and division, it seemed a good idea to republish one of my longest sequence of posts ever, which focuses on the power of art.

In the last post I quoted Hazlitt’s view from Holmes’s biography that Shelley was (page 362) a ‘philosophic fanatic.’ He described him as a ‘man in knowledge, [but] a child of feeling.’

Side Issue of Altruism

In the light of Hazlitt’s comment, it is perhaps worth mentioning here where all this maps onto my desire to understand more fully the influences that either strengthen or undermine altruism. Previous posts have examined how intense idealism creates a kind of empathic tunnel vision.

Shelley’s life poses an interesting question. In terms of his personal relationships the compass of his compassion was usually very narrow in its setting, and he often displayed a repellent inability to understand the suffering he caused. However, in terms of society it was set much wider – but there was a catch. Although nominally he strongly felt our common humanity should govern our relationships with one another, his powerful emotional identification with the oppressed, which possibly had its roots in his childhood mistreatment at the hands of authority in the public school system and the lack of protection from bullying by peers that went with it, meant that anyone he defined as an oppressor would be on the receiving end of his seething animosity and subject to remorseless duplicity.

One possible key to Shelley’s paradoxical stance of callousness to those in his immediate circle and compassion for the oppressed in general may have its roots in the trauma of his school days. Judith Herman, in her excellent treatment of this issue, Trauma & Recovery, describes something similar (page 56):

The contradictory nature of [one man’s] relationships is common to traumatised people. Because of the difficulty in modulating intense anger, survivors oscillate between uncontrolled expressions of rage and intolerance of aggression in any form. Thus, on the one hand, this man felt compassionate and protective towards others and could not stand the thought of anyone being harmed, while on the other hand, he was explosively angry and irritable towards his family. His own inconsistency was one of the sources of his torment.

When he fled into voluntary exile it is hard to determine the moral value of his flight. He feared imprisonment both because of his debts and because of his principles.

This indicates to me that unpicking the dynamics of altruism is not going to be easy. A facile attempt to distinguish between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ altruism as a way of explaining political caring, on the one hand, co-existing in the same human being with personal callousness on the other, won’t get me very far.

Print of the Peterloo Massacre published by Richard Carlile (for source of image see link)

His Later Life

Enough of that for now.

After the death of their son, affectionately called Willmouse, Mary’s grief was great indeed. Shelley held himself back (page 520):

He decided that it was best to leave her to live out her own feelings and despair by herself. He continued his reading and writing through the summer… It was a harsh but characteristic commitment to his own craft.

It is in the period after the composition of Julian & Maddallo, a poem we will be looking at in a later post and which was unpublished at the time, that the vexed problem of the paternity of the child of their Swiss companion, Elise, further intensifies Shelley’s problems at this period of his life (pages 465-475). Holmes, after a detailed examination of the evidence concludes that the child was Shelley’s.

It is also possible that Claire miscarried at the same time as Elena was born, and that Shelley could also have been the father of that child, conceived at a later date. The evidence of both these possibilities is inconclusive, but the situation in his entourage was extremely fraught, not least because Clara, his infant daughter by Mary, died at this time. The circumstances that triggered her death were exacerbated by Shelley’s preoccupation with Elena’s birth and a mysterious illness of Claire’s.

Between 1818 and 1820 Shelley’s life had been extremely nomadic, involving ‘eight residences in rather less than twenty-four months’ (Holmes – page 575). He asks, ‘was Shelley running away from something, or was he running after something?’ Not an easy question to answer. Ann Wroe, in her book Being Shelley, shares one of his friend Hogg’s insights, along with a quote from Shelley himself (pages 170-71; the quote is from The Solitary in The Esdaile Notebook edited by K N Cameron):

As Hogg saw it, Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from, whatever it was that moved him. Shelley put it better: ‘He pants to reach what yet he seems to fly.’   

It was in this period that his masterpiece of protest poetry was composed. The trigger for The Mask of Anarchy was what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre which occurred at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a peaceful crowd of 60,000–80,000 that had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. There will be more of this when I come to consider his poetry in detail.

Others have achieved this in later times in song.

When he settled in Pisa in 1820 this restless pattern was cut across but not finally appeased, Holmes felt.

An important prose work in the Pisa period was his continuation of A Philosophical Review of Reform. It touched both on the role of poetry, a theme he returned to later as a separate issue, and on the nature of political process. He speaks (page 585) of the writer tuning in to ‘the spirit of the age’ and we first hear his concept of poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

Concerning ‘the exploitation of labour through capital investment,’ Shelley influenced John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels (page 586). He saw the necessity for writers to raise the consciousness of not only the educated classes. He was also considering the issue of universal suffrage. He began to see the value of a ‘graduated response’ where small advances should not be rejected because a greater one was not currently practicable (page 590). If parliament drags its feet, he saw the value of ‘intellectual attack and a programme of public meetings and civil disobedience.’ He began to see passive resistance as a possible means of shifting the attitude of the soldiers who were acting as agents of the state in curbing protest (page 591). Holmes feels (page 592) that this document was a bold attempt ‘to define the relationship between imaginative literature and social and political change.’ It was not published for another 100 years. (This is not a record as a recent Guardian article indicates: see link).

Elena, his illegitimate daughter by Elise, died on 9 June 1820 though Shelley did not learn of it until early July (page 596), after his work on A Philosophical Review of Reform was completed.

Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (for source of image see link)

Though Shelley was still producing poetry at this point, such as The Witch of Atlas and Swellfoot, the Tyrant, Holmes comments (page 612) on what he calls ‘a steady withdrawal of creative pressure and urgency,’ though his work as a translator continued to flourish.

One of the best descriptions of Shelley’s physical appearance and the impression he made late in life comes from Byron’s mistress at the time, Contessa Teresa Guiccioli. Fiona MacCarthy comments on and quotes her in her biography of Byron (pages 401-02):

She judged him as by no means so conventionally handsome as her own lover was. His smile was bad, his teeth misshapen and irregular, his skin covered with freckles, his unkempt hair already threaded through with premature silver. ‘He was very tall, but stooped so much that he seemed to be of ordinary height; and although his whole frame was very slight, his bones and knuckles were prominent and even knobbly.’ But Shelley still had a kind of beauty, ‘an expression that could almost be described as godly and austere.’

Thomas Medwin, on meeting him again after an interval of seven years, described him as ‘emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey . . .’

Shelley’s health continued to be problematic, with painful attacks of what Medwin called ‘Nephritis’ (probably gallstones) which (page 618) caused Shelley to ‘roll on the floor in agony.’ Claire’s absence in Florence also saddened him. He missed her friendship and company.

He composed the Tower of Famine at this time and began an over-idealised relationship with Contessa Emilia Viviani (page 625), whose virtual incarceration in a convent while her parents sorted out a suitable marriage partner triggered most of Shelley’s romance electrodes, not least the combination of beauty and imprisonment.

At this time (page 626) he was also dabbling with mesmerism to ease his ‘nephritic spasms.’ It led him to speculate that, in mesmerism, ‘a separation from the mind and body took place – one being most active and the other an inert mass of matter.’ In Adonais, he was even tempted to explore the possibility of the immortality of the soul in the context of Something that looks remarkably close to an idea of God.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

Even so, any implications about the immortality of the soul would not, according to the critical consensus, have warranted a revision of his disbelief in God. My doubts about the possible simplifying myth of Shelley’s atheism are on the rise. It is as though emotionally he believed absolutely in the reality of transcendent forces to which he felt connected; intellectually he couldn’t allow himself to accept that this had anything to do with a god such as his contemporaries believed in. I find myself wondering whether in his poetry we will more consistently find belief, and in his prose more frequently a scathing scepticism: that’s something I might have to test out later.

Ann Wroe’s conclusion lends support to this possibility (page 353):

And early I had learned to scorn
The chains of clay that bound a soul
Panting to seize the wings of morn,
And where its vital fires were born
To soar . . . .

Those lines, from 1812, were Shelley’s constant conviction as a poet. As a man, he was unsure . . . . .

She also reminds us of Shelley’s own explanation of his atheism (page 280):

When he redacted The Necessity of Atheism for his notes to Queen Mab in 1813, he added a new gloss to the words ‘There is no God:’ ‘This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.’

Shelley, at this time and within a brief fortnight, wrote the 600 lines of Epipsychidion, (the title is Greek for ‘concerning or about a little soul’ from epi, ‘around’, and psychidion, ‘little soul,’ which Holmes (page 631) describes as an ‘extraordinary piece of autobiography’ and (page 632) ‘a retrospective review of his own emotional development since adolescence.’ In it he finds symbols (pages 635-636) to capture Shelley’s sense of Emily’s and Mary’s meaning in his life: Mary is the Moon, Emily the Sun while he is the Earth. He found a place for Claire also as a Comet!

Shelley’s own prose comment is illuminating (page 639), Epipsychidion:

. . . . is an idealised history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood avoid it, consists in seeking an immortal image and likeness of what is perhaps eternal.

Next comes the composition of A Defence of Poetry. A brief consideration of this must wait till we come to the post on his poetry.

Edward John Trelawny (for source of image see link)

Three things mark this closing period of Shelley’s life. In terms of his relationships the death of Claire’s daughter, Allegra, of typhus fever in April 1822 is among the most important. In terms of the unexpected manner of his dying, he celebrated the arrival of his newly built sailing boat in May.

As for his poetry, he began composing The Triumph of Life. I may come back to that when I discuss his poetry.

In June he was bizarrely requesting his friend, Trelawny (page 725), for a lethal dose of ‘Prussic Acid or essential oil of bitter almonds[1].’

There is confusion in the end about the exact circumstances of Shelley’s death on his boat off the coast of Viareggio. MacCarthy agrees with Holmes that there was a squall. However, whereas Holmes paints a picture of Shelley’s almost suicidal recklessness as being the main cause of the vessel’s sinking, she feels there is the possibility that (page 428) ‘they were rammed and sunk by a marauding vessel.’

It is perhaps fitting that his death was as ambivalent as his life.

In the next post tomorrow I will be looking at the relationship between art and the artist in general terms. This will then lead to a set of posts reviewing Shelley’s poetry before I get round to trying to develop a tentative model of the creative process I can use to help me examine other artists’ lives – even so I’m possibly being slightly over-ambitious there, I think.

Footnote:

[1] Bitter almonds contain glycoside amygdalin. When eaten, glycoside amygdalin will turn into prussic acid, a.k.a. hydrogen cyanide.

Read Full Post »

Reality, Art & the Artist (3/15): Shelley’s formative years

The Massacre at Paris 1792, a tendentious English take on the matter (for source of image see link)

Well is it with the king who keepeth a tight hold on the reins of his passion, restraineth his anger and preferreth justice and fairness to injustice and tyranny.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh – page 65)

On the run-in to Christmas during this difficult time in terms of the current context of political uncertainty and division, it seemed a good idea to republish one of my longest sequence of posts ever, which focuses on the power of art.

As I indicated towards the end of the last post, as my reading of Richard Holmes’s 700 page account of Shelley’s life moved forward, though I lost none of my reservations about the man, they became balanced both by examples of his capacity for kindness at times and by the increasing depth and accessibility of his poetry.

I was also powerfully struck by how relevant his challenges and concerns still are to our world today. We also, as he was, are living in a country which watches terror abroad afraid that it will come to haunt us at home. Even though the desire for liberty had inspired the French Revolution, by the time the Jacobins gained power ruthless oppression had betrayed its original ideals, a pattern that Shelley, for reasons we’ll explore soon, became aware would tend to repeat itself. We have seen many of those repetitions take place across the world since his day, most conspicuously, but by no means only, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

As I explained last time, I will be starting with a helicopter survey of Shelley’s life. Next week I’ll be looking at some ideas about the life/art relationship in general before taking a closer look at Shelley’s poetry prior to attempting to formulate a model of creativity from the wreckage.

Early Influences

In childhood, it would seem, Shelley ruled the roost (page 3):

Bysshe, the favourite of the servants, and secure in his position as tribal chief, ran riot at Field Place [his childhood home].

His time at boarding school was a torment but he had two factors that helped him reduce the impact of the incessant bullying (page 5):

One was his imaginary world of monsters and demons and apparitions. The other was an unexpected discovery – he found he had inherited something his grandfather’s character, and had a violent and absolutely ungovernable temper once he grew angry.

The latter characteristic posed a problem for Shelley though (ibid.):

All his life, Shelley was to detest violence and the various forms of ‘tyranny’ which it produced. Yet the exceptional violence in his own character, the viciousness with which he reacted to opposition, was something he found difficult to accept about himself.

There are no reminiscences recorded by either of his parents about Shelley: all we know is that, as a child, he found his mother (page 11) ‘increasingly distant and unresponsive, and there are indications that he felt deeply rejected.’ His later relationship with his father, after the age of 18, was extremely fractious. He (page 12) ‘dramatised him as the worst kind of tyrant and hypocrite.’

While Holmes warns us to treat these ‘melodramatic’ descriptions with caution, they are very revealing about Shelley’s ‘mythopoeic faculty,’ a major factor in his later creativity. Later (page 105) Holmes indicates, in the accounts Shelley gave of his childhood, that he ‘could be very unscrupulous in adjusting the truth when the need arose,’ but that ‘it is difficult to tell how far Shelley really realised – or admitted to himself – what he was doing.’

My later reading about trauma, undertaken after I had finished this sequence, may shed further light on this. Allowing for a number of caveats, including the way his upbringing prior to boarding school had infused a degree of narcissistic entitlement into his character, it is possible that his fierce temper may be at least in part attributable to his schooling. Joy Schaverian, in her thought-provoking book Boarding School Syndrome, describes what she learnt from a patient she calls Theo, not his real name. Prior to therapy he had often withdrawn from his wife and family for reasons that were not clear to him. Only when he confronted an example of his own violence during his school days did he begin to realise more fully the dynamics of his withdrawal pattern (page 86):

He knew he could be meaner, and this became evident to him when a boy unfairly kicked him during a rugby match. The next time there was a scrum, he took the opportunity to hit that boy. This is depicted in the picture shown below. He was shocked by his own violence and deeply ashamed in telling this story. This brought to light another aspect of the rage of which he was so scared. Theo’s extreme self-control was mustered to keep this aspect of himself at bay. He was worried about how vengeful he had been on this occasion.

Schooldays

A school contemporary at Syon House described Shelley (page 13) as having ‘considerable political talent, accompanied by a violent and extremely excitable temper.’

Shelley was also fascinated by science (page 16) in a ‘speculative and imaginative’ fashion, though ‘more naturally inclined to the field of social sciences – sociology, psychology, even parapsychology – than the physical ones.’

On his return to Field Place, the home of his childhood, after two years at Syon House, we see an escalation in the problematic side of his character (page 17):

Shelley’s natural mischievousness had become more uncontrollable, his games and experiment more violent, and his authority over his sisters more domineering.

A streak of indifference to others’ feelings, even cruelty, became apparent:

Shelley suggested that he will be able to cure his [sister’s] chilblains by [a] method of electrification, but his sister’s ‘terror overwhelmed all other feelings’ and she complained to their parents. Shelley was required to desist.

At Oxford he was later to torment his scout’s son, who had learning disabilities, with the same threat of electrification. His time at Eton replicated his experiences at Syon House, if not worse (page 19) since ‘the bullying by his fellow pupils was extremely severe.’ His experiences with authority were stained with the same dye so that (page 20):

He remembered these first years at Eton with an intensity of loathing that affected many of his later attitudes towards organised authority and social conformism.

The paragraph that summarises the consequences of all this early trauma concludes (page 21):

Of the damage that the early Eton experience did to him, repeating and reinforcing the Syon House pattern and reaction, there can be little doubt. Fear of society en masse, fear of enforced solitude, fear of the violence within himself and from others, fear of withdrawal of love and acceptance, all these were implanted in the centre of his personality so that it became fundamentally unstable and highly volatile. Here seem to lie the sources of his compensatory qualities: his daring, his exhibitionism, his flamboyant generosity, his instinctive and demonstrative hatred of authority.

Mary Shelley’s late portrait by Richard Rothwell (for source of image see link)

Briefly at Oxford

In his brief time at Oxford, before being sent down for publishing a pamphlet on atheism, he developed a close friendship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, the co-author of the pamphlet. Hogg has much to say about his impressions of Shelley. There was much he could not explain (page 42):

The fascination with firearms was one of many elements in Shelley’s character which Hogg, a very down-to-earth personality despite all his masterly sarcasms, could never really account for. Another was Shelley’s almost maniac disregard, on certain occasions, for the commonplace decencies of normal public behaviour, as the time when he seized a baby out of his mother’s arms while crossing Magdalen Bridge and began earnestly to question it about the nature of its Platonic pre-existence so that he might prove a point in an argument he was having with Hogg concerning metempsychosis. A third, and even more significant facet, which Hogg all his life tended to discount as mere comic ‘fancy,’ was Shelley’s natural and sometimes overwhelming sense of the macabre.

He delighted in ‘ritual horror sessions’ throughout his life and they were a constant marker of ‘the darker side of Shelley’s personality’ (pages 260-61). It is hardly surprising then that the most famous novel his second wife, Mary, ever wrote was Frankenstein.

He was also prone (page 114) to ‘attacks of hysteria; at its most extreme this could involve a screaming fit and complete prostration, and he would have to be put to bed and nursed.’

When the relationship with his father was moving towards meltdown over Shelley’s unorthodox behaviour and atheistic views, their shared inability to empathise with each other sank their chances of reconciliation (page 59):

Shelley could see no more than theological hypocrisy and paternal treachery; while Timothy could see no more than a spoilt and overconfident son dragging the whole family into social disgrace. So they were content to wound each other in the dark.

Boris Karloff as the Monster (For source of image see link)

His Traits as an Adult

Empathy was never Shelley’s strong suit in his personal life in spite of his compassionate identification with the oppressed in the political sphere.

This lack was dramatically displayed in the tactless treatment of the Elizabeth Hitchener’s father: this lady was risking her good name by developing a close relationship with him as a married man of dubious reputation. In a letter responding to Mr Hitchener’s concerns, Shelley wrote (page 141):

‘What the world thinks of my actions ever has, & I trust ever will be a matter of complete indifference. Your daughter shares this sentiment with me, and we are both resolved to refer our actions to one tribunal only, that which Nature has implanted in us.’

Holmes’s comment says it all: ‘It was a lapse typical of Shelley, typical of his blind self-assertion and sudden explosions of high-mindedness.’ His subsequent behaviour towards her, as the relationship cooled on his side, indicated that he did not have the faintest idea about the damaging impact of all this on the life situation of a vulnerable woman of lower social status who had, up to that point, been establishing the viable foundation for a secure future. His conduct put this completely in jeopardy. I also recognise we are speaking of a nineteen-year-old youth – given the prominence of Isis/Daesh and the prevalence of narcissism, not a male age group renowned at present for its sensitivity and wisdom. However, Shelley’s conduct frequently placed him close to the extreme end of the inconsideration spectrum.

Holmes feels that the character of the monster in Mary’s Frankenstein was drawn in part from Shelley and that expressions such as (page 333) ‘ . . . misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous,’ from the monster, capture something of his psychodynamics. Shelley himself wrote of the monster (page 334):

‘Treat a person ill and he will become wicked.’ . . . . ‘It is thus that too often in society those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed by neglect and solitude of heart into a scourge and a curse.’ Implicitly, Shelley accepted his own identification as Frankenstein’s monster.

Claire Clairmont in 1819, painted by Amelia Curran (for source of image see link)

It is important to balance this with the generosity of his eventual treatment of Claire Clairmont at the time she was pregnant with Byron’s daughter (page 343). He admittedly had, unusually for him, a strong and protective connection with her, whose exact basis is hard to disentangle. Fiona MacCarthy, in her 2002 biography of Byron, is very clear (page 297-98) that ‘despite their close interdependence there was no evidence of a sexual bond between Shelley and Claire.’ There may have been such a connection at a later date, but this has not been confirmed beyond all doubt. Nevertheless, throughout the remainder of his short life he put himself out and sacrificed much to support her in her difficulties.

Shelley’s relationship with Byron was made more complex by his need to act as Claire’s advocate with Byron in terms of the future of their daughter, Allegra. Even without that, as MacCarthy indicates in her  biography of Byron (page 298), their relationship would always have been pulled in at least two directions:

They fascinated, maddened one another. Intellectually compatible they were yet poles apart, Byron upholding the traditional and factual bases of philosophical argument, Shelley pursuing the further reaches of the experimental and visionary.

It is also true that Byron found it helpful that there was someone else around whose behaviour was even more openly unconventional than his own.

As he grew older, though still only in his twenties which he never outgrew, his health was also becoming a problem. Holmes detects three aspects (page 143): ‘hysterical and nervous attacks after periods of great strain,’ symptoms of a chronic disease associated with his kidneys and bladder’ and an interconnected ‘psycho-somatic area.’

He was not completely blind to his socially destructive impulses but was rarely able to curb them. Commenting on a letter Shelley wrote to William Godwin, with whom his relationship was positive at that point, Holmes writes (page 145):

It was a warm and touching letter. In the intellectual presence of one he felt he could trust, Shelley’s sense of personal inadequacy is revealing. He was rarely able to admit his own impatience and his own bitterness of feeling; more usually he was ‘unimpeached and unimpeachable.’

Incidentally, as his closeness to Godwin increased so did his distance from Elizabeth Hitchener, a painful development for her given how costly her association with Shelley was proving: Holmes (page 175) feels his behaviour demonstrated ‘a certain callous indifference to those he has grown disenchanted with.’

Another developing friendship, this time with the satirically inclined Thomas Love Peacock, helped him begin to learn how to ‘mock his own enthusiasms’ (page 174).

There was then an incident in Tremadoc, whose exact details are difficult to disentangle. It involved gunfire at night and what seemed to Shelley and his immediate relations to be a politically motivated attempt upon his life by disaffected locals whom his behaviour had antagonised. This, combined with his reaction to the Ireland experience, meant (page 198) that ‘he never returned’ to ‘political activism again.’ From that point on ‘Shelley regarded himself as a mouthpiece rather than as an instrument for political change.’ In a famous later phrase, he became ‘the trumpet of a prophecy,’ but ‘not the sword.’

Later still there was possibly an even more critical event: the suicide of his first wife, Harriet, to which his own callous disregard for her had made a special contribution. Claire Clairmont, to whom Shelley was closer than to anyone else in the world at that point, wrote in a letter that (page 356) ‘Harriet’s suicide had a beneficial effect on Shelley – he became much less confident in himself and not so wild as he had been before.’ Holmes unpacks this by saying: ‘For Claire, it was Shelley’s recognition of his own degree of responsibility – a slow and painful recognition – which matured him.’

It was because of the pain Shelley was causing those close to him that the painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, described Shelley (page 360) as ‘hypocritical’ for criticising Wordsworth for his indifference to the suffering of trout that had been caught. Haydon, after a bruising interaction as a Christian with Shelley’s militant atheism, found him proud, ‘domineering and insensitive.’ Hazlitt, for his part, felt he was (page 362) a ‘philosophic fanatic,’ and described him as a ‘man in knowledge, [but] a child of feeling.’

His Atheism

The issue of Shelley’s atheism may not be as straightforward as many, including Holmes, have liked to think.

I feel that he was probably not atheist in the sense that Dawkins uses the word. His prose, poetry and scribbled drafts are littered with such expressions (Ann Wroe’s Being Shelley page 157) as ‘One mind, the type of all . . .,’ ‘Great Spirit,’ ‘Immortal Deity/Whose throne is in the Heaven depth of Human thought,’ or, as I have just recently read in Epipsychidion, ‘The spirit of the worm beneath the sod/In love and worship, blends itself with God.’

In an address in 2008 on The Spiritual Foundation of Human Rights, Suheil Bushrui quotes from one of the best stanzas in Shelley’s uneven Adonais to prove he was a believer in the Absolute:

Each of the founders of the world’s religions has spoken of the Absolute, the one fountain of light and moral guidance, so eloquently expressed by Shelley in Adonais, his noble elegy written on the death of his fellow poet, John Keats:

‘The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.’

I think we can be certain, though, that Shelley did not believe in the same God as his Christian contemporaries.

Perhaps the closest we can get is the description of his beliefs in Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu (page 820):

In truth, Percy’s attitude to God was more complex than the word ‘atheist’ suggests. It is not surprising that the concept was inimical to someone so opposed to an established church not merely complicit, but deeply implicated, in the social and political oppression prevalent in England at the time. On the other hand, he was tremendously attracted to the pantheist life force of Tintern Abbey, and could not resist pleading the existence of a similar power in his poetry. However, he stopped well short of believing in a benevolent deity capable of intervening in human affairs. Much of his poetry tacitly accepts the existence of a superhuman ‘Power,’ but its moral character is not always clear. . . . He could also contemplate the possibility of the universe without a creator. If any phrase were used to encapsulate his position, it might be ‘awful doubt[1]’ – a feeling of awe for the power evident in the natural world, mixed with scepticism as to whether it reveals a divine presence.

We will complete this race through Shelley’s life tomorrow.

Footnote:

[1] Mont Blanc line 77.

Read Full Post »