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THE REVOLT OF ISLAM
NOTE ON THE "REVOLT OF ISLAM", BY MRS. SHELLEY.
Shelley possessed two remarkable qualities of intellect--a
brilliant imagination, and a logical exactness of reason.
His inclinations led him (he fancied) almost alike to poetry
and metaphysical discussions. I say 'he fancied,' because
I believe the former to have been paramount, and that it would
have gained the mastery even had he struggled against it.
However, he said that he deliberated at one time whether he
should dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics; and, resolving
on the former, he educated himself for it, discarding in a
great measure his philosophical pursuits, and engaging himself
in the study of the poets of Greece, Italy, and England. To
these may be added a constant perusal of portions of the old
Testament--the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Prophet Isaiah,
and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with delight.
As a poet, his intellect and compositions were powerfully
influenced by exterior circumstances, and especially by his
place of abode. He was very fond of travelling, and ill-health
increased this restlessness. The sufferings occasioned by
a cold English winter made him pine, especially when our colder
spring arrived, for a more genial climate. In 1816 he again
visited Switzerland, and rented a house on the banks of the
Lake of Geneva; and many a day, in cloud or sunshine, was
passed alone in his boat--sailing as the wind listed, or weltering
on the calm waters. The majestic aspect of Nature ministered
such thoughts as he afterwards enwove in verse. His lines
on the Bridge of the Arve, and his "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty", were written at this time. Perhaps during this
summer his genius was checked by association with another
poet whose nature was utterly dissimilar to his own, yet who,
in the poem he wrote at that time, gave tokens that he shared
for a period the more abstract and etherealised inspiration
of Shelley. The saddest events awaited his return to England;
but such was his fear to wound the feelings of others that
he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent
to the indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent;
while the course of deep unexpressed passion, and the sense
of injury, engendered the desire to embody themselves in forms
defecated of all the weakness and evil which cling to real
life.
He chose therefore for his hero a youth nourished in dreams
of liberty, some of whose actions are in direct opposition
to the opinions of the world; but who is animated throughout
by an ardent love of virtue, and a resolution to confer the
boons of political and intellectual freedom on his fellow-creatures.
He created for this youth a woman such as he delighted to
imagine--full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they
both, with will unvanquished, and the deepest sense of the
justice of their cause, met adversity and death. There exists
in this poem a memorial of a friend of his youth. The character
of the old man who liberates Laon from his tower prison, and
tends on him in sickness, is founded on that of Doctor Lind,
who, when Shelley was at Eton, had often stood by to befriend
and support him, and whose name he never mentioned without
love and veneration.
During the year 1817 we were established at Marlow in Buckinghamshire.
Shelley's choice of abode was fixed chiefly by this town being
at no great distance from London, and its neighbourhood to
the Thames. The poem was written in his boat, as it floated
under the beech groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in
the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for peculiar
beauty. The chalk hills break into cliffs that overhang the
Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech; the wilder portion
of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation;
and the cultivated part is peculiarly fertile. With all this
wealth of Nature which, either in the form of gentlemen's
parks or soil dedicated to agriculture, flourishes around,
Marlow was inhabited (I hope it is altered now) by a very
poor population. The women are lacemakers, and lose their
health by sedentary labour, for which they were very ill paid.
The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but
those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged
to pay poor-rates. The changes produced by peace following
a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most
heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation
he could. In the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had
a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor
cottages. I mention these things,--for this minute and active
sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousandfold interest
to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings
for the human race.
The poem, bold in its opinions and uncompromising in their
expression, met with many censurers, not only among those
who allow of no virtue but such as supports the cause they
espouse, but even among those whose opinions were similar
to his own. I extract a portion of a letter written in answer
to one of these friends. It best details the impulses of Shelley's
mind, and his motives: it was written with entire unreserve;
and is therefore a precious monument of his own opinion of
his powers, of the purity of his designs, and the ardour with
which he clung, in adversity and through the valley of the
shadow of death, to views from which he believed the permanent
happiness of mankind must eventually spring.
'Marlowe, December 11, 1817.
'I have read and considered all that you say about my general
powers, and the particular instance of the poem in which I
have attempted to develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory
to me than the interest which your admonitions express. But
I think you are mistaken in some points with regard to the
peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be their amount. I
listened with deference and self-suspicion to your censures
of "The Revolt of Islam"; but the productions of
mine which you commend hold a very low place in my own esteem;
and this reassures me, in some degree at least. The poem was
produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with
unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness
of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave
some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was
written with the same feeling--as real, though not so prophetic--as
the communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed
to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when
I consider contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions,
I own I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in
many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that
the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this have I
long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that
part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation.
I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of
mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling,
whether relative to external nature or the living beings which
surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result
from considering either the moral or the material universe
as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps
comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly
in my own mind. But, when you advert to my Chancery-paper,
a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of cramped
and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about "Mandeville",
which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two
minutes' thought to express, as specimens of my powers more
favourable than that which grew as it were from "the
agony and bloody sweat" of intellectual travail; surely
I must feel that, in some manner, either I am mistaken in
believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the selection
of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious,
in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity
which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling
alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the
subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to
me. And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years,
doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it may be,
which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest
to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to
their utmost limits.
[Shelley to Godwin.]
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