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1. the Image of the 'Veil' Came to Shelley Partly Through Platonic

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1. the Image of the 'Veil' Came to Shelley Partly Through Platonic Notes NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION: THE PAINTED VEIL 1. The image of the 'veil' came to Shelley partly through Platonic sources, though it is older and played a part in the ancient Mystery religions from which Plato derived it: see Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford, 1956) pp. 120ff. His interpretation of the sonnet (pp. 122-3), however, is too simple in its Platonic faith. The veil may be the sacred veil of Isis, which 'no mortal hath ever lifted': John Beer pointed out to me that the Romantics encountered this image in the popular school-handbook of mythology, Tooke's Pantheon. 'Lift not the painted veil' may profitably be read in conjunction with 'Ye hasten to the grave' (1820), which presents a converse view illustrating the complexity of Shelley's attitude. 2. Cf. Shelley's remarks in the Preface to Alastor. The poem represents, he says, 'a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to a contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted .... But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice' (The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers, vol. II (Oxford, 1975) p. 43). 3. William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, vol v (Oxford, 1952) pp. ~. 4. William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts dated 25 April 1803: in W. Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1972) pp. 822-3. 5. 2 Cor. 12:2-4. Shelley's penchant for choosing his self-descriptions from the language of the New Testament is noted by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971) pp. 439-40. For Shelley's 'constant perusal' of the Bible see also p. 33 and p. 485 n38; and for parallels between Shelley and traditional Christian 'inspiration' see Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (Cornell, 1959) pp. 36ff. 6. See the Romantic material on this subject assembled by Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 377ft. 7. Wordsworth wrote confidently in the manuscript Prospectus to The Recluse Of truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith. 198 Notes 199 But the vision of splendour soon faded. Shelley's Laon and Cythna (1817) was an epic devoted explicitly to establishing 'how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live' (Complete Poetical Works, vol. II, p. 99), an age Shelley characterised as 'an age of despair'. 8. Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence, II. 48-9, in Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt, vol. II (Oxford, 1944) p. 236. 9. On Life: written, conjectured Rossetti, in 1815; see Shelley Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, vol. VI (reprinted New York, 1965; the 'Julian Edition') p. 193. 10. Ibid. 11. I think especially ofthe paintings of John Martin, of which the best known are probably Manfred on the Jungfrau (City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham) and The Bard (Paul Mellon Collection). 12. For Blake art works by penetrating to the essence of things, 'melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid' (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Complete Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1972) p. 154). On the dissolution of the actual in Shelley's imagining see the brilliant essay by D. J. Hughes on 'Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound', Studies in Romanticism, XI (1963); reprinted in R. B. Woodings, Shelley: Modern Judgments (London, 1969) pp.142-61. 13. Eccles. 1:14 passim. 14. The scientifically minded Shelley may well have had in mind sunspots, which are actually bright masses only appearing as 'blots' because the surrounding area of the sun is still brighter. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1: CONTRARY LANDSCAPES 1. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (New York, 1971) p. 282. 2. Queen Mab (1813) displays absolutely no premonitory sign of Shelley's future lyrical energy. Its heavy, ornamented verse labours in the tradition of Erasmus Darwin and the epics of Southey. The outward paraphernalia of the dream-vision alone imitates Spenser, except in one or two moments where dogmatism temporarily blinks. All Shelley's boyhood obsessions are crowded in: the snippets of science in the Darwinian notes which outbulk the poem; the atheism; the radical politics; the Wandering Jew. The elements which exist in electrifying tension in the adult Shelley are all heaped together in an ill-assorted jumble of ideas. The influence of the poem in reform circles was nevertheless astonishing: see Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1976) pp. 208ff. 3. Queen Mab, VI, 197-8. 4. La Mettrie, L'Homme Machine (1748), followed by L'Homme Plante (the series sounds capable of indefinite extension); Baron d'Holbach, Systeme de la Nature (1770). Shelley began a translation of the latter work in 1812, when most of Queen Mab must have been written: see A. M. D. Hughes, The Nascent Mind of Shelley (Oxford, 1947) p. 153. 200 Notes 5. Queen Mab, v, 76-7. Cf. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. S. Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 756 ('Beware of reducing men to the state of machines') and p. 758 ('a clockwork uniformity'). The positive view of technology predominates, however. 6. Prometheus Unbound, I, 21-2. 7. The Triumph of Life, II. 182ff. and 77-8. Compare too the figure impaled on the tree in the prose fragment The Assassins. It is interesting to pose the relationship of these images, particularly that in the Triumph of Life passage, to Dryden: Stay, I fancy I'm now turn'd wild, a Commoner of Nature; Of all forsaken, and forsaking all; Live in a shady Forest's Sylvan scene, Stretch'd at my length beneath some blasted Oke; I lean my head upon the Mossy Bark, And look just of a piece, as I grew from it: My uncomb'd Locks, matted like Misleto, Hang e're my hoary Face ... (John Dryden, All for Love, I, 252-60) 8. Cf. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, ch. 1, para. 3: First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them; and thus we come by those ideas we have, of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. 9. Cited in Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy (New York, 1973) p.79. 10. The Letters of Perry Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, vol. I (Oxford, 1964) pp. 99-100; letter 82, dated 11 June 1811. 11. Sir William Drummond, Academical Questions (1805): for his influence on Shelley see Hughes, The Nascent Mind, pp. 241-3. 'Academical' refers to the fact that the New Academy, successor to the Old Academy of Plato, was the home of the ancient Sceptics. 12. On Life, in Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, vol. VI, (reprinted New York, 1965; the 'Julian Edition') p. 197: 'But cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to each other.' 13. Ibid. 14. Cf. also Queen Mab, IV, 101-3 which pictures: The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp, But serving on the frightful gulf to glare, Rent wide beneath his footsteps. Notes 201 15. On Life, in Complete Works, vol. VI, p. 196. 16. Approaching the matter from the opposite direction, A. O. Lovejoy rightly says that the force of the monistic pathos is in some degree intelligible when one considers the nature of the implicit responses which talk about oneness produces. It affords, for example, a welcome sense of freedom, arising from a triumph over, or an absolution from, the troublesome cleavages and disjunctions of things .... The deliquescence of the sense - the often so fatiguing sense - of separate personality ... which comes in various ways ... is also capable of excitation, and of really powerful excitation, too, by a mere metaphysical theorem. (A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard, 1964) p. 13). Conversely, trance states or other modifications of consciousness may suggest an idealist universe, in terms as direct as those of Bishop Berkeley. For example, Humphry Davy experimented with the inhaling of nitrous oxide, and reports how he soon 'lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas.' On waking he exclaimed, 'Nothing exists but thoughts!­ the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!' (Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, vol. III (London, 1839-40) pp. 289-90). 17. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (London, 1961) pp. 381-2. 18. See David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London, 1974). 19. The fullest study of Shelley's Platonism is that by 1. A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, NC, 1949), a book marred by a certain monomania about its central conviction and by the notion that Shelley'S changing affinity with the Greek philosopher can be plotted on a multiple graph.
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