Shelley | Page 5

the American colonies and maintained negro
slavery, was on the throne, until he went mad and was succeeded by his
profligate son.
Shelley said of himself that he was
"A nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"
and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his life and in his
verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex family that was loyally Whig
and moved in the orbit of the Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and the talk
about emancipation which he would hear at home may partly explain
his amazing invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen
years old, with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the
repeal of the Union Act--subjects on which he was quite ignorant. He
addressed meetings, wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets
"consisting of the benevolent and tolerant deductions of philosophy
reduced into the simplest language." Later on, when he had left
England for ever, he still followed eagerly the details of the struggle for
freedom at home, and in 1819 composed a group of poems designed to
stir the masses from their lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was
in office, with Sidmouth as Home Secretary and Castlereagh as Foreign
Secretary, a pair whom he thus pillories:
"As a shark and dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic Isle, For the negro ship,
whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills the
while--
Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on
the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one."
The most effective of these bitter poems is 'The Masque of Anarchy',
called forth by the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester on August 16,
1819, when hussars had charged a peaceable meeting held in support of
Parliamentary reform, killing six people and wounding some seventy
others. Shelley's frenzy of indignation poured itself out in the terrific
stanzas, written in simplest language so as to be understood by the
people, which tell how "I met a murder on the way-- He had a mask

like Castlereagh-- Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven
blood-hounds followed him."
The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in 1819'--
"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, Princes, the dregs of
their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy
spring."
and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay in sinister
humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by the grunting of
pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the quarrel between the Prince
Regent and his wife. When the Princess of Wales (Caroline of
Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel), after having left her husband and
perambulated Europe with a paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's
accession as George IV, to claim her position as Queen, the royal
differences became an affair of high national importance. The divorce
case which followed was like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of
the distempers of the age. Shelley felt that sort of disgust which makes
a man rave and curse under the attacks of some loathsome disease; if he
laughs, it is the laugh of frenzy. In the slight Aristophanic drama of
'Swellfoot', which was sent home, published, and at once suppressed,
he represents the men of England as starving pigs content to lap up
such diluted hog's-wash as their tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will
allow them. At the end, when the pigs, rollicking after the triumphant
Princess, hunt down their oppressors, we cannot help feeling a little
sorry that he does not glide from the insistent note of piggishness into
some gentler mood: their is a rasping quality in his humour, even
though it is always on the side of right. He wrote one good satire
though. This is 'Peter Bell the Third' (1819), an attack on Wordsworth,
partly literary for the dulness of his writing since he had been sunk in
clerical respectability, partly political for his renegade flunkyism.
In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern Europe began to lift in
the south. After Napoleon's downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-16)
had parcelled Europe out on the principle of disregarding national
aspirations and restoring the legitimate rulers. This system, which
could not last, was first shaken by revolutions that set up constitutional
governments in Spain and Naples. Shelley hailed these streaks of dawn
with joy, and uttered his enthusiasm in two odes--the 'Ode to Liberty'
and the 'Ode to Naples'--the most splendid of those cries of hope and

prophecy with which a long line of English poets has encouraged the
insurrection of the nations. Such cries, however, have no visible effect
on the course of events. Byron's jingles could change the face of the
world, while all Shelley's pure and