The Revolutionary Percy Shelley in His Time and Ours

Today I am pleased to release the recording of my presentation "The Revolutionary Shelley in His Time and Ours".  This was delivered on November 15th 2016 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Shelley Seminar; run under the auspices of The Unbinding Prometheus Project and Penn Libraries. I hope you enjoy it.  You will find some introductory notes below.

---

"I am a lover of mankind, a democrat and an atheist."

When Shelley wrote these words in the hotel register at Chamonix, he was, as PMS Dawson has suggested deliberately, intentionally and provocatively “nailing his colours to the mast”. The thumbnail above is a portion of the actual hotel register page. Shelley's handwriting can be seen in the top line. Here it is in full:

He knew full well people would see these words and that they would inflame passions. The words, however may require some context and explanation.  Many people have sought to diminish the importance of these words and the circumstances under which they were written.  Some modern scholars have even ridiculed him.  I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.

Shelley’s atheism and his political philosophy were at the heart of his poetry and his revolutionary agenda (yes, he had one).  Our understanding of Shelley is impoverished to the extent we ignore or diminish its importance.

Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc in July of 1816. Mont Blanc was a routine stop on the so-called “Grand Tour.”  In fact, so many people visited it, that you will find Shelley in his letters bemoaning the fact that the area was "overrun by tourists." With the Napoleonic wars only just at an end, English tourists were again flooding the continent.  While in Chamonix, many would have stayed at the famous Hotel de Villes de Londres, as did Shelley.  As today, the lodges and guest houses of those days maintained a “visitor’s register”; unlike today those registers would have contained the names of a virtual who’s who of upper class society.  Ryan Air was not flying English punters in for day visits. What you wrote in such a register was guaranteed to be read by literate, well connected aristocrats - even if you penned your entry in Greek – as Shelley did. 

The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading "Observations") were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”.  The words were, as I say, written in Greek.  The Greek word he used for philanthropist was "philanthropos tropos." The origin of the word and its connection to Shelley is very interesting.  Its first use appears in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” the Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound.  Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered philanthropy to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”.

What do the words Shelley chose mean and why is it important? Because here is exactly what I think he was saying: I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus, and I will steal fire from the gods and I will bring down kingdoms and I will give power to the people. This is an incredibly revolutionary statement for the time.  No wonder he scared people. But not only did he say these things, he was developing, as we will see, a system to deliver on this promise. Part of his system was based on his innate skepticism, of which he was a surprising sophisticated practitioner.  And like all skeptics since the dawn of history, he used it to undermine authority and attack truth claims. "Implicit faith," he wrote, "and fearless inquiry have in all ages been irreconcilable enemies. Unrestrained philosophy in every age opposed itself to the reveries of credulity and fanaticism."

My presentation will discuss his revolutionary programme and its application to our modern era.  Enjoy.

Of Myth and Reality. My Visit to the Beach at Viareggio.

On 8 July 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley died at sea off the Italian coast in the Ligurian Sea. Days later his badly decomposed corpse washed ashore on the beach a mile or so north of Viareggio. The body was discovered and buried by the local militia. Much later Shelley was exhumed and cremated by an Italian work party under Edward Trelawney's supervision.

Shelley lived in San Terenzo near La Spezia.  He sailed from Livorno on the 8th and his body was discovered on the beach north of Viareggio.  Livorno to San Terenzo by sea is approximately 60 kilometers by sea. 

The circumstances of his death and the actions of his friends and loved ones contributed to a veritable circus of hagiography and myth-making that continues to this day - replete with the development of a trove of "relics" and icons many of which are of dubious provenance - including his heart, allegedly pulled from the flames of the white hot furnace by Edward Trelawney.  It is important to remember that no one saw Trelawney do this.  Trelawney was an inveterate liar, who continually embellished and reworked his version of what happened.  We have only his word to rely upon.  Expert medical opinion tells us that it would have been impossible for the heart to have withstood the flames.  But the myth lives on and has assumed quasi-religious. if not outright religious, overtones. 

The scene depicted in this famous 1889 painting NEVER HAPPENED.  Byron was not there.  Mary was not there. Hunt was not there. Shelley was cremated in a jury-rigged furnace. His body was badly decomposed.  This painting is a lie.

Shelley, who was a sophisticated skeptic and one of history’s great atheists, would be appalled. Because Shelley worked with mythological material so much, he is often through of as a "myth-maker".  Harold Bloom must assume much of the blame for creating this idea, and Earl Wasserman for canonizing it.  However, the great Gerald Hogle in his book, Shelley's Process points out that Shelley was almost the opposite of a myth-maker - he was a demythologizer. No less a person that the great Stuart Curran complimented Hogle for reaching "the highest ground ever reached by Shelley criticism." So what Hogle says carries enormous weight.  You can buy it here - but I warn you - it is an incredibly difficult read.

But it also makes common sense. Shelley viewed religion as the "handmaiden of tyranny". Hogle suggests that Shelley saw myth as a "means of social control" in which the values espoused by the myths are "concepts fabricated and disseminated by a hegemonic group...striving to preserve its supremacy and using them to conceal from the public eye an underlying war between classes." [Hogle, 169)  Hogle views Shelley's tactics in his greatest poem Prometheus Unbound as disruptive: as a "dispersion of older mythic patterns" into new iconoclastic versions. So of course Shelley would have the same issues with myth (all myths) as he does with religion - for all religion are founded on myth.

It is for this reason unfortunate that his family and friends together with generations of admirers and biographers created myths about his life and death.  And these myths were used in almost exactly the same way that all myths are used - to create a canonical story that disguises or masks the truth.  In Shelley's case the truth that was masked was his revolutionary political philosophy.  This is exactly what Paul Foot was talking about in his 1981 speech to the London Marxism Conference.  I have written about it and reproduced it here. 

On the anniversary of his death, however, let's put aside the controversies and the mythologies.  In May of this year, I visited the places in and around Viareggio on the Ligurian Sea.  This is where Shelley lived out the last few days of his short life. The video which is at the heart of this post was recorded on the beach at Viareggio.  Somehow standing on that beach made it possible to strip away the accretion of the mythology and to confront the numbing reality of his death.  I found the moment almost overwhelming.

I invite you all to join me on this virtual pilgrimage; and to pause for reflection. Why not read one of his poems in his honour? Tell me which one you picked in the comments. Thank you.

I chose Arethusa. You can learn more about the myth here.

Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,---
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;---
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.

II

Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks---with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III

'Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!'
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth's white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:---
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,---
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV

Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest's night:---
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean's foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.

V

And now from their fountains
In Enna's mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;---
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.

The Casa Magni where Shelley and Mary lived in the Village of San Terenzo - as it might then have looked.

Shelley and Pope Francis

In the Mask of Anarchy, Shelley presents the tyrannical government of England as very clearly shown as being propped up by bishops and priests.  Indeed, Shelley once characterized religion as the "hand maiden of tyranny".  He said this because religion is faith-based and encourages people to discard their skepticism and accept things as they are.  This is why the recent mania for "stoicism" is so popular in the alt-right movement. It is probably the LAST ancient philosophy we need to revive today; a point that has been eloquently made by Oxford philosopher Sandy Grant. As tyrants threaten to take the stage around the world, we need to keep a close eye on how religion is being used as a tool to control the people. We are faced by a new administration in Washington well stocked with evangelical Christians, many of whom are hard-line "dominionists"; Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Betsy de Vos are examples.  Christian dominionism is a radical ideology whose adherents believe that it is their duty to seize control of the civic institutions and rule the United States as a theocratic Christian state.  Dominionists oppose and seek the repeal of the 1st Amendment which enshrined the separation of church and state.

Which brings us to Jorge Gergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis. 

Gergoglio is probably a very good man, but as pope, he is very fond of highly symbolic gestures that change very little: for example, on the question of gays priests in the church, he has done absolutely nothing except express the sort of benign sympathy that garners headlines. Here is how a sympathetic, beguiled reporter for the New Yorker reacted:

Who am I to judge?” With those five words, spoken in late July [2013] in reply to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church, Pope Francis stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of Popes and bishops. This gesture of openness, which startled the Catholic world, would prove not to be an isolated event.

And indeed, the writer was correct. He did step away from disapproving tones, it eas not isolated; but he has done little more. Another example is his non-action on the issue of women priests. Gergoglio has repeatedly stated that women can not and will not be ordained. More recently, we have his attack on the materialism of christmas. Popular to be sure, but what about the materialism of the catholic church itself? Well, he has said nothing.

Gergoglio the news last summer for more non-action on the paedophile priests and their enablers in the Catholic church.  The Guardian reported that

"Catholic bishops who fail to sack paedophile priests can [now] be removed from office under new church laws announced by Pope Francis.".

There are more than a few problems with this.  The first question has to be, "You are kidding me, they didn't have a rule about this already?" Are we supposed to congratulate the Vatican on introducing a rule that should have been introduced decades ago - or the fact that there even needed to BE a rule?  But then critics of the pope pointed out that yes, there already IS a rule. According to the Guardian,

"While acknowledging that church laws already allowed for a bishop to be removed for negligence, Francis said he wanted the “grave reasons” more precisely defined. However, doubts remain about the Vatican’s commitment to tackling the issue."

So what exactly has Gergoglio done? Well, almost nothing it would seem.  This attention-grabbing move seems to be window dressing designed to distract attention from actions he has taken recently to actually protect priests accused of covering up abuse. The Guardian:

The move comes shortly after the pontiff moved to defend a French cardinal accused of covering up abuse. Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, is facing criticism for his handling of allegations made against Bernard Preynat, a priest in the diocese who has been charged with sexually abusing boys.

Gergoglio also seems to be moving to maintain in office his financial chief, Cardinal George Pell - a man accused of covering up systemic child abuse in Australia. As the Guardian reports, Pell has improbably denied all knowledge of priests abusing children as he rose through the ranks of the Catholic church. As recently as November last year Pell was still refusing the answer questions about the issue and he is still a cardinal.

Which brings us to Shelley.

Over a year ago, a fellow student in Professor Eric Alan Weinstein’s Open Learning course, “The Great Poems: Unbinding Prometheus” posed the following question to the community. 

“I'm wondering what Shelley would've made of the Pope's visit to America (something that was up close and personal for those of you in Philly).   I was jazzed by his remarks about climate change, the war economy, social justice and the widening economic divide in this country. Then, boom, I read that he met in secret with Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis (the elected official who refused to give marriage licenses to gay couples). So I guess the Pope's great compassion for prisoners, refugees, the poor and minorities of all stripes does not extend to gay couples. So much of what he said in public was worthwhile, but what he did in private was revealing and makes me think this holy man has a keen and secular focus on his public image. Interesting to see what was selected for presentation on the outside (I'm not challenging the sincerity of that) and what was kept behind the "veil" that Shelley tells us must be rent.”

I thought this was an excellent question and one that remains worth considering at length. 

Shelley was profoundly anti-clerical and an avowed atheist fond of referring to religion in terms such as: “the hand-maiden of tyranny”. He certainly had no truck with the priests of his day, so what might he had thought about the pope’s visit to America -- particularly in light of the pope's latest propagandistic actions? Given the fawning reaction accorded to Gergoglio by American political leaders and even an otherwise skeptical media, my opinion is that Shelley would have been appalled.

Readers approaching Shelley for the first time are often genuinely confused by what they find. In my article "Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?  I have offered a partial explanation - one which I will elucidate in much greater detail in the future.  Most modern readers are genuinely surprised to learn he was a skeptic and an atheist.  The reasons for this are complex, but for the purposes of this article, suffice to say that thanks to centuries of sometimes deliberate mis-readings, modern readers expect a somewhat florid, vapid lyrical poet who wore puffy shirts.  But what they find is radically different: they find an intensely political writer for whom, according to Timothy Webb, “politics were probably the dominating concern in [his] intellectual life."

The signs can be confusing in other ways because Shelley often used overtly religious language for decidedly atheistical, secular purposes. Missing the irony in his use of religious terminology, many otherwise astute readers have concluded that he was a closet Christian.

But he was not. Shelley was an atheist; he was a skeptic; and he was a philosophical anarchist.  He viewed religion as perhaps the most pernicious force in society.  As an anarchist and a skeptic he saw religion and its adherence to dogma and tradition as the number one enemy of political reform.  As an anarchist and a skeptic he was an opponent of most forms of state government and all forms of religious tradition and dogma.  He would have viewed the Catholic church as one of the most corrupt institutions on earth - and one of the most dangerous. He would have been appalled to see the coverage of the pope's visit to America, for reasons I will try to elucidate. 

I had exactly the same reaction to the secret meeting pope Francis had with the county clerk as my fellow student did.  There is no disguising hypocrisy that is this bold and this brazen.  It is fitting that what Gergoglio conceived of as, and desired to be, a secret meeting was nothing of the sort as he was almost immediately betrayed by the clerk's lust for publicity and acknowledgement.  It was her own lawyer that leaked the fact the meeting took place - he revealed they planned all along to make the photographs public.  I am sure pope Francis would have been very happy to have that secret meeting remain a secret - which also begs the question of exactly how many other secret meeting there were or have been over time.

But back to Shelley.  Why would he have been so concerned?  Perhaps because Gergoglio's messages were so smoothly, so seductively and so beautifully adapted to the troika of modern woes my fellow student so aptly identified: the environment, the seemingly endless wars we are fighting and the growing divide between rich and poor.  The Vatican has achieved enormous mileage from utterly empty gestures such as Gergoglio’s decision not to wear the expensive red shoes favoured by his predecessors.

Pope Benedict wearing red Prada shoes.

The announcement that he now has "rules" to deal with bishops who hide paedophile priests falls into the same category.

I believe that the Gergoglio's messages regarding climate change, war, and poverty are important, but they are also dangerous because they operate to distract us from his failure to address the systemic problems associated with the catholic church.  Chief among these is the fact that it is founded on allegedly "sacred texts" that are, as Tim Whitmarsh noted, imagined to be “nonnegotiable contracts with the divine, inspired or authored as they are by god himself.” (Whitmarsh, 28).  The Greeks, to whom Shelley looked as a primary source for his philosophical foundation, had no such concept of books that possessed magical properties and which contained the source of ultimate truth.  Such beliefs are unique to the world’s monotheistic religions. The pope has been accorded a similarly magical status by the church: edicts promulgated by a pope are believed to be infallible – they can not be questioned or altered – ever.

Late in life my father, a converted roman catholic, lost his faith.  The reason for this was the failure of the church to address the systemic sexual abuse of children by priests - and the centuries long cover up. By addressing issues such as climate change and the evils of capitalism, the pope is distracting us from the real problems that are rotting the church.  The Vatican is a walled nation state.  A critic of the evils of capitalism, Gergoglio sits astride an entity that is awash in obscene amounts of money -- all of it gained through the very capitalist system the pope so disingenuously attacks.  The Catholic church owns some of the most valuable property on the planet.

This pope needs to put his own house in order before he comes to the rest of us with homilies on what ails the world.  Gergoglio should act to ordain women, cast out his own capitalistic devils, and don sack cloth in order to crisscross the globe begging forgiveness for what the church did to indigenous cultures around the world. The Vatican should institute a truth and reconciliation commission.  Gergoglio should renounce his papal “infallibility." The church should pay reparations.  Why is it only secular governments that are apologizing to indigenous peoples and paying reparations?  As for the sexual abuse scandals? Why is this still an issue?  The church has the names.  The church knows exactly who did what and to whom.  They have files that must fill warehouses.  Turn everything over to the police.  There is no role for the church in investigating the egregious crimes committed againstchildren. None.  The police have experts who deal daily in sexual abuse matters. The pope has the power to turn over everything to the police. He should do it NOW!

Shelley would be dismayed to think that after the passage of 200 years, people in vast numbers yet approach the subject of religion credulously.  Many of them still actually believe that a ghost impregnated a virgin.

A poem of Shelley's that I would recommend to those who care to go deeper would be "Peter Bell the Third".  This is an unjustly overlooked poem.  Is it EVER taught at university?  I doubt it.   P.M.S. Dawson argues that the subject of this poem is the alienation of society from itself (Dawson, 199). Dawson writes, "The key to this alienation is in Shelley's view the acceptance of religious fictions....Shelley identifies the slavish acceptance of a corrupt religion with devotion to tyrannical social order." (Dawson, 199).  Shelley himself pointed to religion as the "prototype of human misrule."  Dawson: "God, the Devil and Damnation may be absurd fictions, but men's belief in them has also made them sinister and palpable realities." (Dawson, 200)  As Shelley perceptively notes, "'Tis a lie to say God damns."  Why?  Because we damn ourselves.

Shelley very clearly saw men like Gergoglio as part of the "ghastly masquerade" of the Mask of Anarchy. He even has a line which seemed to anticipate him:

"Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,"

                        Mask of Anarchy (ll 14-15, 22-23)

---

Works Cited

Dawson, P.M.S.  The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

Witmarsh, Timothy, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. Knopf, 2015. Print

"I am a Lover of Humanity, a Democrat and an Atheist.” What did Shelley Mean?

Part of a new feature at www.grahamhenderson.ca is my "Throwback Thursdays". Going back to articles from the past that were favourites or perhaps overlooked.  This was my first article for this site and it was published at a time when the Shelley Nation was in its infancy.  I have noted how few folks have had a chance to have a look at it.  And so I am taking this opportunity to take it out for another spin. If you have seen it, why not share it, if you have not seen it, I hope you enjoy it!

---

The "catch phrase" I have used for the Shelley section of my blog ("Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat.") may require some explanation.  The words originated with Shelley himself, but when did he write it, where did he write it and most important why did he write it.  Many people have sought to diminish the importance of these words and the circumstances under which they were written.  Some modern scholars have even ridiculed him.  I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.

Shelley’s atheism and his political philosophy were at the heart of his poetry and his revolutionary agenda (yes, he had one).  Our understanding of Shelley is impoverished to the extent we ignore or diminish its importance.

Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc in July of 1816. 

View fullsize

"The Priory" Gabriel Charton, Chamonix, 1821

Mont Blanc was a routine stop on the so-called “Grand Tour.”  In fact, so many people visited it, that you will find Shelley in his letters bemoaning the fact that the area was "overrun by tourists." With the Napoleonic wars only just at an end, English tourists were again flooding the continent.  While in Chamonix, many would have stayed at the famous Hotel de Villes de Londres, as did Shelley.  As today, the lodges and guest houses of those days maintained a “visitor’s register”; unlike today those registers would have contained the names of a virtual who’s who of upper class society.  Ryan Air was not flying English punters in for day visits. What you wrote in such a register was guaranteed to be read by literate, well connected aristocrats - even if you penned your entry in Greek – as Shelley did. 

The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading "Occupation") were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”.  The words were, as I say, written in Greek.  The Greek word he used for philanthropist was "philanthropos tropos." The origin of the word and its connection to Shelley is very interesting.  Its first use appears in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” the Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound.  Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered philanthropy to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”.

What do the words Shelley chose mean and why is it important?  First of all, most people today would shrug at his self-description. Today, most people share democratic values and they live in a secular society where even in America as many as one in five people are unaffiliated with a religion; so claiming to be an atheist is not exactly controversial today.  As for philanthropy, well, who doesn’t give money to charity, and in our modern society, the word philanthropy has been reduced to this connotation. I suppose many people would assume that things might have been a bit different in Shelley’s time – but how controversial could it be to describe yourself in such a manner? Context, it turns out, is everything.  In his time, Shelley’s chosen labels shocked and scandalized society and I believe they were designed to do just that. Because in 1816, the words "philanthropist, democrat and atheist" were fighting words.

Shelley would have understood the potential audience for his words, and it is therefore impossible not to conclude that Shelley was being deliberately provocative.  In the words of P.M.S. Dawson, he was “nailing his colours to the mast-head”. As we shall see, he even had a particular target in mind: none other than Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Word of the note spread quickly throughout England.  It was not the only visitor’s book in which Shelley made such an entry. It was made in at least two or three other places.  His friend Byron, following behind him on his travels, was so concerned about the potential harm this statement might do, that he actually made efforts to scribble out Shelley’s name in one of the registers. 

While Shelley was not a household name in England, he was the son of an aristocrat whose patron was one of the leading Whigs of his generation, Lord Norfolk. Behaviour such as this was bound to and did attract attention.  Many would also have remembered that Shelley had been actually expelled from Oxford for publishing a notoriously atheistical tract, The Necessity of Atheism.

Shelley's pamphlet, "The Necessity of Atheism"

While his claim to be an atheist attracted most of the attention, the other two terms were freighted as well.  Democrat then had the connotations it does today but such connotations in his day were clearly inflammatory (the word “utter” acting as an exclamation mark).   The term philanthropist is more interesting because at that time it did not merely connote donating money, it had overt political and even revolutionary overtones. To be an atheist or a philanthropist or a democrat, and Shelley was all three, was to be fundamentally opposed to the ruling order and Shelley wanted the world to know it.

What made Shelley’s atheism even more likely to occasion outrage was the fact that English tourists went to Mont Blanc specifically to have a religious experience occasioned by their experience of the “sublime.” Indeed, Timothy Webb speculates that at least one of Shelley’s entries might have been in response to another comment in the register which read, “Such scenes as these inspires, then, more forcibly, the love of God”. If not in answer to this, then most certainly Shelley was responding to Coleridge, who, in his head note to “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” had famously asked, “Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders?" In a nutshell Shelley's answers was: "I could!!!"

View fullsize

Mont Blanc, 16 May 2016, Graham Henderson

The reaction to Shelley’s entry was predictably furious and focused almost exclusively on Shelley’s choice of the word “atheist”.  For example, this anonymous comment appeared in the London Chronicle:

Mr. Shelley is understood to be the person who, after gazing on Mont Blanc, registered himself in the album as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist; which gross and cheap bravado he, with the natural tact of the new school, took for a display of philosophic courage; and his obscure muse has been since constantly spreading all her foulness of those doctrines which a decent infidel would treat with respect and in which the wise and honourable have in all ages found the perfection of wisdom and virtue.

Shelley’s decision to write the inscription in Greek was even more provocative because as Webb points out, Greek was associated with “the language of intellectual liberty, the language of those courageous philosophers who had defied political and religious tyranny in their allegiance to the truth."

The concept of the “sublime” was one of the dominant (and popular) subjects of the early 19th Century.  It was widely believed that the natural sublime could provoke a religious experience and confirmation of the existence of the deity.  This was a problem for Shelley because he believed that religion was the principle prop for the ruling (tyrannical) political order.  As Cian Duffy in Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime has suggested, Prometheus Unbound, like much of his other work, “was concerned to revise the standard, pious or theistic configuration of that discourse [on the natural sublime] along secular and politically progressive lines...." Shelley believed that the key to this lay in the cultivation of the imagination.  An individual possessed of an “uncultivated” imagination, would contemplate the natural sublime in a situation such as Chamonix Valley, would see god at work, and this would then lead inevitably to the "falsehoods of religious systems." In Queen Mab, Shelley called this the "deifying" response and believed it was an error that resulted from the failure to 'rightly' feel the 'mystery' of natural 'grandeur':

"The plurality of worlds, the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seductions from the falsehoods of religious systems or of deifying the principle of the universe” (Queen Mab. Notes, Poetical Works of Shelley, 801).

 He believed that a cultivated imagination would not make this error. 

This view was not new to Shelley, it was shared, for example, by Archibald Alison whose 1790 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste made the point that people tended to "lose themselves" in the presence of the sublime.  He concluded, "this involuntary and unreflective activity of the imagination leads intentionally and unavoidably to an intuition of God's presence in Creation".   Shelley believed this himself and theorized explicitly that it was the uncultivated imagination that enacted what he called this "vulgar mistake." This theory comes to full fruition in Act III of Prometheus Unbound where, as Duffy notes,

“…their [Demogorgon and Asia] encounter restates the foundational premise of Shelley’s engagement with the discourse on the natural sublime: the idea that natural grandeur, correctly interpreted by the ‘cultivated imagination, can teach the mind politically potent truths, truths that expose the artificiality of the current social order and provide the blueprint for a ‘prosperous’, philanthropic reform of ‘political institutions’.

Shelley’s atheism was thus connected to his theory of the imagination and we can now understand why his “rewriting” of the natural sublime was so important to him. 

If Shelley was simply a non-believer, this would be bad enough, but as he stated in the visitor’s register he was also a “democrat;” and by democrat Shelley really meant republican and modern analysts have now actually placed him within the radical tradition of philosophical anarchism.  Shelley made part of this explicit when he wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener stating,

“It is this empire of terror which is established by Religion, Monarchy is its prototype, Aristocracy may be regarded as symbolizing its very essence.  They are mixed – one can now scarce be distinguished from the other” (Letters of Shelley, 126).

This point is made again in Queen Mab where Shelley asserts that the anthropomorphic god of Christianity is the “the prototype of human misrule” (Queen Mab, Canto VI, l.105, Poetical Works of Shelley, 785) and the spiritual image of monarchical despotism. In his book Romantic Atheism, Martin Priestman points out that the corrupt emperor in Laon and Cythna is consistently enabled by equally corrupt priests. As Paul Foot avers in Red Shelley,  "Established religions, Shelley noted, had always been a friend to tyranny”. Dawson for his part suggests, “The only thing worse than being a republican was being an atheist, and Shelley was that too; indeed, his atheism was intimately connected with his political revolt”.

Three explosive little words that harbour a universe of meaning and significance.

What Shelley, Star Trek and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Have in Common: Humanism!!

I offer a very short post today on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of one of the few GREAT humanist television programmes.  Now, I will admit off the top, that I am a huge fan and always have been.  But until today, I am not sure I made the connection between Shelley and Star Trek.  But now I know what it is - both Shelley and Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry were humanists to the core. 

There is nice article on the subject of Star Trek's humanistic vision by the CEO of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson which can be found here. The BHA is a terrific organization that among other things sponsors a programme of annual lectures that explores humanism and humanist thought as expressed through literature and culture. The 2016 Darwin Day lecture, for example, was given by the redoubtable Jerry Coyne. Coyne, an indefatigable advocate for evolution and atheism, is also a fan of Shelley, and made these comments about him in a recent article:

Shelley could be seen as the first “New Atheist,” since he argued that the idea of God should be seen one that requires supporting evidence. The frontispiece of my book Faith Versus Fact starts with a quote from the 1813 edition of the pamphlet:

“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi  [burden of proof] rests on the theist.”

One of the characteristics of “New Atheists”, as I see it, is their framing of religious “truths” as questions subject to empirical and rational examination (i.e., science construed broadly). Although Shelley wasn’t a scientist, I adopted him as an Honorary Scientist (and honorary New Atheist) for making the statement above.

Coyne has also spoken admiringly of and drawn attention to this blog, for which I am grateful. 

However, of more interest to readers here is the fact that the BHA annually includes the "Shelley Lecture" as part of the aforementioned series.  One of the speakers in this series was Rebecca Goldstein, recently awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Obama for her work to popularise philosophy.  Goldstein spoke in Oxford in 2015 on "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature".  I must confess that Shelley booster that I am, I was completely unaware of this series.  I think this is a symptom of the fragmentation of the Shelley community - a problem this site is designed to play a small part in remedying. 

If you like Shelley, I strongly recommend following the Association on Twitter: @BHAhumanists and @andrewcopson

But back to Star Trek.  There is a surprisingly strong connection to Shelley here. Shelley was one of the world's great humanists. His values find a surprising resonance in the themes and plots of the early years of Star Trek. Copson:

Roddenberry has a hopeful vision of the future: one in which mankind has united around shared human values, joined in a common endeavour to reach the stars, and happily left religion behind on the way. It’s a counsellor, not a chaplain that the Enterprise crew turn to when in need of guidance. Starship crews explore a cosmos that is full of beauty and wonder and they respond with awe and appreciation. This wonder does not overawe them, because ultimately the universe, and its billions of stars and planets, is a natural thing which the curious can know and understand. All the phenomena encountered within it are investigated rationally and, though they may at first seem inexplicable, are understood in the end as susceptible to naturalistic explanations.

I think that Shelley would love to imagine the world of the future conceived by Gene Roddenberry and in particular the quote in the image below:

Shelley was after all, the man who, translating Lucretius, wrote, “I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.”  However, were Shelley "beamed" to the present by Scotty, I think he would be very surprised to learn that "belief in the supernatural" was not already a thing of the past.  He would be shocked to see the humanist agenda in retreat -- not in the face of benign, religious belief systems, but rather radical, intolerant, orthodox fundamentalism of all varieties.  I think he would be profoundly unsettled by the realization that 200 years after the publication of Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, a secular, humanistic society was still an imagined future that was the subject of science fiction. The "crippling bonds of superstition" bind us yet.

Which brings me to the great English social reformer, Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939).  Salt was a great admirer of the real Percy Bysshe Shelley - the same Shelley that I am actively promoting through this website; the Shelley who, as I have written before, was first and foremost a skeptic, atheist, republican, revolutionary, philosophical anarchist, leveler, feminist and vegetarian.

As for Salt, here is what the the website devoted to him has to say,

Henry Stephens Salt was an English writer and social reformer whose work brought praise from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi. Whatever humanitarian cause Salt chose to write about he demonstrated great logic and wit to show the folly of those who opposed progress. His studies of Thoreau, Shelley and Jefferies remain highly respected even today, especially his Life of Henry David Thoreau. Salt's classic "Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress" is still in print, whilst "A Plea for Vegetarianism" is highly sought-after. His circle of friends included Ernest Bell, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter.

I have written extensively about the bifurcation of Shelley's reputation in "My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelley's" and I consider Salt to be a vital, inspirational forerunner of my work. In the opening chapter (titled, "Rival Views of Shelley") of his wonderful, and sadly ignored, book "Percy Bysshe Shelley" (London: Watts & Co, 1913) , Salt writes that

"...there can be no mistake whatever about the attitude Shelley took up...in the whole body of his writing toward the established system of society, which, as he avowed in one of his later letters, he wished to see, "overthrown from the foundations with all of its superstructure, maxims and forms." His principles are utterly subversive of all that orthodoxy holds most sacred, whether in ethics or in religion..." (Salt, 4)

And later:

"...Shelley was the poet-pioneer of the great democratic movement; he anticipated in his own character and aspirations, many of the revolutionary ideas now in process of development....his outlook...was in the main, an exceptionally shrewd one, inasmuch as all the chief principles which were essential to his creed are found to have increased enormously in importance during the years that have passed since his death. (Salt, 5)

Salt was reacting to the orthodox, sentimental Victorian view of Shelley which imagined him as "mere singer and sentimentalist."  This is a view of Shelley which sounds distressingly familiar in the 21st Century. I have written about it here.  Salt sought to restore Shelley's reputation as a "revolutionist". Sadly Salt, and others like him (George Bernard Shaw, for example), were swimming against the current and were drowned out by anti-Shelley, character assassination conducted by TS Eliot and his co-conspirators. It was only in the 1960s that Salt's vision of Shelley began slowly to return to the mainstream; it has yet to dominate our modern appreciation of Shelley - hence the need for a website such as this.

However, today is about Star Trek, and I found a surprisingly apt quote in Salt's opening chapter.  He wrote:

"Shelley was the poet-prophet of the great humanitarian revival; and...he sang of the future rather than of the present, and of a distant future rather than a near one..." (Salt, 7)

Well, I guess that puts Shelley in the same boat as the late, great Gene Roddenberry -- and wouldn't I love to be in that boat with the two of them!

Oh, and as for Buffy?  I did not forget!! Is there a connection? Yes there is: humanism. And if you think I am crazy, well I am not alone!! See Liam Whitton's wonderful celebration of Shelley's fellow humanist Joss Whedon here.

UPDATE: Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

In the category of "hiding in plain sight," I can now offer a higher resolution copy of the Hotel de Villes de Londres' register.

View fullsize

This has been available since 22 July on the Trinity College Library site (the "Trinity Library blog"). My original searches did not unearth this and I was forced to rely on the much poorer quality image that appeared here (the "Trinity College blog")  I have my friend Stathis Potamitis to thank for this discovery.  He is obviously more thorough than I am!! Therefore I offer my apologies to all of my readers.

The Trinity Library blog also fills in many of the gaps that were left out of the Trinity College blog. The page came to the Trinity College Library as part of a bequest by the granddaughter of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes was a poet in his own right but is more widely known as a patron of writers.  Here is a portion of the Britannica entry:

"He published the pioneering Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), secured a pension for Tennyson, made the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson known in England, and was an early champion of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. He also formed a large library of erotic books that included the first serious collection of the works of the Marquis de Sade."

Several very rare Shelley editions were included in the bequest, and the page from the register was discovered pasted inside the front cover of Milnes' copy of Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam.

The higher resolution image now puts us in the position of advancing some more refined conclusions.  Here is the relevant portion of the page:

View fullsize

Here is what Trinity Library blog suggests:

"Underneath Shelley’s name is written ‘Mad. M. W. G.’ – Madame Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future Mary Shelley – and a further name, now crossed out, was Claire Clairmont. It was very likely to have been Byron who underlined Shelley’s name along with ‘the fool’ in the Greek text, in order to vent his frustration at Shelley’s outrage, and who crossed out Claire Clairmont’s name. A later visitor cut this page out of the visitors’ book..."

Professor Wilson in the Trinity College blog adds:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

This thesis originally appealed to me.  I liked the idea of Byron telling people that he had crossed out Shelley's name when in fact he had underlined it.  There is a deliciously Byronic aspect to this bit of chicanery.   But the more I think about this, the more I think it is inconsistent with his character.  I am therefore not sure how we arrive at the conclusion that Byron had anything to do with the underlining of Shelley's or crossing out of Claire's names - but more on this later.  There may, however, be details that have yet to be released by Trinity Library. 

With respect to the Greek portion of the entry, I turned to my old friend Stathis, a respected lawyer based in Athens.  Now, there are two distinct Greek entries.  The first is the famous and well known declaration by Shelley that he was an atheist.  We know know exactly what he wrote and in what order.  Says Stathis: "It is clear that what Shelley wrote is: “I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist.”

View fullsize

Now, it has also been suggested that Shelley's Greek is less than perfect.  Yet Stathis notes only that there is one spelling mistake (Shelley writes δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’) and that the Greek is missing its accents.

For Shelley scholarship the more interesting aspect of the register is the Greek quote that appears immediately beneath Shelley's entry.  In my last post, I proposed that the handwriting in each case appeared to be the same; allowing for the speculation that Shelley may have engaged in one of his classic ironic inversions.  But the higher resolution image from the Trinity Library post tells a different story.  Here is Stathis:

"...the Greek seems to be by two different hands – for example the α is different in the two parts, the quote has all the accents unlike the first one where only άθεος is accented, the θ is also different as is the final ς.  Shelley’s Greek includes a spelling mistake (δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’).  By contrast the Greek of the quote is perfect.  Interestingly, the word order is different from the original [Psalm 14.1]: “ο άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστιν θεός" as opposed to "Είπεν άφρων εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστι Θεός".  This would suggest someone who is familiar with both Greek and the Psalms (or possibly only the particular one) and is able to reproduce from memory, however with a slight change in the word order that still works well in Greek."

It is worth looking back to my previous post to remind ourselves what Psalm 14 is about.  There I wrote:

The opening words of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Psalm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Based on the assumption that the handwriting was the same, I offered an interpretation:

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

But it would seem that I am quite wrong.  Stathis also points us to the famous scholasticist, St Alselm:

"I noted before that the particular quote was used by Saint Anselm in his Proslogion as part of his famous ontological proof of the existence of God.  Anslem attempts a reduction ad absurdum of the denial of the existence of God.  His argument is that since God is a being of which something greater cannot be conceived, that means that it must not lack in any attribute that would make it less than perfect.  “Existence” is in Anselm’s view such an attribute, indeed a non-existent God would be less perfect than an existent God, therefore God must necessarily exist.  This “a priori” proof of the existence of God was criticized by many philosophers, including Hume and other empiricists, and that discussion must have been familiar to William Godwin and perhaps, through him, to Mary Shelley.  However, the Proslogion was written in Latin – it is not clear to me that quoting the Psalms in Greek should be seen as a reference to Saint Anselm’s argument (it would have been a clearer reference had the quote been in Anselm’s Latin)."

Shelley himself was intimately familiar with philosophical works of David Hume (though perhaps the interest indeed derived from Godwin), so I am not sure we need to assume it came to Shelley through Mary.  In any event, based on Stathis' analysis, it is clear I am wrong that Shelley made this entry and I think we must conclude that it was made by someone else. But who? As I noted previously, it is tempting to think it might have been Byron.  But the Greek is perfect and Byron's Greek was anything but perfect. It seems most likely then that someone familiar with the Psalms and St Anselm inserted the remark - someone offended by Shelley's assertion of atheism; but this hardly narrows it down as literally every educated English traveler of the day would have been familiar with both.

Which brings us to the question of the underlining. Stathis offers this thought:

"The underlining of Shelley’s name seems to be repeated by the same hand under the words ‘ο άφρων’, “the fool”.  To me this suggests that whoever quoted from the Psalms wanted to make sure that people understood that “the fool” was Shelley."

View fullsize

I find this a very attractive idea.  Now it also takes us back to Byron.  Byron himself asserted that he had tampered with at least one register.  And it is important to remember, as Shelley's biographer Bieri points out, that Shelley made a similar entry in possibly as many as four registers. This means that we may not be looking at the register in which Byron crossed out Shelley's name - perhaps he crossed it out somewhere else; perhaps for the first time in history we should give Byron the benefit of the doubt!  The Hotel de Villes de Londres was, however, the place to stay in Chamonix; if Byron was going to see one of Shelley's entries, it is most likely that he saw it there.  So let's allow ourselves some guesswork.

Byron and his friends arrive at the Hotel.  He looks for and finds Shelley's entry. It would be entirely within his character to play the devil and critique Shelley by underlining the word "the Fool" and then Shelley's name. But why would he cross out Claire's name? He had been made aware at that point that Claire carried his child.  Shelley has literally forced him to admit paternity and accept responsibility. But his admission was grudging and he made it clear from the very start that he would have nothing more to do with Claire. So why would he cross her name out? What possible motive would he have to protect her? The answer is unclear to me. But I welcome the speculation of others. And if Claire's name was not crossed out by Byron, by whom.....and when? Did Claire do it herself?

Postscript

My thanks to Stathis Potamitis for his careful and thoughtful assistance.  Stathis and I have known one another for decades. One of the hallmarks of our friendship is our spirited and perpetual dialogue about our favourite poets, his (Byron) and mine (Shelley).  Indeed I can thank him for rekindling my interest in Shelley which had lain dormant for many years.  It happened in a succession of debates at seaside tavernas in the Peloponese in the winter of 2013. You can find out more about Stathis here.

Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

There is a supplementary post here. It contains additional information and a high resolution copy of the register.  The articles should be read together.

On 19 July 2016, the University of Cambridge made a startling and almost completely unheralded announcement.  They were in possession of a page from the register of a hotel in Chamonix: not just any page and not just any hotel. The hotel was the Hotel de Villes de Londres and the page in question was the one upon which Percy Bysshe Shelley had inscribed his famous declaration that he was an atheist, a lover of humanity and a democrat. Not a copy of it….THE page. No reproduction or copy of this page has ever, to my knowledge been made available to the public.  Evidence for what Shelley wrote was based almost exclusively on either eye witnesses, such as Southey and Byron, or mere hearsay.

I make the point in my article "Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?" that Shelley’s declaration is exceedingly important to our understanding of his entire literary output. There I wrote,

“I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.” 

Thus the discovery of this page is a rather momentous occasion; rather like finding a hitherto unknown, handwritten copy of the Gettysburgh Address.

My sources for this discovery are two-fold: an article in Cambridge News, dated 19 July 2016, and an undated blog post on the University of Cambridge website. Unfortunately, neither included a high resolution copy of the register.

But based on these sources here is what we know.  Cambridge News, quoting noted Shelley scholar, Professor Ross Wilson reports, “No-one knows by whom or why, but the leaf had been removed from the visitors' book by late summer 1825, three years after Shelley had drowned in the Bay of Spezia.” Cambridge News goes on to inform us that the page was "found pasted into Shelley's copy of his poem, “The Revolt of Islam”, which addresses revolutionary politics and the long history of the nineteenth century through an elaborate mythological narrative.”

There are obvious questions.  Who removed the page? When? How do we know it had disappeared in late summer of 1825? How did it find its way into Shelley’s own copy of the Revolt of Islam? Who had this copy? Where has it been and why is it only now this important artifact is noticed.  Has it be suppressed? overlooked? ignored? Tantalizing speculations are available to us.  Clearly the page which the University of Cambridge is in possession of has a provenance which requires a more fulsome exploration. It is to be found no where on line as of today. The most important question of all is this, until now has any scholar ever seen a copy of the register, or have they all been relying on hearsay? I believe we have to assume it is the latter case and that for the first time we are seeing the real thing. This will require everyone who has ever written anything about this incident to revise their opinions.

As I said, both sources included a low resolution image of the page which is difficult to read. I have reproduced it below. However, what we can see is fascinating.

View fullsize

A low resolution copy of the page taken from the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres in Chamonix.

On the left hand side of the page we see Shelley’s familiar signature – I don’t know why, but I felt quite emotional seeing this. Below it are the initials of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: “MWG”.  Beside their names we have their country and city of origin: London, England.

Interestingly, Shelley’s signature has been underlined twice – but by whom? Well, our biographies do tell us something about this.  For generations, biographers, relying on a claim made by Byron, have believed that Byron, upon encountering Shelley's entry some weeks later, scribbled out Shelley’s name. He claims to have done this to protect his friend’s reputation (Ellis, 115; and Bieri 342-343). Biographers have universally taken Byron at his word, one remarking that, “he [Byron] must have felt that Shelley was too young to understand fully what a red rag to a bull of English public opinion the word “atheist” would be, and how quickly news of its offensive presence would be spread…” (Ellis, 115). Personally I find that assertion ridiculous.  For his part, Holmes concludes, "Byron...immediately felt obliged to cross it out as indelibly as possible for Shelley's own protection." (Holmes, 342-3) Again, ridiculous. The Byron I know was hardly solicitous of the reputations of others and relished controversy. Well, we now have evidence that Byron’s story may well have been false.

What we see when we look at the register is that quite apart from scribbling Shelley’s name out, someone (and who else but Byron) underlined it not once but twice.  Professor Wilson would seems to agree:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

Now many motives may be ascribed to this if we are to assume that the underlining is Byron’s.  One could conclude, charitably, that Byron delighted in his friend’s provocational action and sought to draw attention to it. On the other hand it could have been a crude attempt to compound what he might have viewed as Shelley’s indiscretion.  We can’t forget that for all of his bluster, Byron was anything but an atheist or even deist.  Given that fact that he appears to have lied about his action, the latter conclusion seems the more likely. There is something of an irony bound up in this. If in fact Byron did this to attract unwelcome attention to Shelley’s provocative statements, he actually would have played right into Shelley’s hand – for Shelley would have most likely thanked Byron for helping to draw attention to his declaration.

Under the column heading, “destination”, Shelley writes “L’Enfer”; both for himself and for Mary. We might find this amusing – but it was anything but in those days. For more on this see my article Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?. 

We then come to the heart of the matter, his famous declaration of atheism. Until I looked at the register, I, like everyone else, assumed that the only words he wrote were the Greek words for “atheist”, “democrat’ and “lover of humanity”.  The ordering of these words is different in almost every version.  Holmes for example use this formulation: "Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist" (Holmes, 342); PMS Dawson uses this one: "I am a philanthropist, utter democrat, and an atheist." (Dawson, 54).  Until we can see a better copy of the Cambridge document, it is difficult to tell who is right. And I think it actually matters.

Bieri notes that Shelley’s entry occasioned caustic rejoinders from fellow travelers, including one who wrote in Greek that Shelley was a “fool”. I doubt Bieri ever saw the original register – based on what we have just learned from Cambridge; if he did, he does not say so. And his footnotes for this assertion point us to articles by Gavin de Beer (1958) and Timothy Webb (1984); neither of whom saw the original register either – everyone relying on contemporary third party reports – in law we call this “hearsay” evidence. Both of these article are unavailable online.

Not knowing Greek, I forwarded the Cambridge document to my friend Stathis Potamitis, a distinguished lawyer in Athens. Stathis reported:

“There is a passage in quotation marks which is a line from a Psalm (14:1) “o άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού ουκ έστιν θεός”. This I recognized because it was used by St. Anselm in his ontological proof of the existence of God.  It means ‘the fool said in his heart there is no god’. There are three words (the third one is very long and may be more than one that are linked) that precede the quotation, but I can only make out one of them: “φιλάνθρωπος», which literally means he who loves humans, but is usually translated as charitable.” 

It is the quotation that interests me.  Bieri, relying on de Beer and Webb, jumped to the conclusion that these words were added by someone else and were an attack on Shelley.  No one that I am aware of has ever ascribed these words to Shelley himself. However, while I am not handwriting expert, my untutored eye tells me that whoever wrote the first three words included the quotation. I would welcome the thoughts of scholars who have spent more time with Shelley’s handwriting than I have. If this is true it adds an exciting dimension to this incident.

I can understand why people would jump to the conclusion that these were not Shelley’s words.  The opening lines of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Palm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

Much of what I have written is, of course speculation. But my desire is to get the discussion started and focused on earthing the facts. When the University of Cambridge makes a better copy available and when they tell us more of the provenance of the page, we will be much further down the road.  Look for updates here.

One last note.  while Shelley's name is not crossed out, someone's is.  If you look below Shelley's name and Mary's initials, you will see that a name has been heavily over-scored.  Could this be Claire? If so, who crossed her name out, and why?

References

Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (2008). Print. 

Dawson, P.M.S.  The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

Ellis, David. Byron in Geneva, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,( 2011) Print

Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit Weidenfield. London: and Nicolson, 1974). Print.

Shelley in the 21st Century

Shelley in the 21st Century

Most writing on Shelley seems frustratingly designed for scholarly audiences and much of it is almost unreadable by anyone outside a university setting.  Most of the books and articles written between 1980 and around 2005 are written in a scholarly style that limits readership to a handful of people: esoteric, jargon-filled, arcane and at times pompous.

This is a pity because many of these books contain extremely important insights that would help the lay reader to better understand Shelley’s intent in writing a poem like Prometheus Unbound. For my part, I hope to write about Shelley in a manner that is straightforward and accessible.

Evidence of the extent of the problem abounds today.  When the Guardian published a recently discovered, highly charged, political poem by Shelley, the reactions in the comments section were telling.  The Guardian readership is literate and engaged, yet the vast majority of the hundreds of comments which were posted suggested that even a literate audience had a very poor understanding of who Shelley was and what his philosophical and political preoccupations were.  Here is a representative sampling of how readers reacted to the poem:

Maybe Corbyn ought to quote this Shelley stuff at [ Parliamentary Question Period].

If Jeremy Corbyn needed a script, he need not look any more.

Kind of like Tsipras and Corbyn, but with balls.

Corbyn during next [Parliamentary Question Period]: "I’ve had a poem sent to me by Shelley which I would like to read to the house"

Young, keen and well afire - good for him. Every era, every minute, every place needs such a cutting flame.

Anti-war, Anti-colonialism, Anti-slavery, Anti-state-oppression. I've just read it, and it's brilliant. I wonder why it disappeared?

Revolutionary socialist with the guts to stand outside his privileged class, expose its oppressive nature & champion workers.

Had no idea he was so radical..wow...RESPECT!

Interesting to read his critique of contemporary British imperialism within the poem. I've tended to largely miss Percy Shelley's work before, will have to have a proper look at it.

At a recent seminar I attended at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Patricia Matthew commented that many of her students were surprised to learn that there was a Shelley other than Mary, his wife and author of Frankenstein.  A nephew of mine in fourth year at a distinguished Canadian university thought I was talking about Mary when it was mentioned that I was engaged in research on Shelley.

And when Shelley IS taught in university, it is usually his more anodyne, less political poetry that is offered to students. As recently as 1973, Kathleen Raine in Penguin’s “Poet to Poet” series omitted important poems such as Laon and Cythna as well as most of his overtly political output – and she does so with gusto and states explicitly, “without regret”. In the most widely available edition of his poetry, the editor, Isabel Quigley, cheerfully notes, "No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety" and goes on to suggest wrongly that Shelley was a more than anything else a platonist. With friends like this, who needs enemies! The current Norton Anthology includes this extraordinarily unrepresentative sampling of Shelley’s poetry:

from A Defense of Poetry; from Preface to Prometheus Unbound; A Dirge; Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude; Worlds on Worlds; The World's Great Age; O World, O Life, O Time; Song of Apollo; To Jane. The Invitation; The Triumph of Life; Stanzas Written in Dejection; To Jane. The Invitation; To — [Music, when soft voices die].

Editors often consign sophisticated political tracts such as Queen Mab to the category of “juvenilia” with the predictable result. This is all nothing short of criminal.

Shelley, to the extent he enters a casual, non-academic conversation at all, enters shorn of almost everything for which he stood. The reasons for this are varied and complex but what Michael Gamer refers to as the “Shelley Myth” and what Paul Foot in his thrilling book, Red Shelley, more tartly refers to as the “castration of Shelley” is a fact that anyone who cares about Shelley must accept.  I think of it as the “hallmarkification” of his reputation.  Most people encounter snippets of Shelley on greeting cards one of the most common being: “There is a harmony in Autumn, and a lustre in its sky”

That this has happened represents a great loss to modern culture and society because if ever there was a poet speaking to our time, it is Shelley. Shelley was first and foremost a skeptic, a skeptic who was also an atheist, republican, revolutionary, philosophical anarchist, leveler, feminist and vegetarian (he also happened to write some rather fine poetry and essays!). The issues which preoccupied him, for example vast disparities in wealth, have if anything become exacerbated with the passage of time. Wealth today is concentrating in fewer hands than at almost any time in history.  Far from the influence of religion receding, its icy grip has been strengthened, and where it grows in power so too do tyrannical and oppressive regimes. The man who, translating Lucretius avowed that: “I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition” would be absolutely appalled at this development. Shelley believed that “…the delusions of Christianity are fatal to genius and originality; they omit thought.”

Paul Foot, one of the 20th century’s great socialists had this to say in summing up Shelley’s life:

“Shelley was not dull. His poems reverberate with energy and excitement. He decked the grand ideas which inspired him in language which enriches them and sharpen communication with the people who can put them into effect. That is why he was loved and treasured by the chartists workers, the socialist propagandists of the 1890s, the suffragists and feminists of the first 20 years of the 20th century and that is why socialists, radicals and feminists of every hue should read Shelley today – read him, learn him by heart and teach him to their children. If Shelley’s great revolutionary poetry – all those glaciers, and winds and volcanoes – can get to work on the imagination of the hundreds of thousands of people who have had enough of our rotten society and of the racialism and corruption off which it feeds; if that poetry can inspire them to write and talk with a new energy, a new confidence and a new splendour, then there is no telling what will happen. Certainly the police will have to be sent for.”

Engles, commenting on the importance of Shelley’s thought to the 19th century wrote that “Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.” And Marx himself offered this idea:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

My goal is to try to restore this man to at least a few modern readers. Shelley has the power to enthrall, thrill and inspire – to change our world. Our institutions need to teach him in a radically different way. The reactions of the lay readers of the Guardian demonstrate the power of his ideas. Perhaps this individual said it best:

"Maybe a copy of this poem ought to be nailed to the door of the Palace of Westminster in the same way Luther nailed his '95 theses' to the door of a church in Wittenberg…….our political class needs a Reformation just as much as the Catholic Church did……"

It is time to bring him back – we need him; tyrannies, be they of the mind or the world are implacable foes.