“ All these people that you read and people read in schools and universities and all those people that were writing at the same time, in just about that period: in those twenty or thirty years, all these people were infected with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and wrote about the revolutionary upsurge. Even Wordsworth in his youth used to write about the menace of gold and the power of reason. People used to talk about how reason could be used to undermine superstition; how individual working people are as good as the people who dominate them and so on and so on. And those things happened because of the French Revolution. And the French Revolution, of course, terrified people in England, particularly as it went on and developed, and as the left in the French Revolution began to seize power and consolidate it.
And what happened in the British ruling class was a great terror took them, seized them with terror. They were terrified that the Jacobin ideas, the revolutionary ideas, the ideas of reason as opposed to superstition would start to grip people in Britain. And therefore, they moved troops into the cities, and they unleashed the most terrible repression right across the whole country. All different kinds of spies were put into the cities; put into workplaces in order to detect whether or not there was any evidence of any Jacobin or revolutionary ideas of one kind or another.
Commemoration to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.
Commemoration to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.
And Shelley developed in that atmosphere.
This is the point even at Eton where he refused to take part in the fagging[38]operation. Even at Oxford where he challenged the rights of people to tell him whether he should believe in God or not. Those ideas developed in his mind because of the French Revolution. And what comes out of all his poetry?
The first thing that comes out of all his poetry is a deep, intense hatred and contempt for authority. For people who put themselves in authority without any responsibility for the people over whom they put themselves in authority. A contempt for those who have become masters of other people, not because the people have chosen them but as a result either of some superstition or most of all because of their wealth. All of his poetry is about that.
Queen Mab, which is the poem that he wrote when he was eighteen, bursts with rage and fury at all the drones, the sycophants, the parasites and the people who were in charge. I can’t read these poems out to you in full. I might one day have to have a meeting about eight or nine hours long, and then all these poems can be read out in full.
But the whole purpose of this meeting is to get you to go back and get hold of Queen Mab and read it—particularly the central cantos. It’s a story of a young woman asleep and a faerie coming from above, a great spirit coming and taking her so that she can look upon the world. He takes her right out into the stratosphere so that she can look down upon the world and see all the things that go on: all the kings and priests and statesmen and parasites that operate there.
The whole of his poetry bursts out in rage. All the way through his life, he couldn’t stand the idea of illegitimate authority.
And then there is his greatest poem of all: The Mask of Anarchy, the poem that he wrote about the massacre at Peterloo in 1819 when the trade unionists who were meeting in the fields outside Manchester were mowed down by the yeomanry on the orders of the local magistrate.
Shelley wrote in this poem about the Tory government that was in power at that time; about Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary; about Sidmouth the Home Secretary; about Eldon, the Lord Chancellor.[39] He wrote about these people in language which is so furious and so simple that it has come down to us all the way through the ages. Quoting Mask of Anarchy:
"And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.”[40]
“I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
He hated the whole damn lot of them. Every single one of them that fell into any one of those categories or any other category which are parasitical, in one way or another, upon the working people. He loathed and hated them. The whole of his poetry reeks with that hatred. But the other point is this: that it wasn’t just a simple hatred of authority. He understood the reasons for that authority—he understood the central cause of that authority.”
“And I should say this, just in case anyone thinks at any stage that I think Shelley was a saint or a marvelous creature that was blameless in his own life or in his writings. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, that little bit of drivel and doggerel that I quoted earlier about the kisses and the seductions. That type of thing runs through not only his poetry but also through a lot of his life. I think from time to time, and the fellow was prepared to “help himself,” he wasn’t prepared to assume responsibility. It was easy enough for him to say: “the answer is separation,”[59] but the problem is, do both parties want to be separated?—that often is the problem. And he didn’t always apply his mind to that, in the terms of the equality of people. And therefore, I think that when you look at his life, and the way he lived his life, there is none of the perfection and the stringency of the ideals that appear in his poetry.[60] And although there is some of it in his life, he certainly doesn’t live up to it.
But the point really is this, that the poetry and the writings and the things that he believed in, were there. There is a guide and a marker as to how people should determine their lives and how people could determine their lives if society wasn’t founded on constraint right the way through—all those economic restraints and domestic constraints that exist. And then people say, and they say it often with a lot of justifications, that there is a lot of talk about Shelley as a great revolutionary poet that doesn’t fit the facts; it doesn’t fit a lot of the things that Shelley wrote about. There were many, many aspects of Shelley’s writing, which appear to us to be quite crudely reformist, revisionist, if you want to use that kind of language, or even elitist if you want to use that kind of language. But there’s a whole number of things that he wrote, which indicate a rather different kind of approach when compared to the one that I have been talking about. Can I find it?
An early printing of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.
An early printing of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.
What he wrote in the Preface was that he was interested in reform and change in society. And he said he wanted to write only for an educated and intelligent group of people so that they can understand his intentions.[61] There’s a whole lot of his writing which talks about the dangers of the mob and dangers of doing things too fast. For example: the pamphlet that I mentioned earlier, A Philosophical View of Reform, and another one very similar to it which he wrote in 1817 called A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote. As a matter fact in these writings, Shelley comes out against universal suffrage, against the thing which many other reformers were advocating; reformers who were much less revolutionary in my opinion than Shelley. He comes out against universal suffrage on the ground that no one wants to move too fast, that you can’t be quite sure about what the mob will do because they are not educated people and they’re not intelligent or sensitive people and they might make nonsense of universal suffrage and therefore, we ought to be careful about it.
And it is no good talking about Shelley in an idealistic or utopian matter—hagiography, writing about the man as though everything that he said fitted into the proper Socialist Workers Party line. In fact a lot of things go right against the kinds of things that I’ve been supporting. How can such clearly contradictory ideas such as those he espouses in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, for example opposing universal suffrage, how can they be reconciled with the rest of his radical philosophy. Let me put it this way: a number of people, and particularly people who come to the revolutionary cause out of the ruling classes—a species, with which I have some familiarity[62]—people such as this are like Shelley, who was all his life, or most of his life, very much isolated from the working people about whom he wrote and for whom he wanted to change the world. Such people, according to the degree to which they’re isolated from the working class, can have a “fear of the mob.”[63]
Now, I don’t know, but there may be one or two people here that have not read a novel by George Eliot[64] called Felix Holt. Now, some people have boils and some people have piles, and that’s very unfortunate. And some people haven’t read Felix Holt and that is also unfortunate [laughter]. The good news is that you can put that right. You can read it; but you don’t have to tell anyone that you haven’t read it before, and you can read it and pretend you read it ten years ago [laughter]. I know that’s what most you should have done because it’s a marvelous novel, a wonderful radical novel.
Felix Holt is about a man who is perhaps the nicest man ever written about in the whole of literature. You can’t help reading Felix Holt without feeling a fantastic affection for him. He was lovely. Everybody loved him. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be with the workers, and he didn’t like all the hypocrisy of the society, and he was wonderful. There was one thing about him and there is also one thing about George Eliot, and that was they both had this “fear of the mob”; uncertainty about unleashing the mob. The same uncertainty Shelley expresses in A Philosophical View Reform. Shelley was uncertain about universal suffrage and had debates with Willian Godwin about universal suffrage. Godwin being a Methodist minister was in favour of universal suffrage. Like Felix Holt, Shelley was afraid of the mob. And if there is one nightmare, the traditional nightmare of the bourgeois novelist or poet, or for that matter the average Labour Member of Parliament [laughter], it is the nightmare of the mob in action. There is a passage in Felix Holt I want to point out. It is a Saturday, and he’s sitting there thinking about his ideas, and he realizes there is an election underway and that there is a riot[65] [laughter]! He thinks, “Oh my God, there’s a riot!,” and he leaves home to keep the people in check, and he talks to them about what they should do. But a lot of people are stampeding, demanding and picketing, and kicking Clive Jenkins in the balls[66] [laughter] and all that kind of thing. Shouting down Albert Booth.[67] All these things are happening and he’s telling the people, “For god’s sake, watch it, don’t do it. You can’t do this! It’s the mob!” And he’s standing there and here come the yeomanry, and they shoot him because they think he’s the leader [laughter]!
An early edition of Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical , first published in 1866.
An early edition of Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, first published in 1866.
That’s the terror of every bourgeois radical. That's the nightmare that they have: they wake up sweating in the night [laughter]. All the Labour MPs, all the reformers, they wake up and think, “My god, have we unleashed the mob by what we’re doing? [Laughter.] Shelley! You’re preparing the sea of blood! Remember what Godwin said? Perhaps that’s what’s gonna happen. The mob! We’ve got to watch out for the mob! The mob aren’t intelligent!” And all these prejudices sank in to the ruling class mind, that sensitive, intelligent and ruling class mind, the one that doesn’t go along with his class’ ideology. But then that sort of person comes to some other ideology, some reforming or radical ideology, and then he finds he’s worried about what he unleashes. Just like the people who 40 years later read Felix Holt. Nice, radical bourgeois people read George Eliot, read Felix Holt and thought oh it’s the nightmare! The mob, the election riot and Holt who is shot through the shoulder and then put in prison, by the way, for leading the riot in the first place[68] [laughter].
And that sort of idea is in some of Shelley. People aren’t—they aren’t perfect. And they don’t have ideas which are pure. And there’s some part of Shelley all the time forging its way out, here and there, in some of his poems. You know, there’s a passage in The Mask of Anarchy where he says the answer to violent oppression is to fold your arms when the yeomanry come next time.[69] He’s talking about the people that had been mowed down at Peterloo, women and children, murdered at Peterloo. And he says, “next time, fold your arms resolutely, thinking about the laws of England, the good old laws of England. Stand there and talk about the law of England, and stand there and let them mow you down and then maybe everything will be all right but whatever you do, don’t unleash yourself.”
And that was one part of him. Of course, there was another side of him, the side that I talked about already, the side of him that says, “Yes. You’ve got to get them [laughter]. You’ve got to move and get them.[70]” There are two sides to his personality, constantly coming out.
Shelley wrote a whole series of letters to a woman called Elizabeth Hitchener when he was a young man. He had a long correspondence with her. And I’ll just read out one section of it but this is typical of his other side, a side that was different from the reformist side, the side that was worried about the mob. There was another side to him as well. Shelley wrote: “They may seethe and they may riot, and they may sin at the last moment. The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry (of the rich), till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take ruinous vengeance on their oppressors.”[71] “Ruinous vengeance”? What the hell is that? That’s Felix Holt saying exactly what you shouldn’t do! [laughter]. In Shelley’s poem Swellfoot the Tyrant, which is a wonderful poem, which has been sneered at by a lot of people who think it isn’t funny,[72] what he has, is a lot of pigs. [laughter]. The pigs are snorting away and doing everything they are told and then suddenly the pigs turn into people and all the oppressors, all the priests and the parasites and speculators and industrialists and people of that kind and commercialists, they turn into pigs. And the pigs turn into people. And then you have a fantastic scene at the end of the poem in which he has the pigs driven out and killed. What happened to all this talk that you must never take people’s lives, that you mustn’t be a retributionist and you mustn’t seek revenge?[73] And then he goes completely out of school, and now he’s ultra-left in his attitude to what they should do to the pigs[74]: get them out, drive them out, pin them down and stick them in the back! Anything! Just get them! When Shelley is aroused to fury by what he sees going on around him, you see a very different attitude to violence.
And really it comes to a climax, this division, this contrast between the way in which he thought about revolutions and oppressions and the mob: all these things come to a climax when he writes Prometheus Unbound. Now that’s a very difficult poem to read. I have lots of people who’ve come up to me since we had the meeting at Skegness[75] last year and they say, “Well, I tried to read this thing, this Prometheus Unbound, but it is very difficult to read.” And so it is. It is very difficult to read. But the most important thing about it in my view, is that it brings that contradiction—between his fear of the mob and the need for revolution—to a head and forces it through to some kind of conclusion.
And this is the story of Prometheus. I was a Greek scholar. I’ll admit it [laughter]. I was a Greek scholar at school. I was very, very good at Greek; we didn’t have to be good at anything else. And, well, I’m not actually all that good at it [laughter]. But anyways, I was a Greek scholar, and we were taught this about Prometheus[76]: we were taught that it was a Greek legend. And it was simply this: that there was a man, Prometheus, who dared to say that Jupiter was not god of the Earth. We were taught this was an absolute scandal, and that Prometheus was a really revolting, subversive figure. And he was treated in a way in which subversive figures ought to be treated. He defied Jupiter, he dared to invent fire, and he had the idea that the science of this invention might advance the cause of mankind instead of advancing the cause of Jupiter. Jupiter’s view was that the science was really a radical idea in the first place, that we would be better off without science of any kind in order that his rule could be more secure. But Prometheus disobeyed Jupiter, invented fire and gave science to humanity and he was treated in a way in which all naughty school boys ought to be treated, which is to be chained to a rock for seven million years [laughter]. And every evening a vulture came and gnawed out his liver which would grow again by the following morning and then the vulture would come again and gnaw it out again. And it was extremely painful. I understand the Turkish authorities in Cyprus are looking into this form of dealing with recalitrants of one kind or another [laughter].
And the whole thing was taught to us in that way. The original story was written, as a matter of fact, by a man called Aeschylus and it was called Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Unbound.[77] And he did have an idea about how people should rebel against authority. But we were not taught that. I read the whole bloody thing in Greek.[78] I never came to that conclusion; I never even started to come to that conclusion. But anyways, there we are. Here is a man in revolt against authority and he’s chained to a rock.
Shelley writes a poem about this man chained to the rock and how his lover Asia seeks to get him off the rock. He represents oppressed mankind. Now Asia loved militants. Richard Holmes, whose book is the only one worth reading on the subject,[79] describes her love as militant. She is trying to get him out of there. That’s the point: how the hell do you get him out of there? What do you do to get him out of that situation?[80]
It’s very interesting the way in which critics write about Prometheus Unbound. Because there is another character in this play; in this play/poem.[81] Prometheus Unbound contains some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in the whole history of English literature. But you have here another character called Demogorgon.[82] But what is Demogorgon? You can read all the books you want. You can try looking him up in the index. Everybody discusses it. Who is this Demogorgon? They tell you it is a spirit, some kind of weird thing that Asia goes to and appeals to, to help her save Prometheus. You see her man is in trouble [laughter]. And in the same way you would go to an altar or to some deity and say: “now who can help me save my man” [laughter].
But actually the original Greek actually assists us here. Because the word “Demogorgon,” as I understand it and as Richard Holmes understands it and as no one else has yet understood it [laughter], comes from two words in Greek: demos, that means “the people” and gorgon, which means “the monster.” He is the “people monster” [laughter].
Now where does Asia go to save Prometheus? She goes to the “people monster.” She goes down to his cave in Act 2, Scene 4 of Prometheus Unbound which is one of the most fantastic passages in the whole of literature. I am going to find this even if it takes me half an hour to find it. I bloody well got to find this. Act 1 is extremely difficult to read and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t read it and if I were you I would go straight to Act 2, Scene 4 [laughter]. Quoting Prometheus Unbound:[83]
“Act 2, Scene 4—The Cave of Demogorgon. Asia and Panthea.
Panthea: What veiléd form sits on that ebon throne?
Asia: The veil has fallen.
Panthea: I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
— Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
Demogorgon: Ask what thou wouldst know.
Asia: What canst thou tell?
Demogorgon: All things thou dar’st demand.
Asia: Who made the living world?
Demogorgon: God.
Asia: Who made all
That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will,
Imagination?
Demogorgon: God: Almighty God.
Asia: Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one belovéd heard in youth alone,
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,
And leaves this peopled earth a solitude
When it returns no more?
Demogorgon: Merciful God.
Asia: And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things,
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels
Under the load towards the pit of death;
Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;
Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech
Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?
Demogorgon: He reigns.
Asia: Utter his name: a world pining in pain
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.”
And Asia whips him with agitation, whips him with it. She asks a simple question first: “Is it God who done it? Well, then, what about all the dirty things that are going on? What are you gonna do about that?” All the way through this passage she is whipping him and agitating him.
“Asia: Whom calledst thou God?
Demogorgon: I spoke but as ye speak,
For Jove is the supreme of living things.
Asia: Who is the master of the slave?”
Asking the question, “who is the master of the slave?” And on and on and on until she says:
“Prometheus shall arise
Henceforth the sun of this rejoicing world:
When shall the destined hour arrive?”
Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The Pursuit.
Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The Pursuit.
And what happens after all of her agitation, her constant agitation? What happens after Asia demands that Demogorgon bring new ideas to her that he come out of his old religious superstitions and backward ideas, his old racist ideas? What happens? What happens is that two cars emerge out of the cave. Two cars representing change, representing the powers that are going to go after Jupiter and who? deal with him. In one way or another, they’re going to deal with him. I’m not gonna read that out to you. I’ll leave that for you to read. But what I will read is Richard Holmes’ description of what those two cars mean, what they represent. And here is the synthesis, if you like, the coming to grips with the problems that he had all his life about the masses. Would the masses respond and what would happen if they did? What was the problem of the mob? All these things. [Quoting Holmes]:
“There are two chariots mentioned: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process in society is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which “ruins” cities. The etymological reading is surely relevant here. It is the eruption of ‘Demogorgon,’ the ‘people monster.’
Yet there is also the second chariot with its “delicate strange tracery,” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope.” This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus, and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’s curse. The end of Act II leaves both those possibilities open historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends on man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case it is inevitable, and it is to be celebrated.”[84]
From the 1813 Queen Mab edition published by Shelley himself. Foot no doubt has a beautifully bound copy from a later time.
From the 1813 Queen Mab edition published by Shelley himself. Foot no doubt has a beautifully bound copy from a later time.
Now we don’t say that it is inevitable. But the point is this: that in either case the synthesis there, the dialectic if you like, of the argument about the mob—that the mob might go and supersede itself—is really met in that great passage there. Everyone says that it is the greatest passage ever, but nobody understands what it’s about! They don’t understand what’s going on in his head because they have separated Shelley from his ideas. They don’t understand what the imagery is about. They say: “this is a very beautiful passage; learn it off by heart and shut up.” If you ask any questions they’ll tell you: “Demogorgon, yes that’s all very interesting, Demogorgon’s rather like Mary, the mother of Jesus, that’s the sort of creature Demogorgon is.” They unleash all kinds of fanciful ideas about what Demogorgon stands for.[85] But the fact of the matter is, that you do have a synthesis there coming out of the dialectic of the argument. The fact of the matter is that when you rise up, you can have civil war, bloody revolution and all kinds of violence on the one hand. On the other hand, if you’re strong enough, powerful and forceful enough, you can do it by cutting down on the amount of violence and do it with that gentle “dove-eyed charioteer.”[86] Either way, probably, if the truth be known, it will be a mixture of both. But either way it is to be celebrated. Either way it has to be supported. And the point about Shelley is this: that although there is his statement about writing for elites that aren’t gonna do the job,[87] there is no conclusive proof that whenever he came to test the two ideas.[88] that he came out on that side.[89] There is no evidence at all for this. You read for instance Stephen Spender. Oh, Stephen Spender [laughter]. Stephen Spender, you know, that old Stalinist hack from the thirties who couldn’t even bear to be a Stalinist and who gave that up and then just sort of driveled on in the Times Literary Supplement. And he writes that there’s lots of proof that Shelley at the end of his life gave up his revolutionary ideals.That’s not what happened at all. Prometheus Unbound was written right at the end of his life. There are also all the great poems of 1819 including The Mask of Anarchy and other shorter poems including one that starts off, “An old mad, blind, despised and dying king.”[90] That’s not the line of a man who’s giving up the struggle. His attacks on the Castlereagh administration comes right at the end of his life. Those things happened. And the people that understand Shelley, understand that he would have gone on to develop these themes. The tragedy is that he did die when he did, otherwise he would have gone on to develop his ideas among the rising working-class movement that was taking place.
