= SHELLEY'S LITERARY AND EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN SHAWCROSS LONDON HENRY FROWDE 1909 Botherew 309412 5 copie. INTRODUCTION 1 THE present edition of Shelley's prose works comprises all his later critical and speculative writings (with the exception of the prefaces to the longer poems) and a selection from his letters, illustrating more particularly his literary and artistic criticism. The youthful romances and the various political pamphlets, as well as the lengthy notes to Queen Mab, have been omitted from the volume, the primary aim of which is to exhibit Shelley's maturer genius on its critical and philosophical side. This principle of selection has necessarily confined the edition within somewhat narrow limits. Except under the pressure of some great public occasion (and then only in his earlier years), Shelley was not readily moved to sustained utterance in prose. At first sight this may appear strange, for he was by no means averse from those interests which find in prose their natural vehicle of expression. Apart from his passion for reforming the world', Shelley had also a passion for speculating upon it and unravelling its meaning. Of the first he has left abundant record in the reform pamphlets of his youth; yet after 1812, with the exception of the Marlow pamphlet, he wrote nothing with a directly practical aim. His love of 1 I refer to published writings only. 6 speculation grew stronger rather than weaker, as his years increased, and seems, to some extent, to have tempered his political zeal; in the Philosophical View of Reform, written in 1818, the two tendencies blend and are reconciled, and the spirit of this paper may perhaps be taken as typical of Shelley's maturer attitude to political and social problems. Yet in spite of this ardour for theorizing, Shelley has left behind him in writing only the veriest fragment of his speculations. Nearly all that he has written of this nature is confined within a period of a few months, the latter part of the year 1815; and it covers less than a hundred pages of print. After these attempts were abandoned, Shelley produced nothing purely speculative 1 until the end of 1820, when Peacock's attack on poetry and poets' excited his polemical faculties', and drew from him his finest sustained effort in prose writing. But of this work the first portion only was completed: as Shelley's indignation subsided, the impulse to write subsided likewise, and although at the end of this year we find him still contemplating the completion of his apology, there is no evidence that he actually finished it. The disquieting reception of Epipsychidion, which even the ovveroí, as Shelley wrote, wholly failed to comprehend, moved him to project a Symposium, 'in which all these misunderstandings should be set right'; but in the end he was content to leave things as they were. Nor was the more ambitious design, to which he alludes in the preface The prefaces to the longer poems contain much valuable speculation, but this is incidental to their main purpose. to Prometheus Bound, of a systematical history of... the genuine elements of human society', carried into execution during the remaining years of his life.1 Shelley's work in prose, then, seems at first sight, if judged by its bulk alone, surprisingly slight and insignificant. But the cause of its fragmentary nature is perhaps not far to seek. To direct intervention in the political and social questions of the day Shelley grew less and less inclined, as his years increased and his self-knowledge ripened.2 As regards his speculations, moral or metaphysical, Shelley was, we have to remember, an uncompromising disciple of Godwin, and the majority of his longer poems are impregnated with Godwin's ideas. Now to reproduce those ideas in poetic guise might naturally seem well worth the while to Shelley, and it is true that, Shelley being the poet, the attempt was more than justified; but to systematize them in a prose work, unless by way of illumination or correction, is on the face of it a superfluous task, and so it probably appeared to Shelley himself, when he so soon abandoned the attempt. Here, then, we have an explanation of the fragments of 1815: but we have not yet understood why the Defence, which lay outside Godwin's sphere, or the Philosophical Review of Reform, in which Shelley is beginning to emancipate 1 Unless indeed Shelley's unpublished MSS. contain anything of the kind. But it is presumable that any important remains would have seen the light ere this. 2 Cp. Letter to Horatio Smith (1822), ' I once thought to study these affairs, and to write or act in them. I am glad my good genius said refrain.' |