12, Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 317-340

Part IV: Fire, 2. Burning

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Having his own ideas about God, Shelley naturally had corresponding ones about God's adversary. Even as a boy he liked to play Satan and to conduct experiments with chemicals and incantations to raise the devil, and he terrified Harriet with talk of "his supreme Majesty the Devil." She overcame her fears only to have them resurrected by an experience in February 1813. They were in Wales, where Shelley had gotten involved with an effort to reclaim land from the sea, a project that had stout opposition. One night, Shelley heard a noise downstairs and took his pistols with him when he went to investigate. A man, who was leaving through a window, fired a shot at him and missed. Shelley returned fire but the man escaped, vowing revenge. A few hours later, he heard another noise at the window and someone fired another shot at him, which narrowly missed. "Shelley fired his own pistol and grabbed an old sword to beat the stranger off but then, losing him, set fire to the nearby woods to burn him alive.... Most probably, local enemies had come to scare the nuisance-radical away. But to Shelley, at the instant he saw him, he was the Devil."

For Shelley, "Satan and God alike were projections of man's mind, nothing else. They were sappers of his will, crushers of his potential, but self-made.... If God was the callous monarch, the Devil was 'the Informer, the Attorney General, and the jailor of the Celestial tribunal.'" But Satan was also himself, "the bad daemon twinned with the good." He found his archetype in Paradise Lost: "Milton, Shelley wrote, 'alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.' In fact, the Devil was 'far superior.'.... Shelley's closing cry to enslaved manking in his Declaration of Rights was Satan's, to his angels, from Paradise Lost: 'Awake! -- arise! -- or be forever fallen.'" If Milton's Satan could only overcome "hate, pride and his own belief, amounting sometimes to despair, in the tyrant-God who tormented him ... [he] could be divine, as Shelley could. Only an act of will was needed."

Shelley believed "that God in his infinite cruelty had devised unending tortures for his creatures while tempting them, in their frailty and ignorance, towards the sin that would condemn them. The gift of 'most merciful God' to man was an eternity of pain. By contrast Satan's gift, through the fatal apple, had been self-knowledge."

Shelley kept the churchmen's Hell to bait God with, not believing it, fearing it or caring. And he could find smaller hells aplenty strewn across the universe. In his essay On the Devil and Devils he had cynical fun with the argument that the sun might be a Hell, swarming with devils as unconcerned about boiling as the animalculae he had seen in mutton broth, and that the countless comets might be needed as little hells too for the overflow of "sinners" and the "damned." With the mind of a bigot, he could make eternal torture chambers even of the stars. 

With his polemic pamphlets, Shelley practiced a kind of pyromania: "His writings were meant to start destroying and purifying fires, the words searing individually into minds and hears and igniting, he hoped, a roaring chain reaction." Peacock caricatured him in Nightmare Abbey as Scythrop Glowry, "a burnt child" who was the author of Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. Shelley liked the caricature "but both the enlightenment and the pyrotechnics were seriously meant." He once asked a man in Hampstead to help him find shelter for a sick woman and when the man refused, proclaimed "that if ever a 'convulsion' came to England, which was 'very probable,' 'you will have your house ... burnt over your head!'"

He was, in fact, a good shot, having handled firearms since childhood: "he was often the best at Byron's shooting afternoons in the vineyards outside Pisa, squarely hitting the pumpkin or the five-paul piece stuck in a cane, even though, Byron said, 'he is thinking of metaphysics rather than of firing.'" But his real weapon was the pen, which "carried his imaginings, glowing and dangerous: again, the reed tipped with flame, or the hollow stem in which Prometheus, his hero, had stolen fire from the gods."

After that sly theft, Prometheus had founded all the human arts that were most precious to Shelley. Language and words; music and prophetic song; the art of building in columns to admit the air, and the science of navigation by the stars. Each talent forged by Prometheus was  touched by the leaping life of imagination, the fire he had stolen, approaching the divine.... In Aeschylus's fragment Prometheus Bound, from which Shelley developed his own "lyrical drama," Prometheus had been intended eventually to reach a pact with Jupiter. Shelley rejected "a catastrophe so feeble." His Prometheus would make no deals with tyrants. 

Shelley's attitude toward Jesus Christ was ambivalent. He "hated the 'Galilean serpent'; but he could stomach his name, even revere it, once the trappings of established Christianity had been stripped away. Christ as the Son of God, he had written in 1812, was 'a hypocritical Daemon,' Christ as a man, on the other hand, 'stands in the foremost list of those true heroes who have died in the glorious martyrdom of liberty.'" Shelley paired this Jesus "with Socrates, an outcast from the state."

His chief weapon was Love, which "was the law of life. Creation, motion, gravitation, magnetism, heat and electricity were all that force.... Love was infinite, unsatiated, ever divisible and inexhaustible; to share and divide it (as with Harriet, Mary, Claire, Emilia, Jane) was merely to increase it. In his new Promethean world, growing towards perfection, Love would be 'common as light,' and light itself." But he was also "not such an optimist, or a fool, to believe that this would last. Nothing on Earth lasted. History moved in inexorable cycles. ... Prometheus would become Jupiter again." 
 

10. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 257-289

Part III: Air, 3. The wind

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At some point early in his career he adopted a motto: Sincerity and zeal -- "a stout Godwinian tag for a young man who knew he had truth to tell, and meant to tell it." But he had reason to doubt that the truth he told was reading an audience: "'I wonder why I write verses for nobody reads them,' he sighed to Peacock.... 'It is a kind of disorder.'" In the preface to The Revolt of Islam he proclaimed that his poems served "the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality" and that he wanted to promote "a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence not misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind."

He was often disturbed by the pain he felt in the world:

Hunt noticed how miserable Shelley became at the sight of worn grey faces in the Strand. The same hopeless sympathy seemed to cry out from a single line in The Mask of Anarchy, as he felt the poor of England shivering and starving or emerging, pale as ghosts, from the workhouse, the factory and the prison:

They are dying whilst I speak.

He saw himself and his fellow poets -- Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton -- as revolutionaries whose time was approaching but had not yet arrived. While he claimed he didn't care what the critics said, he was hurt by the reception of Adonais, which he considered "better than any thing that I have yet written." The Literary Gazette called it "contemptible, a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other" like "the refuse of a schoolboy's commonplace book." But he rose from the funk it cast him into, proclaiming another motto that he wrote inside the cover of his notebook in 1821 or 1822:

the spring rebels not against
the winter but it succeeds it --
the dawn rebels not
against night but it
disperses it --

The revolutionary change he prophesied would come, and would "perhaps be as natural and irreversible as the change from winter to spring."

In 1812, when he was nineteen, he went to Ireland, choosing it "deliberately as the most oppressed and exploited corner of the kingdom," advocating "the repeal of the Act of Union with Britain and the emancipation of Catholics," but also the emancipation of something "infinitely wider, of Irish minds; and wider again, like a list in a schoolboy's textbook, 'the peace, the harmony, and the happiness of Ireland, England, Europe, the World.'" His methods were juvenile and quixotic, printing pamphlets and handing them out or tossing them from his balcony. He thought of it as "seeding minds."

In late October 1819 he was in the Cascine wood near Florence, when he was caught in a storm. "He knew this wind for a winter-bringer and also as the herald of spring: his own revolutionary rabble-rouser, blowing from the west.

There were always two West Winds in his life, even in his schoolbooks. One was Ovid's storm-bringer, or Homer's bullying blast that shoved the beaked ships of Odysseus over the darkening sea. The other was Virgil's Zephyrus, the gentle awakener and guardian of the olive groves.... One stripped the autumn trees and laid the Earth bare; the other ushered in the spring. The same principle indifferently brought death, or life. Shelley knew the wind in both guises and, through both, he sang of the harrowing and revival of the world.... While his body was in the Cascine, watching the leaves and the river, his mind was in England with the scenes he hoped might follow Petrloo: troops mobilising, the people rising, crown lands and chattels seized by the mob, "bloody struggle" and "great actions," while the West Wind roared. 

In "Ode to the West Wind," which he began writing that day, he addressed the wind as "Destroyer and Preserver." "At times this dualism might almost be his own: philanthropist and monster, bright and evil daemon, good and bad serpent writing through the world. Shelley too could tear down and build up again, Destroyer and Preserver, with the words he wrote." But he also saw the wind "as a force beyond him: a revolutionary agent, a force of history, Necessity itself." The poem "saluted the West Wind as a comrade and invoked him as a god."

Shelley's God was "the powers of Nature." In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, he had read that "it is clearly apparent that the powers of Nature are what we call God." And in his Essay on Christianity he quoted Lucan: "Has God any dwelling-place save earth and sea, the air, Heaven, and virtuous hearts? Why seek we further for deities?" In Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-politicus he read that "Spinoza, in the Hebrew, had found ... God was ruagh, dry violent wind, free of the heavy moisture of the incarnate state; God was courage, temper, soul, the four quarters of the world from which the winds came. God was prophecy. He blew through Daniel, Zachariah and the rest and they, though 'possessed of the mind of God,' had no idea what he made them say." But Shelley, who considered himself a prophet, thought of himself as freely choosing to become one, not in an act of "obedience, for he would never obey. It was complicity, freely embraced. His sails were 'given' to the tempest: Do what you will with me."

The exulting sweep and speed of his poetry, image chasing image, was the special sign of that spirit, and its sinking or slowing was proof of that power subsiding. When it withdrew, as he had told the West Wind, he fell again upon 'the thorns of life' and bled, like a man.

As for immortality, he was ambivalent.

As a rational man, he could not believe in a notion he could not prove. As a Poet, he was well aware that he could hardly put it into words. As far as evidence went, much of it still seemed to lie in the leaves that beat on the windows of his carriage or piled up in the woods. These were the Spirit's instruments and mediators; they had been in the cycle of life, and were now discarded. Death was unbinding and releasing their atoms, and those leaves would be gone for ever. That much he could be sure of.

6. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 147-181

Part II: Water, 2. Reflection from "What he also sought in water or in mirrors ..." through end. 3. Escape through "... leaned down towards an embrace."

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Reflections were also, in Shelley's Platonic idealism, a medium through which ultimate reality could be perceived. "The mind, Plato said, should be treated like an eye, guided gently from obscurity to light." For Shelley, the eye was also the window to the soul. He gazed deeply into Mary's eyes, and sketched images of eyes in his noteooks.

Eyes, he believed, became intricate from "the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment." Dreams, too, could be read there. In their "mazy depth of colour behind colour" he could lose himself with looking, as Narcissus did, at his own idealised image reflected in the mind of another.... In deepest thought, using the inner eye of his mind, he could sometimes begin to observe within himself the bright form of which Shelley, with his lined cheeks and greying hair, was only the mortal shadow.... Hence the hours spent musing by ponds and pools and, in female company, the uncomfortable intensity of his longing, blue-eyed stare. 

It was Southey, whom Shelley visited in 1811, who suggested he read Berkeley, who conceived of reality as "a construct of mind." He didn't go to the solipsistic extreme, but argued, "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive." He also posited a universal Mind, not a divinity to be worshiped but "a source from which his thoughts drew energy." This concept was reinforced by an Alpine epiphany in the summer of 1816 in which he "sensed a presence in the mountains" when he visited the glacier at Chamounix.

As he picnicked with Mary and Claire at the glacier's edge they could hear it creak and crack; they once saw, not far off, the thunderclap smoke and rubble of an avalanche it caused, bearing down into the valley "all the ruins of the mountains."... Three years later, in Prometheus Unbound, he made this the echo of all men's thoughts suddenly released from the ice.... The great mountain represented the secret law that governed though: solemn, inaccessible, transcendent. Mutability and chance could not come near it. Only mind could ponder it. In its remoteness it marked the last of the visible and natural causes men could see before ... they lost the thread of their understanding and reached, clumsily and blindly for the notion "God." 

Shelley crossed a bridge over the river Arve and saw the torrent below as an image of "his own thoughts, 'now dark -- now glittering,' and ceaselessly bursting and raving among the rocks." He wrote to Peacock of his "realisation that his existence and the mountain's were one in his mind. He had made the whole landscape his idea, his thought, and part of him. Mind became what it contemplated, and what he saw became himself." As Poet, "he could shape, colour, fill with meaning, invest with light and life." The human mind was a mirror of the vast sea of mind. "The notion of 'distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature,' was a delusion. He was simply an infinitesimal ripple in a Mind infinitely extensive."

In Dante's Convito, God dreamed man and the divine Intelligences made him, according to God's idea. But in Shelley's Queen Mab, man dreamed God. Y los sueños, sueños son. ... Others, standing in awe under the same Swiss sky, had bowed before the God who made the mountain. Shelley had been made aware of, and had tested, his own power. 

This concept of the power of mind informed his politics. "Perceptions, opinions and dispositions could be changed, not least by his own writing and incessant, urgent arguing.... Mind would triumph over matter, and the world could be transformed."

"You talk Utopia," said Byron shortly. Perhaps Shelley did; he knew that men did not dare this, that they did not even know their lack of daring, that "the good want power, but to weep barren tears," and that the revolution in France had failed precisely because its promoters had persisted in seeing the world in terms of oppression and revenge. But he talked Utopia because "some few, like we know who" saw it believed it, and knew it had to be shown forth to other minds. It could be built that way.

Shelley thought of his political writings as stones cast into the lake, the ripple made by the disturbance spreading outward. It was an image suggested by Godwin, who called truth "the pebble in the lake." "The Necessity of Atheism had been one such pebble, in Shelley's view." In November 1817, he wrote his Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, in which he contrasted the widespread grief over the death of the young princess with the "indifference to the death of Liberty in England." Two years later, in Italy, he began work on A Philosophical View of Reform, but it was left unfinished and unpublished for a century. "Shelley crouched by the water with his mind full of spreading circles of light. But the pond, and England, slept again."

One problem is that Shelley had a short attention span: "His life seemed compounded of eddying ideas that begged to be heeded and followed. Sudden notions drove him to grab friends by the arm and tug them eastwards, westwards, sideways, into bread-shops and pawn-shops in the London streets." Trelawny said, "He overbore all opposition in those less self-willed than he was." In Hogg's view, "Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from whatever it was that moved him."

Increasingly, Shelley resorted to images of "free fall through nothingness, or water, or the illusory solidity of the body and the self." In 1820, he jumped into the Arno from the Ponte della Trinità in Florence, from which Trelawny, who had failed to teach him to swim, rescued him. Despite the horror of Harriet's drowning, he had convinced himself that he would drown calmly. In 1816, he had been sailing with Byron on Lake Geneva when they were caught in a sudden windstorm. Byron, a strong swimmer, "assured him he could save him, as long as he did not struggle. Shelley replied that he had no notion of being saved." And when Trelawny rescued him from the Arno, "Shelley was sorely disappointed that he had not left him there."

He took Jane Williams and her two small children out in a small boat in the Bay of Lerici in the spring of 1822 and fell oddly silent as the little coracle drifted far from shore. "Jane watched him as he sat, head bowed, motionless and wordless. His melancholy was terrifying." Finally he announced his interest in finding out what mysteries lay in the afterlife. Jane told him that she and the children would rather have dinner first, and when they got back to shore she "swore she would never go out in a boat with Shelley again."

He had persuaded himself that drowning "was a state much like sleeping."

He was confident ... that thought did not die. It might even become more influential once the thinker had gone. Books, paintings, sculptures, products of mind, survived, with immortality in them as long as men lived to admire them. ... Yet the question for Shelley was whether minds themselves persisted, and whether his own mind, with all its pulsings of thought, would dissolve as a billow in the ocean or go on. His reasoning self insisted that things beyond the grave could not be known. Men could believe, if they cared to, in eternal life; but in belief of that sort, the sort that priests demanded, the will was passive and the intellect suspended.... Nothing beyond visible phenomena could be subjected to rational analysis. It was a realm of phantoms and faith. The first he had outgrown, the second he rejected as poison. But looking into water -- water running deep and quiet, his own face looking back at him -- he sometimes felt he was on the edge of understanding, and leaned down towards an embrace.