Shelley in the 21st Century. By Graham Henderson

A link to my article at the Wordsworth Trust Blog.  I did not pick the picture of the actors from that atrocious and to-be-avoided-at-all-cost-movie, "Gothic"!!!!

‘The Modern Disciple of the Academy’: Hume, Shelley, and Sir William Drummond. By Thomas Holden

The influence of skeptical thinkers on Shelley's poetry and philosophy was decisive. There is unfortunately very little writing on the subject which is approachable and easy to digest.  There are several important books which cover the subject. Two are focused exclusively on the question:

Pulos, C. E. (1954) The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska.

Hoagwood, Terence Allan (1989) Scepticism and Ideology: Shelley's Political Prose and its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.

Some touch on the subject in depth:

Wasserman, Earl R. (1971) Shelley: A Critical Reading, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press.

Duffy, Cian (2009) Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

All of these are what I would consider to be specialist texts which require an enormous amount of effort to digest.  Thomas Holden's article therefore fills an important gap by canvassing the question in a more digestible fashion.  The great service which Holden offers is that he zeros in on Sir William Drummond himself - a key figure in the philosophical landscape of the last 18th and early 19th centuries, and a thinker who who exerted an enormous influence on Shelley.  Shelley actually met him in Italy.

It is a unfortunate that Drummond's book, "Academical Questions" is almost completely unavailable to the general reading public. A recent reissue has disappeared into thin air.  Until it reappears, we have Professor Holden!

"Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world" By Carole Cadwalladr

Carole Cadwalladr writes for the Guardian and can always be counted on for incise, hard hitting articles.  From her introduction:

Did the Holocaust really happen? No. The Holocaust did not really happen. Six million Jews did not die. It is a Jewish conspiracy theory spread by vested interests to obscure the truth. The truth is that there is no evidence any people were gassed in any camp. The Holocaust did not happen.

An introduction to 'The Masque of Anarchy' by John Mullan

If you are looking for an interesting introduction to Shelley's radical and intensely political poem, the Masque of Anarchy, look no further. This article is produced by the British Library as part of their "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" series. Professor Mullan is Professor of English at University College London and is a specialist in 18th-century literature.  In 2012 he published "What Matters in Jane Austen?"  I am happy link to this wonderful series because virtually all of the articles, like this one, are written in an approachable, accessible style. 

From the articles Introduction: 

Percy Bysshe Shelley was living in Italy when news reached him of the Peterloo Massacre. On 16 August 1819 a crowd of well over 50,000 had gathered at St. Peter’s Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain’s notoriously corrupt system of political representation, with its ‘pocket’ and ‘rotten’ boroughs. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry (recruited from amongst the local middle classes) to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn. At least 15 demonstrators, including a woman and a child, were killed, and many more wounded.

Shelley's Musical Muse

Jessica Quillin’s magical book, Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, was originally published in hardcover by Ashgate in 2012 and almost immediately thereafter became almost inaccessible. There is good news for the Shelley Nation, or at least those with an appetite and stomach for a deeper dive: her book was recently issued in paperback at a reasonable price.  You can order it here. All references in this review are to her hardback version.

Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism explores Shelley’s near lifelong fascination with music and the role it played in the creation of his poetry and his theory of the imagination. It thus fills a significant gap in the critical literature. So far as I am aware hers is the only book length treatment of the subject.  Jessica radically extends and amplifies the pioneering work of Ronald Tetrault who wrote briefly on the subject in the early 1980s. Quillin's book is thoroughly researched and tackles a difficult subject.  As an independent scholar anxious to bring Shelley to the attention of a larger audience, books such as this are an important tool because they can connect Shelley to people who come from very divergent walks of life.

Anyone who has read Shelley (or has heard it properly read, which sadly is almost never) has almost certainly been impressed with its musicality.  Burton Pollin’s view was that “No English poet…has paid more attention than has Shelley to the loveliness of music….” During the 1800s, Shelley’s poetry was set to music on hundreds occasions; it is a pity that this habit died out. Jessica however is quick to point out that it is not just musicality that invests Shelley’s poetry, it is a musical aesthetic. What I mean by this is that Shelley carefully selects the musical imagery which infuses many of his poems. She writes:

“Shelley’s exposure to a diversity of musical experiences and ideas of music affected not only the way in which he perceived music, but came to shape both his skills as a poet and his general view of poetry and the poet’s role.” (Quillin, 7)

One musical form with which he was particularly enamored was opera. Shelley's taste for opera developed very early and was complimented by the affection both his friend Thomas Love Peacock and Mary had for it. Peacock introduced him to Don Giovanni in 1817, and after that, he was a regular attendee.  Mozart was his favourite and he saw many performances at La Scala as well as in Turin, Naples and Pisa. I feel that we can say with confidence that his love of opera came to dictate the actual form of "Prometheus Unbound" which Shelley referred to as a “Lyric Drama”.  Tetrault notes that even his choice of this term

“inevitably associated [Prometheus Unbound] with the operatic stage. ‘Drame lyrique’ was the term applied in 1809 to the French production of Don Giovanni…”

Jessica also argues that the “organization of discourse and the specific dramatic arrangement…of Prometheus Unbound have strong affinities with the Italian opera of his day.”  (Tetrault, 149)

Tetrault believed that we can better understand "Prometheus Unbound" if we see it unfolding according to the conventions of opera in which

“not action, but the quality of an action, the intensity of the moment is elaborated musically. Music abstracts and internalizes the social realism of drama, allows the characters to express their motives and passions in song, and shifts the attention of the audience from narrative to essential emotion and thought. Shelley's drama occupies its own imaginative space, beyond the bounds of realism, according to the conventions of a vast psycho-drama that gives expression to desire and hope.” (Tetrault, 152)

In a brilliant appendix to her book, Quillin outlines a possible “Operatic Organization for Prometheus Unbound” part of which you can see below.

Jessica also points to Alastor in which Shelley uses two contrasting musical images, both of which are based on the Aeolian Harp.  According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Aeolian Harp derives its name from Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, and is an instrument

“on which sounds are produced by the movement of wind over its strings. It is made of a wooden sound box about 3 feet by 5 inches by 3 inches that is loosely strung with 10 or 12 gut strings. These strings are all of the same length but vary in thickness and hence in elasticity.”

Massive version of an Aeolian Harp from the castle of Baden-Baden

You can read more about the construction of the Aeolian harp and see lots of examples at Luthier Arthur Robb's excellent page here. 

It was well known in the ancient world, but only really regained popularity during the period of Shelley’s life. Coleridge, for example, wrote two poems about it: "The Eolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode" and Shelley mentions it several times: in “Ode to the West Wind”, “Mutability”, “Defence of Poetry” and, of course, “Alastor”.

The type of instrument it is, is obviously very important, for it requires no human intervention in which to produce sound; it is a passive instrument enlivened by the wind. How Shelley elects to present the image is therefore telling.  In the first instance it is presented in its traditional sense: the poet is the harp itself, and the wind (nature) sweeps through him producing music (inspiration) which heightens his understanding of the world around him. But we later find it presented in an entirely different manner: the sound it produces in the second instance is “bewitching, transfiguring, otherworldly” (Quilan, 58).

Now, Quillin believes that Shelley employs these two contrasting images to express what she sees as tension between Shelley’s two philosophical poles at that time: a sort of Godwinian idealism and the skepticism he had imbibed from his readings of David Hume and Sir William Drummond.  Quillin is thus one of the few critics who I believe have attempted to bring a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of skepticism to the study of Shelley’s philosophy, poetry and politics.

Shelley’s recipe for revolution began in effect with the human spirit.  He believed that in order for a successful outward, political revolution to succeed, our imagination, the primary tool with which our minds organize and make sense of the external world, needed to be cultivated and reformed. PMS Dawson wrote that for Shelley, “the world must be transformed in imagination before it can be changed politically…this imaginative recreation of existence is both the subject and the intended effect of Prometheus Unbound.” (emphasis added) Jessica also notes the intensely political aspect of Shelley’s poetry: “For Shelley, the idea of the poetical is so strongly linked with humanistic notions of socio-political reform that on some level ever his minor lyrics have polemical function.” (Quillin, 144)

Shelley believe that true political reform could come only through the aesthetic education of humanity – a fact our policy makers would do well to take note of as they ravage liberal arts programmes around the world. He would have seen opera as an ideal form to achieve his goal.  Opera combines poetry, music and dance and, according to Tetrault, “the ideals it presents are not superhuman and inaccessible but attainable by human skill, discipline, and effort.”  Revolution of the imagination is, thus, eminently achievable. 

Opera was also often intensely political, playing a central role in the unification of Italy by keeping the dream alive during decades of foreign rule. “The Marriage of Figaro” (which Shelley saw at least twice in 1818 according to Mary) was suppressed by Louis the XIV because as he said, “it would be necessary to destroy the Bastille before the presentation of this play would not be a dangerous piece of inconsequence.” He was right.  As Tetrault points out, “Figaro’s mocking aria is the direct expression of the will to revolt.”

The opera, therefore, not only supplied musical inspiration for Shelley, but a revolutionary political platform on which to construct his own vision of the future.

Jessica Quillin’s book is not for the casual reader and will not be everyone’s cup of tea.  However, for those interested in meeting the real Percy Bysshe Shelley, understanding the role music played in his poetry, his philosophy and even his revolutionary politics is important. It is my great hope that Jessica, who is a visitor to this site, will encounter this review and perhaps someday offer the Shelley Nation a simplified approach to the music of Shelley’s world.

References

Ronald Tetrault, “Shelley at the Opera”, ELH, Vol 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp 144-171)

Alexander Larman's "Byron's Women" and the conjoined but contrasting myths of Shelley and Byron

Last week Byron's Women was released in paperback. In recognition of this, I have re-released my original recommendation as part of Throwback Thursday at TRPBS.  I suppose it is fair enough to draw a line between the character of a poet and his or her poetic output, however, the Byron that emerges from these pages is so odious, so repellent that I find it impossible to do so.  I can understand why Shelley was increasingly troubled by his behaviour and why he was so worried for the well-being of Allegra.

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Alexander Larman's new book Byron's Women is just out and you need to buy it; now.  In what may be one of the best written blogs I have come across in a very long time, he encapsulates his thesis. Larman does not mince words:

The greatest falsehood propagated about Byron is that he loved women. On the contrary, his attitude towards those in his life was mainly a mixture of contempt, violence and lordly dismissal.

In the pages of his book it would appear that we finally we have someone speaking truth to power and by power I mean what Larman calls the "Byron establishment"; an establishment which he asserts has been "permeated by a lazy misogyny for decades". You can find his article here. If his blog is in any way representative of what is to come in his book Byron's Women, it will be a blockbuster.

Larman's book interests me for a very particular reason: I am fascinated by "reputational history." Students and advocates for Shelley have battled for literally 200 years over who the "real" Percy Bysshe Shelley is. I think there is an important lesson for fans, students and critics alike: and that is that very little can be taken at face value when we speak about "cultural heroes".  In the case of Byron, in order to maintain his place in the pantheon, his supporters have chosen to almost completely ignore a dark side.  In the case of Shelley, advocates constructed a version of Shelley which never existed.  Byron's reputation benefited when what can only be called a "coalition of the willing"  either ignored his misogyny or painted out of existence.  Shelley's reputation suffered when his advocates (for a multiplicity of reasons, some of them well-meaning) chose to block out his political radicalism.

Let me give a stark example.  Here are two descriptions of Shelley drawn by two famous, erudite Victorians:

This:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.”

and this:

"...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..."

The first comes from Francis Thompson's arch-Victorian paean to Shelley that was published in 1909.  The second comes from the roughly contemporary Henry Stephens Salt, writing in his seminal book "Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Pioneer" in 1896 .  Can these possibly be the same person?  Clearly not. Yet in the contest of competing visions, I would suggest that Thompson's image of Shelley has for the most part won out, to the detriment of Shelley. One scholar (Karsten Klejs Engleberg) produced a bibliography of over one thousand essays and monographs that were written about Shelley up until 1860. Mark Kipperman commented in his 1992 article, "Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, 1889-1903" that these essays invariably,

"centered on the spectacular events - the elopement, the rumors of hallucination and madness, the death, cremation, and ghoulish passing on of relics - to sustain the myth of a poet either ludicrously incapable, criminally irresponsible, or gloriously and ineffably transcendent."

Newman Ivey White's landmark 1940 biography of Shelley devoted an entire chapter to Shelley's posthumous reputation.  At the time of his death, Byron was literally the world's first superstar; Shelley, on the other hand, was virtually unknown. It is a quirk of history that the survival of Shelley's reputation as a poet in the early years after his death owed a noticeable debt to the accidental factor of his connection with Byron. Thereafter, it slowly gathered steam and within 20 years Shelley had accomplished one of the greatest and most unlikely comebacks in literary history - he joined his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Byron in the accepted pantheon of the great writers of the 19th Century.

White traces the manner in which the feat was pulled off but a detailed analysis of this is beyond the scope of this short note.  What I will say is this: what Shelley became famous for would most likely have been anathema to him.  The man who was, according to White, "perhaps the greatest radical voice in poetry since Lucretius" became a sentimentalized caricature of himself. The later Victorian critics, whose voice I think dominates to this day the lay perception of Shelley, believed that while he was one of the great poets, “on everything that really mattered to him except his purely personal emotions and his fine art, he was dead wrong.”  In short, the Shelley ends up widely regarded as one of the great 19th Century writers based upon a completely erroneous understanding of what he actually stood for.  As White observes, "Matthew Arnold's 'beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain', was protested by Stopford Brooke in his Shelley Society inaugural address [1886], but it remains today one of the most influential critical dicta on Shelley." Thus White concludes, "undoubtedly a large part of Shelley’s popularity for a hundred years has been based upon an evasion of the real Shelley."

Shelley's admirers went to absolutely extraordinary lengths to cement his reputation as anything other than the "atheist, lover of humanity and democrat" which he described himself as.   For example look at these images:

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A biographer of Shelley's, Buxton Forman, actually commissioned this 'portrait' of Shelley. The drawing was explicitly imitative of da Vinci's "Head of Christ" and bore no relation to what Shelley looked like at all (yeah, okay, he got the open-necked shirt right).  Forman then went on to present this falsified image as a "portrait" of Shelley in two successive editions of his biography. I have an article coming on the manner in which Shelley has been represented throughout the last two centuries.

Let's now turn to Byron and go back to that opening salvo of Larman's:

"The greatest falsehood propagated about Byron is that he loved women. On the contrary, his attitude towards those in his life was mainly a mixture of contempt, violence and lordly dismissal."

There has to be an irony in this somewhere.  To promote their hero, Byron's advocates have disguised or ignored distinctly unappealing aspects of his character.  Exactly the same could be said about Shelley.  But in Shelley's case the character traits which were suppressed and considered to be unappealing had nothing to do with misogyny, contempt or violence; they had to do with political radicalism, republicanism and in particular atheism. Let us also not forget that Byron was more a cynic than a skeptic and that his republican values were a thin gruel indeed; a fact that grated continually on Shelley. Marx brilliantly and succinctly captured the contrast between the two poets:

"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."

Byron, unlike Shelley, never demonstrated the slightest desire to repudiate his aristocratic title and privilege. He was a man born as George Gordon, who by accident of birth (and a lot of other fortuitous circumstances) manged to inherit a title. Perhaps it is an accident of my birth in Canada that I find this uncomfortable and irksome. George Gordon is never referred to by his real name - only his lordly title.  And I think his reputation has benefited from this for the simple reason that title and aristocratic privilege clearly matter - and not just in England, around the world.  I think this dismaying deference to aristocracy has in many ways contributed to the Byron cult. You can imagine what Shelley might have thought of that.  Here is Larman on the subject:

"In a hurry to put their beloved lordly poet on a pedestal, scholars, critics and general readers alike have been all too keen to overlook the obvious faults that he had as a man."

So, Shelley and Byron, two remarkably dissimilar poets, at least share this much: they each have a carefully cultivated myth. Larman's stated objective is to "delve beneath the surface of the myth" and warns his readers to "be prepared for what we may find there."  As a student of Shelley, I find the contrast between the history of the reputations fascinating.  Like many other Shelley scholars, I have spent much of my life engaged in my own archeological project - delving beneath the surface of Shelley's own myth to resurrect the "real" Percy Bysshe Shelley. This is a theme I will continue to develop in this blog

Larman recounts movingly the obstacles he faced in writing his book:

"And what of ‘the Manager’ himself, as Annabella and Augusta nicknamed Byron? At times, as I wrote about his grotesque cruelty towards Annabella and Claire, I found myself loathing him so much that it was almost an ordeal to continue to chart his misdeeds. Yet I must confess that I have, like so many others, been at least been half-seduced by Byron. Like the women he associated with, he was a pioneer in thought and deed. Of all the Romantic poets, it is his writing that speaks most clearly to us today, as his hatred of ‘the cant’ will find a warm reception with readers who have themselves long since wearied of being told what they should think and feel."

I hope you will allow me a little advocacy for Shelley.  On the question of who speaks most clearly to us today, Larman and I must part company.  Shelley despised much more than "cant". It was Shelley's politics and philosophy that inspired generations of Chartists and socialists; not Byron's. Newman Ivey White goes so far as to say, "If Robert Owen was the founder of British socialism, it is possible for modern socialism to claim Shelley as a sort of grandfather.”  I think it is reasonably clear today that even the political event Byron is most famous for - the Greek war for independence - was something he poorly understood. He was heard to remark shortly before his death in Greece: "this is Shelley's war"; as in, I think, "What am I doing here?" Marx had so much wrong, but in his opinion of Byron and Shelley, I think we can see a startlingly accurate insight.

I suppose it is controversial of me to pit Byron against Shelley, but history has conjoined them. Therefore is it perhaps not so terribly wrong to open the door to a contest of ideas and philosophies.  In any event, for my part, I can't wait until my copy of Byron's Women arrives from my local book seller.

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Alexander Larman is an author and journalist who read English at Oxford and graduated with a First.  He writes regularly about literature and the arts for publications including The Guardian, TLS, New Statesman, Spectator, Telegraph, Five Dials, the Erotic Review and the Observer. He also reviews restaurants and hotels for luxury titles such as The Arbuturian, The Resident, Quintessentially Insider and Mr and Mrs Smith. You can find him online here. His blog about his book can be found for the Wordsworth Trust here. Follow him on Twitter.

Elizabeth Rawson - "Cicero; A Portrait"

I wish I could find a simple way to convince people to read about one of my heroes, Marcus Tullius Cicero.  Today he seems so remote.  However a very great deal of our modern world (our laws, our language, our philosophy) is founded upon his thinking. And for those of you who are interested in Shelley, Cicero is actually extremely important.  Shelley was very familiar with his writings and said of him, "Cicero is, in my estimation, one of the most admirable characters in the world." Much of the underpinning for Shelley's philosophical skepticism is derived from his reading of Cicero; whose philosophical dialogues are cited in his letters as a "favourite".  The "Tusculan Disputations" were an extremely important source for aspects of "Prometheus Unbound". If you want to know Shelley, you must understand Cicero.

Early manuscript copy of The Tuscan Disputations

Elizabeth Rawson's biography of Cicero is probably the ONE indispensable modern portrait that we have. Cicero has, of course, been the subject of innumerable books. His importance to any understanding of his age (or indeed our own) simply can not be underestimated. So prolific was he that during the middle ages he was actually thought by many to have been two people: Tullius and Cicero! He was referred to as "Tully" by generations of aristocrats who often gave this name to their daughters. Sir John Harrington poignantly brought Cicero to the attention of the Elizabethan generation with his moving translation of what he called , "Cicero's Book of Friendship" (he was also the inventor of the flush toilet!!). Today we know this volume as "On Friendship" and I much recommend it.  Cicero was, in short, revered.

However, Cicero's reputation has, of late, suffered somewhat. A fantastic example of this is the crudely distorted and utterly unhistorical treatment he receives in one of the books in Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" series. I remember how excited I was when the first of these books appeared: "The First Man in Rome".  It was fantastic! But the series seemed to steadily deteriorate in quality and coherence from volume to volume - it was as if she started mailing it in. By the time she reached the fourth volume, "The October Horse" McCullough's abject and unreasoned hero worship of Caesar had reached its apogee and her vilification of Cicero had reached its nadir. The books were becoming unreadable.   In McCullough's portrayal, Cicero, the greatest orator of his age (and one of the greatest in history), squeaks and grovels his way through some of the most momentous moments in Roman history. McCollough (who comically purports in one of her "After Words" to have her "nose glued to the historical record") is not alone -- but her supposedly "historical" portrait surely remains the most distempered and dyspeptic view of Cicero in recent memory. She should, were she alive, be ashamed.

Rawson, on the other hand,  offers a readable, erudite, accessible biography that canvasses all of the important aspects of Cicero's life and thought. It is true that she is sympathetic and an admirer, but she is not blind to his many foibles.

As a young man I had a perhaps unreasoning admiration for Cicero. I held him in a somewhat old-fashioned esteem.  I confess I named a succession of dogs after him - though not a daughter!

But it was Rawson who provided me with the necessary perspective on him. You really need no other. I think that what is important about this volume is the careful attention devoted to Cicero's political and philosophical works. Mary Beard has best described what we were all waiting for: "a biographical account that tried to explore the way his life-story has been constructed and reconstructed over the last two thousand years; how we have learned to read Cicero through Jonson, Voltaire, Ibsen and the rest; what kind of investment we still have, and why, in a thundering conservative of the first century BC and his catchy oratorical slogans. Why, in short, is Cicero still around in the 21st century? And on whose terms?" Her review of Anthony Everitt's much inferior biography can be found here.

Cicero's reputation gets a much needed shot in the arm in Rawson's volume. She writes, "whatever the shortcomings of Cicero's political works, there is no evidence that any of his contemporaries understood the problems of the time as clearly or indeed produced nearly so positive a contribution towards solving them as he did."

Her penultimate chapter on his final year in Rome also offers a closely argued reassessment of his place in the "final conflict". In Rawson's view, it was in 43 BCE that he became the "true ruler of Rome" -- for however brief a period.

This book is filled with little gems. It is often remarked that one of Cicero's principal contributions to Rome was his elevation of the Latin language itself. But it was unknown to me that words such as "quality", "essence" and "moral" were first found in Cicero (though derived from Greek roots).
Also reproduced here are some of the marvelous witticisms for which he was so justly famous. Upon hearing that Brutus deemed Caesar to have "joined the boni" (by which he meant the privileged class), Cicero remarked that he did not know "where Caesar would find them, unless he first hanged himself." Cicero is also famous for the oft quoted expression "O tempore, O mores" which we can translate as "Oh what times! Oh what customs!" This was a phrase designed to deplore the viciousness and corruption of his age and comes from his famous attack on Cataline that began, "How far, then Cataline, will you go on abusing our patience. How long, you madman, will you mock at our vengeance? Will there be no end to your unbridled audacity".

Perhaps the most poignant assessment of Cicero was Plutarch's, though he puts the words in, of all people, Augustus' mouth. According to Plutarch, Augustus discovers one of his grandsons reading a volume of Cicero. The terrified boy trembles while his grandfather leafs through the book at length. At last the great emperor hands the book back with the famous words: "an eloquent man, my boy, an eloquent man....and a patriot."

Cicero is one of the most important personages in all of history. Indeed it is almost impossible for us to understand the roots of our culture unless we understand him. Percy Bysshe Shelley commented in one of his letters that he admired him above all other writers - a reason to love Shelley and a reason to love Cicero. If you read nothing else of him, read this wonderful book.

Gabriel Charton - Glaciers of Chamonix

Tony Astill has been a bookseller for over 40 years and specializes in rare mountaineering books and mountain art. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an Associate Member of the Alpine Club.  A visit to his websites www.mountaineeringbooks.org and www.mountainpaintings.org is like a stepping out of time and into the finest of rare book rooms.  He is also a congenial and helpful proprietor who is quick to respond with assistance, suggestions and ideas.

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Tony Astill's facsimile edition of Charton's 1821 "Glaciers of Chamonix

I encountered an extraordinary book of his while in Chamonix in May of this year: Tony Astill's facsimile edition of Gabriel Charton’s 1821 “tour guide”: “Souvenirs Pittoresques des Glaciers de Chamouny” (Glaciers de Chamouny).  I was there to follow in the footsteps of Percy Bysshe Shelley who visited the area almost 200 years ago in July of 1816.  His time there was very important for it was in Chamonix that Shelley found his literary footing, his poetic voice and where he developed the tailored skeptical philosophy that was to influence his literary output for the rest of his life.

To get to Chamonix most people follow the Viaduct des Egratz which in under an hour takes you effortlessly into the heart of the alpine valley that Shelley took several days to reach. It cuts through the heart of the valley of the Arve, avoids the historic alpine villages that dot the countryside and burrows through granite mountainsides.  It is a busy, smelly, noisy thoroughfare. 

However, it is also possible to follow the old “Ancienne Route Imperiale” which takes you through Bonneville, Saint Martin, St Gervais, Le Lac de Chede, Col de Voza and Servoz (where I stopped and had one of the greatest lunches I have even had at La Sauvageonne).  At this point the valley narrows into what Shelley called the Gorge of the Arve and the old imperial highway was erased forever – there was simply no room for both old and new.  After exiting the gorge, the road jinks hard left and a majestic view of the Vale of Chamonix opens.

This would have been Shelley’s route, and Tony Astill has done students of Shelley an inestimable favour by offering a gorgeous facsimile edition of Charton’s "Glaciers de Chamouny".   If you want to get a sense of what Shelley saw with his own eyes, this is the book for you because it EXACTLY follows the route he followed and contains startling, contemporary images of Chamonix, the Mont Blanc Massif and the Glaciers of Chamonix: Glace de Mer and Bossons.

For example, here is Charton's Bonneville:

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Bonneville, 1821

And here is how it looks today:

Bonneville, 2015

If you can not make the trip yourself, Charton's tour guide will take you step by step into the Chamonix. The valley narrows dramatically at Servox, a fact Charton's images clearly captures:

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Saint Gervais, 1821

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Servoz, 1821

Snow capped peaks appear and the road climbs up on the shoulder of the ravine reaching a considerable height at Servox which today is a gorgeous little village where properties are on sale for almost USD $2,000,000. When Shelley visited, it was little more than a hamlet. So far, Shelley would have seen nothing that he had not seen in one form or an another in Wales. After Servoz, the road then descends to the valley floor (you can see clearly the gap through which Shelley needed to go in the second image above) before it makes a sharp turn to the left which dramatically reveals the Mont Blanc Massif in all of its majesty. Here is what Shelley wrote:

“As we proceeded, our route still lay through the valley, or rather, as it had now become, the vast ravine, which is at once the couch and the creation of the terrible Arve. We ascended, winding between mountains whose immensity staggers the imagination. We crossed the path of a torrent, which three days since had descended from the thawing snow, and torn the road away…."

‘Glaciers de Chamouny” was produced in 1821 and despite Astill’s best efforts, he has managed to locate a mere handful of surviving copies. As Astill notes, the original publication was aimed at the “wealthy traveller of the day and the elite of Genevoise society”.  No such volume was available for Shelley; a fact that raises some important considerations which I intend to write about in an article soon to be published here.

Charton was an artist and engraver and Astill notes that he was:

“one of the first to introduce the process of lithographic printing in Switzerland.  It was the very first illustrated guide for those who desired to travel the road from Geneva to Chamonix…The original French text…provides a lively descriptive account of the journey and accompanies a series of delightful views that lead the traveller to their destination.”

His process was novel. The facsimile’s forward, by Jacques Perret, notes that he followed in the footsteps of a father and son team, the Lorys, who:

 “painted from nature and then engraved their works from nature.”  Charton, on the other hand “took his inspiration from the works of landscape painters and reproduced them resorting to the new lithographic process, the colouring being done in the workshop. These gouache and watercolour lithographies were then assembled into albums presented to travellers.”

While this facsimile has obvious interest to art historians and those who cherish the Alps, it is of a particular interest to any student of the Shelleys (for both Mary and Percy derived inspiration for major works of literature from their visit to Chamonix).  This may be the only book that traces their path and gives us a sense of what they saw.

But it gives us only a sense, because despite the closeness in time to 1816, the Shelley’s visited Chamonix under very different conditions – in the depths of the “Year without Summer”. The images reproduced by Charton are for the most part “picturesque” scenes (as suggested by the title itself).   Paintings such as "The Priory"

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The Priory, Chamonix, 1821

show us a calm, serene countryside, peopled by well dressed travellers; even the glaciers themselves seem somehow tamed. One of Shelley’s own descriptions should suffice to suggest his very different experience.

"As we entered the valley of Chamouni (which in fact may be considered as a continuation of those we have followed from Bonneville Cluses) clouds hung upon the mountains at the distance perhaps of 6000 from the earth but so as effectually conceal not only Mont Blanc but other aiguilles as they call them here, attached and subordinate to it. We were travelling along the valley suddenly we heard a sound as of burst of smothered thunder rolling above; yet there was something earthly in the sound that told us it could not be thunder. Our guide hastily pointed out to us a part of the mountain opposite, from whence the sound came. It was an avalanche. We saw the smoke of its path among the rocks and continued to hear at intervals the bursting of its fall. It fell on the bed of a torrent which it displaced and presently we saw its tawny-coloured waters also spread themselves over the ravine which was their couch."

Avalanches in July!! I will write further about the startling differences in my soon to be published series on “Shelley and the Sublime.”

For now, I am here simply to extol this beautiful facsimile, to recommend that you acquire it and to congratulate and thank Tony for the service he has done to Shelley scholarship.