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Laughter As Sympathy in Percy Shelley's Poetics

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Laughter As Sympathy in Percy Shelley's Poetics Laughter as Sympathy in Percy Shelley’s Poetics Matthew Ward The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 2, June 2015, pp. 146-165 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/583753 [ Access provided at 3 Nov 2020 12:38 GMT from Ewha Womens University ] Laughter as Sympathy in Percy Shelley’s Poetics Matthew Ward THE DISCOVERY OF THE SCROPE DAVIES NOTEBOOK in 1976 unearthed a previously unknown sonnet by Percy Shelley addressing itself to laughter. Its inclusion in the notebook dates ‘To Laughter’ to the summer of 1816, when the Shelleys are in Switzerland.1 The poem accuses laughter of being deter- minedly scornful of aesthetic contemplation, and of adopting callous disre- gard towards the sympathetic feeling Shelley bases so much of his poetic philosophy upon: Thy friends were never mine thou heartless fiend: Silence and solitude and calm and storm, Hope, before whose veiled shrine all spirits bend In worship, and the rainbow vested form Of conscience, that within thy hollow heart Can find no throne – the love of such great powers Which has requited mine in many hours Of loneliness, thou ne’er hast felt; depart! Thou canst not bear the moon’s great eye, thou fearest A fair child clothed in smiles – aught that is high Or good or beautiful. – Thy voice is dearest To those who mock at Truth and Innocency; 1 For a history of ‘To Laughter’ see Neville Rogers, ‘The Scrope Davies “Shelley Find”’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 28 (1977) pp. 1–9; Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett, ‘The Byron and Shelley Notebooks in the Scrope Davies Find’, The Review of English Studies, 29 (Feb. 1978) pp. 36–49. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfv003 © The Author, 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: [email protected] LAUGHTER AS SYMPATHY IN SHELLEY 147 I, now alone, weep without shame to see How many broken hearts lie bare to thee.2 That laughter is inimical to Shelley’s ethical beliefs and aesthetic ambitions is implied in the way the Shakespearian sonnet works through antitheses, consigning laughter to an antagonistic relationship to tropes the poet praises elsewhere. Laughter will not accept hope, which is an essential human virtue in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, also composed while in Switzerland that summer. In September 1816, Shelley writes to Lord Byron, purporting to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that ‘Hope is a most awful duty, the nurse of all other virtues’.3 And he more or less repeats the dictum three years later to Maria Gisborne, describing hope as that ‘solemn duty which we owe alike to ourselves & to the world – a worship to the spirit of good within’.4 Laughter’s coldness towards ‘Silence and solitude’ suggests that it sneers at sublimity and the poet’s apprehension of it. Edmund Burke had high- lighted both as ways of discerning the sublime, and Shelley is clearly drawing on Burke’s writing here.5 As Timothy Webb and John Bleasdale also note, the allusion calls to mind ‘Mont Blanc’ (an early version of which appears in the Scrope Davies Notebook alongside ‘To Laughter’) and its faith in ‘Silence and solitude’ as part of an epistemology rooted in percep- tion.6 Central to the relationship between the mind and knowledge is the quiet born of solitude, while the need for absolute concentration in compos- ition and reading is typified by Shelley’s attention to the lyric form through- out his career. Laughter is disruptive of such contemplation within the poem, with its derisive ‘voice’, amplified by others ‘who mock’. Caricatured as a noise that overwhelms quiet acts of perception, it is personified too as an unsympathetic figure that finds feelings of transcendence amusing and so gleefully laughs at them. And while the speaker weeps in sympathy for hearts lying broken, laughter delights in the opportunity to ridicule those hearts. As such, the sonnet implies that laughter frequently dismantles the high feelings of impassioned poetry. It echoes anxieties of others at the time, 2 The Poems of Shelley, 4 vols. (London 1989–), vol. i: 1804–1817, ed. G. M. Matthews and Kelvin Everest, p. 520. Line references in the text are to this edition. 3 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford 1964) i. 504. 4 Ibid. ii. 125. 5 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T.Boulton (London 1958) p. 71. 6 Timothy Webb, ‘Shelley and the Ambivalence of Laughter’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge 1992) pp. 43–62: 49; John Bleasdale, ‘“To Laughter”: Shelley’s Sonnet and Solitude’, Romanticism on the Net,22 (2001); doi: 10.7202/005972ar. 148 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY epitomised by Hazlitt’s comments on wit and humour in his first lecture on English comic writers, that laughter works against the feeling and sublimity deemed most essential to serious and pathetic poetry.7 The depiction of laughter in the sonnet reflects Shelley’s feelings towards the ‘withering and perverting spirit of comedy’.8 Regularly ‘a perversion of sentiment’, it takes cruel pleasure in humiliating ‘human beings’ until ‘they are scarcely recognisable’ and ‘instead of being treated as what they really are, subjects of the deepest pity, they are brought forward as grotesque monstrosities to be laughed at’.9 During his brief discussion of comedy in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley notes that too often ‘we laugh from self- complacency and triumph instead of pleasure’.10 His attention is directed specifically at Restoration courtly comedy, which he felt acted to maintain authoritarian rule, bent to the will of ‘kingly power over liberty and virtue’.11 Unlike Byron, who finds Restoration comedy hilarious, Shelley’s response implies that his political beliefs trump any enjoyment the genre might be capable of providing. His own deployment of satire to denounce social and political forces he detests is recognition by Shelley of the power of laughter. But his squeamishness towards laughter derives from his fear that it corrodes the ethical principles of our nature. Ultimately, Shelley is deeply suspicious of laughter when it reveals our capacity to rejoice in the suffering of others. The idea that laughter is anti-sympathetic has a long history in western thought, and stretches at least as far back as Plato’s Republic and Phaedrus. In England, Thomas Hobbes’s strident remarks are the most notorious example of this assumption and cast a long shadow over eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought, as laughter becomes a rhetorical weapon in the battle over human nature between Hobbesian egoism and Shaftesburian benevolence. Hobbes argues in Leviathan that the ‘grimaces called LAUGHTER’ are derived from a sense of ‘sudden glory’ when people notice ‘some deformed thing in another’,in‘comparison whereof they suddenly applaud them- selves’.12 He admits that we laugh mercilessly at ourselves as well, and 7 William Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour’,inThe Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P.Howe, 21 vols. (London 1930–4) vol. vi. 8 Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley,inThe Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F.B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols. (London 1924–34) viii. 81. 9 Ibid. 10 In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (London 2002) p. 520. 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,inThe Collected English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London 1997) iii. 46. LAUGHTER AS SYMPATHY IN SHELLEY 149 acknowledges in Treatise on Human Nature that ‘Laughter without offence’ is pos- sible when ‘absurdities and infirmities’ are ‘abstracted from persons’ so that the ‘company may laugh together’.13 Despitethisslightlymoresociableangle, laughter remains for Hobbes principally a divisive form of mockery. Of course, there’s laughter, and then there’s laughter. So whilst ridicule naturally remains pervasive in the Romantic period and is most obviously in evidence in its satire, as significant to the time is enthusiasm for laughter’s gregariousness, which it is felt might point to our natural benevolence. These contrasting strains can be heard in Prometheus Unbound. Early on there is the laughing malevolence of the Furies as they jeer at the Titan’s suffering, telling him triumphantly that they ‘will but laugh into thy lidless eyes’, and ‘laugh thee to scorn’.14 But the fourth act’s vision of an unfettered world enacts rapture through an outburst of laughter: Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains, My cloven fire-crags, sound exulting fountains, Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter. The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses Of the deep air’s unmeasured wildernesses Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.15 This sympathetic movement is not part of a humorous or comic discourse. Instead it is suggestive of a collective process of shared experience: what Henri Bergson appreciates as laughter’s collective creativity when he identi- fies how ‘Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo … it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, some- thing beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.’16 Shelley associates the Utopian vision of a liber- ated Earth with laughter that is joyously unbound, ceaselessly and abidingly flowing throw all things. In such a moment, he recognises laughter as part of a process of freedom, one which imagines this ‘animation of delight’ (l. 322) to be ‘inextinguishable’. The laughter moves between earth and celestial spheres since the moon feels conscious of how it penetrates my frozen frame, And passes with the warmth of flame, 13 Treatise on Human Nature, ibid., iv.
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