In another letter, the poet writes: "I have been cautious to avoid the introducing faults of youthful composition; diffuseness, a profusion of inapplicable imagery, vagueness, generality, and, as Hamlet says, 'words, words.'" The play is, in truth, a wonderful instance of mature judgment and self-control the more extraordinary when we reflect that the author was barely seven-and-twenty when he wrote it, and that the peculiar tendency of his genius was towards an excessive affluence of imagination and fancy, and the embodiment of thoughts the most evanescent and impalpable in forms the most gorgeous and transcendent. The Cenci occupies entirely different ground. Everywhere we feel the earth under our feet. The characters are not personifications of abstract ideas, but are true human beings, speaking, indeed, a language exalted by passion, but, nevertheless, a language which has its roots in nature, and draws its sustenance from life. Awful are those revelations of the monstrous heart of the old man; tremendous in their hopeless agony and desolation those staggerings of the mind of Beatrice on the brink of madness; angelical, in its serene redemption from transitory error, that spirit of resignation and immortal love which rises, towards the close of the play, out of the hell of the earlier parts, and finds its most lovely expression in the final words. Never did poet more exquisitely show the triumph of Good over Evil than Shelley has done in that hushed and sacred ending. It is a voice out of the very depths of the suffering patience of humanity. But, indeed, the play throughout comes nearer to Shakspeare than any other writer has approached since Shakspeare's time. Strange to say, however, Shelley, though frequently urged by his friends, would never again write in the same manner, asserting that his natural tastes lay in a totally different direction. The first edition of the Cenci was printed in Italy, and sent to London for publication. It was received with a degree of enthusiasm to which no other work of Shelley attained during his life; and in 1821 a second edition was printed in England. In a letter to Mr. Ollier, his publisher, dated "Leghorn, September 6th, 1819," Shelley alludes both to Prometheus Unbound and to the Cenci. "DEAR SIR, FROM SHELLEY TO MR. OLLIER. "I RECEIVED your packet with Hunt's picture about a fortnight ago; and your letter with Nos. 1, 2, and 3 yesterday, but not No. 4, which is probably lost or mislaid, through the extreme irregularity of the Italian post. "The ill account you give of the success of my poetical attempts, sufficiently accounts for your silence; but I believe that the truth is, I write less for the public than for myself. Considering that perhaps the parcel will be another year on its voyage, I rather wish, if this letter arrives in time, that you would send the Quarterly's article by the post, and the rest of the Review in the parcel. Of course, it gives me a certain degree of pleasure to know that any one likes my writings; but it is objection and enmity alone that rouses my curiosity. My Prometheus, which has been long finished, is now being transcribed, and will soon be forwarded to you for publication. It is, in my judgment, of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it. I shall also send you another work, calculated to produce a very popular effect, and totally in a different style from anything I have yet composed. This will be sent already printed. The Prometheus you will be so good as to print as usual. "In the Rosalind and Helen, I see there are some few errors, which are so much the worse because they are errors in the sense. If there should be any danger of a second edition, I will correct them. "I have read your Altham, and Keats's poem and Lamb's works. For the second in this list, much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think, if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger. In Altham you have surprised and delighted me. It is a natural story, most unaffectedly told; and, what is more, told in a strain of very pure and powerful English, which is a very rare merit. You seem to have studied our language to some purpose; but I suppose I ought to have waited for Inesilla. "The same day that your letter came, came the news of the Manchester work, and the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously to hear how the country will express its sense of this bloody, murderous oppression of its destroyers. Something must be done. What, yet I know not.'* 6 "In your parcel (which I pray you to send in some safe manner, forwarding to me the bill of lading, &c., in a regular mercantile way, so that my parcel may come in six weeks, not twelve months) send me Jones's Greek Grammar and some sealing wax. A quotation from the Cenci. - ED. “Whenever I publish, send copies of my books to the follow The reference to Keats in this letter is curious, considering the high admiration which Shelley afterwards felt for his writings. But the truth is that Keats's first volume (which is the book here alluded to) contained a great deal of what was raw, youthful, and weak, together with passages reflecting, as Shelley rightly says, "the highest and the finest gleams of poetry" phetic of the future achievements of the Another letter to Mr. Ollier contains further allusion to the Cenci, and some scornful remarks on Quarterly Review slanders :· : - passages proyoung genius. "Florence, Oct. 15th, 1819. "DEAR SIR, "THE droll remarks of the Quarterly, and Hunt's kind defence, arrived as safe as such poison, and safer than such an antidote, usually do. "I am on the point of sending to you 250 copies of a work which I have printed in Italy; which you will have to pay four or five pounds duty upon, on my account. Hunt will tell you the kind of thing it is, and in the course of the winter I shall send directions for its publication, until the arrival of which directions, I request that you would have the kindness not to open the box, or, if by necessity, it is opened, to abstain from observing yourself, or permitting others to observe, what it con tains.* I trust this confidently to you, it being of consequence. Meanwhile, assure yourself that this work has no reference, direct or indirect, to politics, or religion, or personal satire, and that this precaution is merely literary. “The Prometheus, a poem in my best style, whatever that may amount to, will arrive with it, but in MS., which you can print and publish in the season. It is the most perfect of my productions. "Southey wrote the article in question, I am well aware. Observe the impudence of the man in speaking of himself. The only remark worth notice in this piece is the assertion that I imitate Wordsworth. It may as well be said that Lord Byron imitates Wordsworth, or that Wordsworth imitates Lord Byron, both being great poets, and deriving from the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view, a similar tone of sentiment, imagery, and expression. A certain similarity all the best writers of any particular age inevitably are marked with, from the spirit of that age acting on all. This I had explained in my Preface, which the writer was too disingenuous to advert to. As to the other trash, and particularly that lame attack on my personal character, which was meant so ill, and which I am not the man to feel, 'tis all nothing. I am glad, with respect to that part of it which alludes to Hunt, that it should so have happened that I dedicate, as you will see, a work which has all the capacities for being popular to that excellent person. I was amused, too, with the finale; it is like the end of the first act of an opera, when that tremendous concordant discord sets up from the orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once. It describes the result of my battle with their Omnipotent God; his pulling me under the sea by the hair of my head, like Pharaoh; my calling out like the devil who was game to the last; swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a French postilion on Mount Cenis; entreating everybody to drown themselves; pretend |
