Shelley Again
The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. By Kenneth Neill Cameron. (Gollancz. 2 is.) SHELLEY, like Shaw and Shakespeare, is always news, and anyone discussing him and his circle, from Harriet Westbrook to Jefferson Hogg, is safe to arouse interest. At the same time most has been heard before, not once but many times. How much of these two new books, then, is really necessary ? Each, aiming at critical assessment, is about half devoted to biography ; and we can hardly help groaning " Yet again," unless some reason other than readability emerges. Mr. Cameron, aware of this, but stating his own case poorly, trots out an old fallacy that should be shot at sight. It shall be, here and now—but it is hydra-headed. He claims that most people look on Shelley in terms of Maurois' Ariel (backed of course by Arnold's ineffectual angel and the girlish portrait by Amelia Curran). They do ; " they " always will. But those people will never correct their astigmatism by reading Mr. Cameron's serious study with its half-volume of apparatus criticus at the end of the text ; and Mr. Cameron's readers are not the Ariel fans. As his venture is worth justifying, we must try another approach. A full 41 years ago Professor A. Koszul, in his admirable La Jeunesse de Shelley, argued at some length that, with the early Shelley in particular, biography and critical study must go together, since the life illuminates the poetry and philosophy, and these give unity and shape to his erratic behaviour. In Mr. Cameron's case it is the political and by no means the poetical Shelley who is under scrutiny. This was also done before the days of most of us ; in 1872 D. F. McCarthy's The Early Life of Shelley gave full texts of the Irish and other political pamphlets, and. stressed an aspect of the radical poet that was not afterwards generally followed up. Professor Hughes in The Nascent Mind of Shelley (1947) covered all this early ground again (quite soon it will be hard to find new titles), pursuing Shelley's thought and interim philosophy. Now Mr. Cameron drives his tractor along a parallel furrow, and relates these same actions and extravagances more objectively to the political scene and the revolutionary free-thinkers of his day.
Forgetting about the immaturities of great poets we have, then, a heavily documented study of a youthful radical whose impulsive, ardent nature carried all the current theories into action and built his own arguments—soundly and sanely enough for their time and place—on those already in the field. This is the biography that Shaw might have written (with more wizardry) had he not stopped at an essay or two and some remarks made at the Shelley Society. Shaw praised Queen Mab when the editors of Shelley as a standard poet were busy relegating it to juvenilia. Mr. Cameron finds it, as the Owenites and Chartists did, " the most revolutionary docu- ment of the age in England." But Shelley did write juvenilia ; and where Mr. Cameron seems to outstep his mission is in giving as much attention to the horrific young scribbler of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne as he does to the Dublinimissionary. The time of the former was his real age of fatuity, in association with Hogg—with whom, by the way, a homosexual relationship is claimed here.
Be that as it may, we are shown an emergent Shelley without " complexes," shrewd and hard-headed enough, where the psycho- logical school excused him, at best, as the victim of hallucinations. What really occurred, for example, over the alleged shooting attack by night at the Tremadoc house ? Some say he was attacked; some say he imagined it. Mr. Cameron comes within a ace of backing the villains who swore it was all staged by Shelley as an excuse for running away with his debts unpaid. His own theory is more cunning and implies no censure ; but it links up the affair with Shelley's temperament and his political and financial entangle- ments at the time. In this kind of way Mr. Cameron convinces us that his method was worth trying. Tusting to Miss Muriel Spark on Mary Shelley we are not sd confident. The first half of her book is biographical ; the second half critical, examining Mary as•an authoress. The second is the operative half. It looks as though Miss Spark, having written papers on three of Mary's novels, decided to give them a full backing and make a book of it. Her short life, based .on modern publications, presents neither .q2w material nor a rehandling of the old. Her own approach is often clumsy, sometimes ungrammatical, and singularly lacking in that sense of character that can illuminate actions from, as it were, behind themselves. And yet Miss Spark is painstaking ; she attempts the psychological approach at times ; she does not falsify (except in misspelling the name of Trelawny throughout), but her picture, ungratefully it may be, does not come to life.
She is far more at home when examining Frankenstein, which many have read and most seen on the screen, and analysing The Last Man, that semi-political fantasy of the future, which probably few—beyond Miss Spark and her present reviewer—have read at all. In this work the brand of romantic-scientific genius that pro- duced Frankenstein has run amok over its three volumes. It ends impressively, after a plague that sweeps the continents, with the unfortunate Last Man writing his memoirs in the ruins of Rome. It could have been a tremendous novel, maestoso : it is shapeless, undisciplined, and overburdened. Miss Spark prints a welcome summary of it, with quotations, strangely labelling this an " abridged version." She does well to urge republication.; an abridged version is just what is required. The rest of Mary Shelley's works are dealt with hastily. 'Miss Spark says that her "first effort in verse-writing" was that melan- choly introspective poem The Choice. There was an earlier effort, with lyrics by P. B. Shelley who gave his wife To Pan and Arethuca• Her two verse-dramas Prosperine and Midas were last published— again by Professor Koszul—in 1922. It is curious that Miss Spark should have missed them, but it bears out the theory that the greater part of this book is " supporting matter." Shelley put forth his prose in pamphlet form ; why should this age of paper famine not
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