Chapter C: K. S. M (6)

If you are in danger of believing in the magic of Blake, of treating him as our pious grandparents treated the Hebrew prophets, you may recover your senses by considering his other art; for in that the difference between his artistic failures and successes is plain. I myself believe that Blake was the greatest master of design among all modern artists, that for the shaping imagination you must go back to Tintoret to find his equal. But, whereas in poetry he freed himself easily from all influences foreign to his own character and genius, in his other art he was free only intermittently and blindly. There are two kinds of drawing which I will call rhythmical and constructional, although, of course, there is rhythm in all good constructional drawing and some construction in all good rhythmical drawing. But the difference is one of kind, it is the difference between Cimabue and Michelangelo. Cimabue expresses himself mainly in rhythm to which the descriptive shapes of things are subordinate--it is enough if you can recognise them. Michelangelo's line itself constructs, it tells us how things are made and insists upon their functions. It is the line natural to an age eager for consecutive thought; it is, as it were, an arguing line. Now, Blake was by nature, by conviction, by habit, a rhythmical draughtsman, and all his best work is rhythmical rather than constructive; he is not arguing with us, he is telling us, in line as in words. It is enough for him if we can recognise his shapes for what they are; he expresses his real content in the sway of lines, as if it were a dance or a gesture, and he is most at his ease when his shapes are like flames blown in the wind, almost transformed by his own emotion. And yet he was not often at his ease in drawing, for all his life he was, like Fuseli, haunted by the ghost of Michelangelo, whose actual works he had never seen. Even he was subdued by the prestige of a master whose method was poison to his genius. In poetry he could be inspired by the past art of his own country, and in his earliest poems alone does he speak for a few words, in the language of his time. "And Phœbus fired my vocal rage"; but his drawings are infested by formulæ taken second-hand from Michelangelo. It is only now and then, in the decorations to books which he printed himself, in the magnificent woodcuts for Thornton's Pastorals, in some of the Dante illustrations, that he quite frees himself from a pretence of constructional drawing. If you would excel in that, you must study the particular fact passionately, you must get your construction from the fact, not from your own mind; but Blake, like so many imitators of Michelangelo, did not study the fact; he gives us a pretence of constructional drawing in formulæ often struggling to be rhythmical and failing because they are formulæ of construction. There he is like St. Paul, who sometimes spoils matter that should be prophetic with a pretence of Greek dialectic, who makes a bad argument for the Resurrection out of an image. Even in his most famous design, the Morning Stars of the Book of Job, the rhythm of the wings and garments is cramped by the drawing, anatomical without freshness, of the bodies. Compare this with the last drawing but one of the series, where rhythm is master of all, and you will see how Blake, even in his great maturity, only practised his true method by accident, and when there was no association to mislead him; the nude was a snare to him, and seldom could he find a method of his own for it. Often he was merely an inferior Fuseli; and bits of Fuseli obtrude even in his finer works. Nothing could be more tiresome than the drawing of some of his faces, and no one could for a moment suppose that there was any prophetic infallibility in these failures; they are as dull as late Roman sculpture or the efforts of Reynolds in the grand style.

But, if Blake is not infallible as a draughtsman, he is not infallible at all; for he himself would sometimes claim infallibility in all his works; by the common infirmity of prophets, when they cease to be prophetic, he assumed a status different from that of the artist, and so was induced to set down whatever came into his mind, as if an angel were dictating to him or he had command of the pencil of the Holy Ghost. But the artist and the prophet are both what they are by effort not by status; if they rely on status they become bores or charlatans; and that is true of all human beings, of Blake no less than of Habakkuk. If ever he seems to have written nonsense, then we must take it to be nonsense until we find sense in it; we must pay no heed if we are told that the seeming nonsense is symbolism.

Even in his finest poems we must not assume a clearer purpose than we find. Take, for instance, the third verse of the Tiger:

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

We may persuade ourselves that there is some peculiar virtue in the two broken questions of the last line; but the original draft of the poem[9] proves that Blake did not at first mean them to be broken questions at all. They were continued in the next stanza:

[9] _The original draft is given in the excellent Oxford
edition of Blake's _Poetical Works_, published by Mr.
Milford, and edited by Mr. John Sampson, at the price,
in 1913, of 1s. 6d. net. In spite of the price, it is
the most complete edition of the poems, and contains
all the shorter Prophetic Books, including the French
Revolution, with extracts from the longer ones._

Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe, etc.

Blake seeing, what was obvious, that this did not promise well and was leading nowhere, gave it up and changed the punctuation of the preceding stanza which had run simply--"What dread hand and what dread feet"--to its present form, so as to finish off the stanza to the eye, if not to the mind.

It is a masterful way out of a difficulty, but it takes the risk that we shall ask what the dread hand and feet are there to do? The original draft tells us--to fetch the tiger's heart from the furnace deep; but in the poem as we know it we may guess for ourselves, and there is no answer. This is not the dark sublimity of the prophet, but the wilfulness of the poet, who, having hit upon a fine sounding line, prefers it to sense. (There is also another reading which may come from Blake himself--"What dread hand forged thy dread feet?" It is not "prophetic," but it does make sense.)

It does not matter much, for the rhythm of the poem carries one through obscurities of detail; but the broken questions are not an added beauty or sublimity, they are merely Blake's way out of a difficulty that may beset any poet.

So I come, gradually and cautiously, to the Prophetic Books themselves, and to my contention that they too are to be judged, like the works of the Hebrew Prophets, as literature, since they were written for men to read. We must make a reasonable allowance for all mystics; they try to say what is very hard to say, what they have seen as in a glass darkly. If you think them worth reading at all, you believe that they are concerned with a reality men do not perceive naturally and immediately with the senses, a reality that we are aware of, if at all, only by hints and whispers. There are no commonly accepted sense-data for this reality, upon which we can reason as we can reason about the movements of the stars. Men are most fully aware of it when they are in an exalted state of mind--a state which expresses itself in images rather than in syllogisms. You may say, of course, that this state of mind is "purely subjective" and therefore only of artistic value; but the mystic himself denies that. He believes that he is aware of a reality not himself, though himself is a part of it; and aware of it, not by the normal use of the senses, but by a more immediate perception of the spirit. He knows it, perhaps, through sense perceptions, but by means of a faculty beyond them; he knows it with the whole of himself, that self which is not often enough of a unity to attain to this kind of knowledge. This you too must believe, or at least not refuse to believe, if you are to take him seriously; but the mystic, even if he does speak to us of an independent reality, speaks with a personal expression of his own, like the artist. Lâo-tsze has put it better than anyone: "It is the way of Heaven not to speak, but it knows how to obtain an answer." When he says Heaven he implies an independent reality; but men make other men aware of it by the answer they give to it, and this answer is personal to them.

So a man must convince us of his experience of this Heaven, this reality not perceived by the senses, by his own expression of it, his own answer. He must say what moves us by the ordinary means of expression; he must not pretend that he has a secret to tell us which we can understand only if he will play his game with his counters, his symbols, and allegories. If he has seen heaven, then it knows how to obtain an answer from him, exoteric in its power if esoteric in its meaning, and leading men into its meaning by its power. The power is in the answer, if the meaning is in the heaven he has seen, and that heaven is to be known by its fruits.

You must, of course, read a mystic with attention; but you should be able to gather his meaning as you read; it is to be found in each sentence and in the whole of each work, not by reference to some other work; for it is the mark of a bad writer not to be able to say what he has to say in the sentence he is writing, to give us always jam yesterday, or jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. Yet that is what the Blake-fanatics offer us in the Prophetic Books. You cannot understand this unless you know that the key to it is in that. You must grasp Blake's "system" if you are to profit by him. They are like the Gnostics for whom nothing in the Gospels meant what it seemed to mean; they alone could give you the key to Christ's inner meaning.

Master Eckhart says that the eternal birth which God the father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time and in human nature. "St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But, if it happen not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me." So what matters for the mystic, and his readers, is that the eternal truth shall happen and be expressed in him, in his actual words. We must not be told that we can find it by turning from one work to another and by piecing them all together. He must utter it sentence by sentence, and it must happen in his sentences, with pain and labour perhaps, but still here and now and in these very words.

In Blake's Prophetic Books sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not, and often Blake by his very method seems to prevent it from happening. He has the weakness of many mystics, the desire for a vast geometrical system equivalent to the reality he believes himself to be aware of. Such a system, if once a man will abandon his mind to it, can unroll itself almost automatically, like a fugue. But many fugues are empty of content; they persuade the composer that he is saying something with the mechanical inevitability of their form; and they may also persuade the hearer. It is the very mechanism that prevents him from saying anything and the hearer from seeing its emptiness. We do not yet understand that automatism of the mind which can produce form without content so easily; the automatism of improvisation in many arts, which you find in some cubist pictures, in much music, and in Prophetic Books of all ages, especially in the Bible. Blake himself speaks of it, with seeming inconsistency, in his preface to _Jerusalem_: "When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place." You may ask how there could be this choice and study where the verse was dictated; but Blake means, no doubt, to describe a process of writing half-conscious and half-unconscious, as a composer might choose to write a fugue and then let it write itself. We may use Sheridan's words of this method: "Easy writing makes damned hard reading"; and _Jerusalem_ is not easy to read.

Yet it contains great passages and ideas, of which Messrs. Maclagan and Russell give a very clear account in their edition of it. Like all the great mystics, Blake was a foreteller of the discoveries of modern psychology; he knew the evils of "suppression"--Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires--and his story, in so far as there is one, is the story of the human mind in its effort to reach unity, not by suppression but by "sublimation." Yet it seems to me that his ideas often lost their way in the myth which he made about them; it is like allegorical painting in which there is a conflict between the allegory and the people and things represented, and a sacrifice of one conflicting element to the other. In Blake's story you have to remember that the characters are not men and women but different parts or faculties of the human mind; this requires a kind of double attention fatal in itself to the experience of a work of art, a double attention like that sometimes demanded by symphonic poems, in which you have to remember the story while you are listening to the music. If you are writing about the faculties of the human mind it must be best, both for yourself and for your readers, to call them by their names and to see them as themselves; so will you think most clearly and so will the reader understand most easily.

The subject-matter of _Jerusalem_ is really philosophy and psychology, and it is better expressed in the prose sentences of the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ than in myth. This should be read first by those who wish to understand Blake's ideas. Like Nietzsche, he went "beyond good and evil." Good according to the religious, he says, is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy; but for Blake himself the conflict between this active and passive is the real evil; it is what makes men prefer dreams to reality. By the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ he means the reconciliation of reason and energy and the destruction of the delusive, dreamer's, sense of a sin which yet allures. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. The pride of the Peacock is the glory of God. Exuberance is beauty. Energy is eternal delight. "Those who restrain Desire," he says, "do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling." To Blake Christ means the harmonious man in whom desire is master, and uses reason as an instrument. From this follows his belief, which is the belief underlying all religion, that true, supreme and harmonious desire is for reality, and that from it alone can reality be discovered. "Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth." But, of course, belief to Blake means real belief, belief of the whole self, belief that is acted upon, not the acceptance of anything on authority. "I asked--Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied--All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything." Firm persuasion is that unity of the self which, for Blake as for all mystics, is salvation.

Blake is united to Christianity by his mystical doctrine of forgiveness; that is what makes him one of the great designers or creators of Christianity, those who know what Christ himself meant, in whom his passion is born anew, and to whom his theology is natural truth. This doctrine expresses itself in Blake's poetry without symbol; we need no key to understand it, and, whenever it possesses him, it lifts him to its own height and clearness. The evil of unforgivingness, to him, is in the remembrance of sin which keeps the sin itself alive:

To record the sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down
In a remembrance of the sin, is a woe and a horror,
A brooder of an evil day, and a Sun rising in blood.
Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of sin.

That is so, whether a man remembers the sin of others or his own; and he who remembers the sin of others will remember his own. The sense of sin comes of the conflict between reason and desire; what we have to do is to end that conflict and attain to supreme desire and firm persuasion; thinking of the conflict only perpetuates it. The religion of Jesus was for Blake freedom from the past, and we attain to it by forgetting the sins of others; then we can forgive, and forget, our own past selves. Hence his doctrine that Jesus, the child of desire, was born in the forgiveness of sin; and the most beautiful passage in _Jerusalem_ is the forgiveness of Mary by Joseph and her song that follows, "O Forgiveness and Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I should never have known Thee: If I were unpolluted I should never have glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." There is the same doctrine in the last section of the Everlasting Gospel, and it runs all through the Songs of Innocence and Experience. God Himself for Blake, as for Christ, is, by the very logic of the idea God, He who pities and forgives, He who blots out the past; the divine energy pours itself out in pity and forgiveness, making life and growth and beauty out of sin itself, justifying even evil, since, by the forgiving and forgetting of it, it is changed into a good more subtle, more entrancing, more assured of an infinite increase than any pure good that needs no change or forgiveness.

In his expressions of this doctrine Blake rises above all our poets by reason of the richness of his mastered content. He is simpler and deeper, more passionate and more philosophic, and attains in art to that harmony which he foretells in life. When I think of it, I am in danger myself of seeing in him the one prophet, the one poet, the infallible. I am sure, at least, that he will seem greater through all the new discoveries and enlarged experience of posterity.

SHELLEY AND HIS PUBLISHERS

(_With Some New Letters_)

By ROGER INGPEN

Shelley's transactions with his publishers were numerous; the books of no great English poet, and certainly none whose literary career at the most extended for not more than thirteen years, can have borne the names of so many separate firms. Until he placed his poems in the hands of the Olliers, almost every book was issued by a new publisher. Every one of his works was a failure, and only one went into a second edition; his wide fame as a poet was entirely posthumous. Although none of Shelley's publishers was sufficiently interested to repeat the experience of issuing a second book by him, he was not discouraged by this want of sympathy. He continued until the end to write and to print his works at his own expense, and, if possible, to find publishers for them. In the absence of a publisher he issued them himself. He began and ended by verse-writing, but in the interval his work was varied enough, comprising novels, drama, philosophy, satire, religious polemics, and politics. In recalling some facts connected with Shelley's literary enterprises a curious repetition of names and incidents will be noticeable. There were two separate publishers of the name of Stockdale with whom he treated, one in Pall Mall and the other in Dublin. There was an Eton and an Eaton, the former a printer in Dublin, and the latter the publisher of the Third Part of Paine's _Age of Reason_, on behalf of whom Shelley wrote his _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_. Stockdale, of Pall Mall, and Munday, of Oxford, both listened with astonishment to his unrestrained conversation on matters of religion, and endeavoured to lead him into an orthodox frame of mind. His boyish appearance and engaging enthusiasm undoubtedly made a strong appeal to them. There was a prolonged similarity in the fate of some of his early productions. Practically the whole edition of the _Victor and Cazire_ volume was destroyed at the author's request, and _The Necessity of Atheism_ and the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ shared a like fate, though without Shelley's consent.

In the year 1809 Shelley and his cousin, Tom Medwin, wrote a poem in the style of Scott's narrative verse on _The Wandering Jew_. It was sent to Scott's publisher, Ballantyne, of Edinburgh, who replied that it was "better suited to the character and liberal feelings of the English than the bigoted spirit" which the writer declared "yet pervades many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter Scott is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual and evangelical magazines and institutions for having promulgated atheistical doctrines with _The Lady of the Lake_." This astonishing statement was evidently an excuse for declining _The Wandering Jew_, which found no publisher during Shelley's lifetime. He was, however, at that date busily occupied with his novel _Zastrozzi_, which he offered to Longmans. He may have been drawn to that firm as the publishers of a romance, which he is said to have admired and indeed to have imitated in _Zastrozzi_, entitled _Zofloya, or the Moor_, by Mrs. Byron, or Charlotte Dacre, better known by her pseudonym, Rosa Malilda. Although rejected by Longmans, _Zastrozzi_ was published while Shelley was still at Eton by another Paternoster Row firm, Wilkie and Robinson. We are told that the young author received £40 or £50 for the book, apparently the only money he ever earned by his pen, which sum he spent in providing a farewell banquet to twelve of his schoolfellows.

There is a tradition that Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, paid for the printing at Horsham of some of the boy's earliest writings, but apparently none of these efforts has survived. Local printing offices seem to have had an attraction for Shelley; we shall see later that he printed books at Dublin, Barnstaple, Oxford, Leghorn, and Pisa.

Shelley's selection of Worthing, rather than Horsham, for his next venture may have been determined by his desire for secrecy. He made a selection of seventeen poems by himself and his sister Elizabeth with the title of _Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire_, and put it into the hands of C. and W. Phillips, of Worthing. A daughter of the printer, "an intelligent, brisk young woman," was the active member of the firm, with whom Shelley was on very good terms. Shelley took great interest in the technical side of the business, and spent hours in the printing office learning typesetting. Some months later when at Oxford he had occasion to find a printer for his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_, he again resorted to Messrs. Phillips, who both printed and added their names to the tract. When Shelley got into trouble in connection with _The Necessity_, his father's solicitors drafted a letter warning the printers of an impending prosecution, and recommending them not to proceed with the printing of any manuscripts that they might have by Shelley. Apparently the letter was never sent, and no prosecution was instituted against the printers, as Munday, the Oxford bookseller, who had been an unwilling agent in selling the pamphlet, sent a similar warning to them.

Before the printing of the _Original Poetry of Victor and Cazire_ was completed, Shelley called on J. J. Stockdale, a publisher in Pall Mall, and persuaded him to publish the volume. Stockdale was a man with a doubtful past, who had issued a good deal of verse on commission for obscure verse-writers, besides the scandalous _Memoirs of Harriette Wilson_. In later years he described, in _Stockdale's Budget_, a curious publication which is to be seen in the British Museum, how he received 1480 copies of the _Original Poetry_, and how he discovered, after some of them had been sent out to the press, that the volume contained a poem by M. G. Lewis. On inviting Shelley to explain this circumstance, the poet "expressed the warmest resentment at the imposition practised upon him by the coadjutor," and instructed Stockdale to destroy all the remaining copies; only three or four are now known to have survived. In the meantime Stockdale had undertaken to revive and publish Shelley's second novel, _St. Irvyne: or, the Rosicrucian_. The author's expectation to get at least £60 for this romance from Robinson, the publisher of _Zastrozzi_, was not realised, as the terms arranged with Stockdale were that the book should be published at the author's expense. The publisher mournfully recorded the fact some years later that the romance did not sell, and that he was never paid for the printer's bill. While _St. Irvyne_ was going through the press Shelley used to call at Stockdale's shop. The publisher became alarmed at the tone of Shelley's conversation, and, in the hope that his intentions would be well received, he communicated his suspicions to Shelley's father. Mr. Timothy Shelley, however, only snubbed Stockdale for his pains. Shelley was furious at the interference, and all hopes of obtaining a settlement of his bill vanished.

When Mr. Timothy Shelley took his son up to Oxford in October, 1810, he called with him at the shop of Munday & Slatter, the booksellers, where he advised him to get his supplies of books and stationery. Then, turning to the bookseller, he said, "My son here has a literary turn, he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks." A month later Shelley took some of his verses to Munday, who agreed to publish them. His friend Hogg saw the proofs and, ridiculing their intended sincerity, suggested that with some corrections they would make burlesque poetry. Shelley somewhat reluctantly agreed, and the verses were altered to fit the title of _The Posthumous Verses of Margaret Nicholson_, edited by her nephew, John Fitzvictor. The lady in question was a mad washerwoman, who had attempted the life of George III. in 1786, and was in 1810 still an inmate of Bedlam, though nominally dead as far as the world was concerned.

The fictitious nephew Fitzvictor was apparently a son of the Victor who had but recently collaborated with the peccant Cazire. When Shelley informed the bookseller that he had changed his mind about publishing, and showed him the altered verses, Munday was so pleased with the idea that he offered to publish the book on his own account, promising secrecy and as many gratis copies as might be required. The book was issued as a bold quarto, and it became the fashion, says Hogg, among gownsmen to be seen reading it in the High Street, "as a mark of nice discernment of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry and the very criterion of a choice spirit." Shelley was frequently in Munday & Slatter's shop, where he was in the habit of talking on his favourite subjects. The booksellers, like Stockdale, became uneasy at the tone of his conversation and endeavoured to reason with him. Failing to make any impression, they persuaded him to meet a Mr. Hobbes, for whom they afterwards published a poetical work called _The Widower_. Mr. Hobbes undertook "to analyse Shelley's arguments, and endeavoured to refute them philosophically." But Shelley was not convinced; he declined to reply in writing to Mr. Hobbes' arguments, and declared that he would rather meet any or all of the dignitaries of the Church than one philosopher. If Mr. Hobbes' arguments were no better than his verses, Shelley was fully justified in his objections. Mr. Slatter, who has left a record of these facts, tells us that when some months later Shelley strewed the windows and counters of Munday's shop with copies of _The Necessity of Atheism_, which he had caused to be printed by his Worthing friends the Phillips, he instructed their shopman to sell the pamphlet as fast as he could at a charge of sixpence each. The result was magical. Mr. Walker, Fellow of New College, dropped into the shop and examined the tract and drew the booksellers' attention to its dangerous tendency. They resolved to destroy the copies, and promptly made a bonfire of them in the back kitchen. Shelley's expulsion from the University followed in due course.

Shelley's activities in Dublin, in February and March, 1812, made it necessary for him to employ a printer, or printers, for his two pamphlets, _An Address to the Irish People_ and _Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists_, but neither of these tracts bore the name of a publisher, and there are no details forthcoming of the circumstances connected with their production. Shelley, however, placed a collection of his poems in the hands of a firm of Dublin printers, Messrs. R. and J. Stockdale, but they refused to proceed with the book until they were paid, and it was never issued. The manuscript was recovered after Shelley left Dublin, and remained unprinted for seventy years, until Professor Dowden included some selections from it in his _Life of Shelley_.

I can find no record of when or how Shelley first met Thomas Hookham, but his earliest published letter to him, July 29th, 1812, was evidently preceded by others that have not been preserved. Hookham's Library was an old-established business in Old Bond Street, and about the year 1811 Thomas Hookham the younger and his brother Edward started publishing on their own account at their father's address. They issued the second edition of Peacock's _The Genius of the Thames_ and _The Philosophy of Melancholy_, and Hogg's novel, _Memories of Prince Alexy Haimatoff_, of which Shelley subsequently wrote a review. Shelley sent Thomas Hookham copies of his _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_, which he had printed at Barnstaple, but the tract shared the same fate as _The Necessity of Atheism_, and was destroyed by the printer as a dangerous publication. One copy was preserved by Hookham, the only one now known to exist; it is in the Bodleian Library. In March, 1813, when Shelley was in Dublin for the second time, he sent Hookham the manuscript of _Queen Mab_, and added that he was preparing the notes to be printed with the poem, which was to be long, philosophical, and anti-Christian. "Do not," he said, "let the title-page be printed before the body of the poems. I have a motto to introduce from Shakespeare and a preface. I shall expect no success. Let only 250 copies be printed in a small neat quarto, on fine paper, and so as to catch the aristocrats. They will not read it, but their sons and daughters may." Nothing further seems to be known about the printing of the poem. It was issued as a small octavo, with a title-page bearing the name of Shelley as author as well as printer, and the address of his father-in-law, 23 Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. The late Mr. Edward Hookham, Thomas Hookham's nephew, stated that _Queen Mab_ was the cause of Shelley's quarrel with Hookham. A coolness was certainly evident between the poet and the publisher after Shelley came to London in 1813. _Queen Mab_ may have been placed in the printer's hands before Hookham saw the notes, and when he saw them he probably declined to go on with the book or allow it to bear his name. But Shelley's connection with Hookham, which previous to this rupture had been friendly, was not entirely severed, for Hookham's imprint, with Ollier's, appears on _The History of a Six Week's Tour_, 1817. Thomas Hookham was a cultivated and well-read man and the author of an anonymous little record of foreign travel which he undertook during the same year as Shelley's visit to the Continent, and published as _A Walk through Switzerland in September_, 1816. He is said to have written the _Shelley Memorials_, which is described on the title-page as by Lady Shelley, the wife of Shelley's son. Thomas Hookham's brother, Edward, was the friend and correspondent of Thomas Love Peacock, whose letters to him have been lately printed.

_The Vindication of Natural Diet_, Shelley's vegetarian tract, was reprinted in 1813 from one of the notes to _Queen Mab_. As the text of the pamphlet differs in some respects from that as given with the poem, it is evident that Shelley was responsible for the reprint, which was issued by J. Calow, a medical bookseller in Soho. Nothing, however, is known of the circumstances connected with the publication of this tract, and there are no references to it in Shelley's published correspondence.

John Murray was not one of Shelley's publishers, but he had some correspondence in 1816 with the Great Cham of Albemarle Street. In his first letter he described himself as "a total stranger" and offered Murray the publication of _Alastor_, of which he had printed 250 copies at his own expense. The offer was declined, and the book was subsequently published by two firms, Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, of Paternoster Row, and Carpenter & Son, of Old Bond Street. In the summer of that year Shelley was in Switzerland with Byron, who requested him to correct and see through the press the third canto of _Childe Harold_ and _The Prisoner of Chillon_. Shelley brought the MS. of the _Childe_ with him to England, and when he saw Murray he reminded him that he wished to see the proofs. From a later letter it appears that Murray announced the poems without sending the proofs to Shelley, who at once wrote urging him to carry out Byron's request.

The names of the Olliers, Shelley's last publishers, first appear on the title-page of his Hermit of Marlow pamphlet, _A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_, 1817. This tract must have been one of the first publications of Charles and James Ollier to bear their imprint, for they commenced business at 3 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, in the year 1817. The Ollier family was of French descent, but they had been settled in the West of England for many years. Charles Ollier, Shelley's correspondent in his negotiations with the firm, was born at Bath in 1788, came up to London and entered a banking house. At an early age he showed a liking for literature, and developed a taste for collecting and reading old books. He subsequently became an author and the friend of authors, among whom was Leigh Hunt, who probably introduced him to Shelley. Ollier and Hunt were both devoted to the theatre and to music. Hunt addressed his verses, "A Thought on Music: suggested by a Private Concert, May 13th, 1815," to Ollier, who published some volumes of Hunt's poetry. One of the earliest of the Olliers' publications was Keats's first volume of _Poems_, 1817. The book, unhappily, was not well received, and Keats, who attributed its want of success to the neglect of his publishers, took his next volume, _Endymion_, to another firm. The Olliers published besides Lamb's works in two volumes, 1818, and Ollier's own stories, _Altham and His Wife_ and _Inesilla_, all of which are mentioned in the letters printed below. Shelley followed up his pamphlet with a more ambitious venture, namely, _Laon and Cythna_, which he printed at his own expense, and arranged for it to be published jointly by Sherwood, Neeby, & Jones, and the Olliers. Before the book was published, but after some copies had been sent out, Ollier discovered in the poem certain passages which he regarded as too frank for circulation, at least by his hands. Shelley agreed, though not without some vigorous protests, to tone down the offending expressions, and the book was issued, with the names of the Olliers alone, as _The Revolt of Islam_. The correspondence relating to this and other matters has been published, but the following letters to Ollier have not, so far as I am aware, been printed, except portions of the first and last. Ollier apparently kept all the letters that he received from Shelley, but when Mrs. Shelley asked for the use of them, he declined on the score that they were valuable to him and he had been offered no money.

To conclude these remarks on Ollier, it may be mentioned that he also published for Shelley _The Cenci_, second edition (1821), _Rosalind and Helen_ (1819), _Prometheus Unbound_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), and _Hellas_ (1822). He also issued a publication called _Olliers' Literary Miscellany_ (1820), to which Peacock contributed an essay on Poetry. This essay prompted Shelley to write as a reply his eloquent _Defence of Poetry_, which was intended for a later issue, but the first was the only number issued. The Olliers abandoned publishing in 1822, the year of Shelley's death. Their want of success was attributed to a lack of business capacity on the part of the partners and insufficient capital.

To CHARLES OLLIER.

[Great Marlow],
March 14, 1817.

DEAR SIR,--Be so kind as to let the Books I ordered (so far as you have completed them) to be sent together with my prints immediately--by the Marlow Coach.

Mr. Hunt has, I believe, commissioned you to get me a _proof_ impression of a print done from a drawing by Harlowe of Lord Byron: I said that it should be framed in oak, but I have changed my mind and wish it to be finished in black.

How does the pamphlet sell?

Dear sir, yours very truly,
P. B. SHELLEY.

Send in addition Mawe's _Gardening Calendar_.

Marlow,
April 23, 1817.

Mr. Shelley requests Messrs. Ollier will have the goodness to send the books and the little pictures as soon as they can.

In great haste,
Bagni di Lucca,
June 28, 1818.

DEAR SIR,--I write simply to request you to pay ten pounds on my account to a person who will call on you, and _on no account_ to mention my name. If you have no money of mine still pay it at all events and cash the enclosed at the bank.

Ever most truly yours,
P. B. SHELLEY.

The person will bring a note without date signed A. B.

It is of so great consequence that this note should be paid that I hope if there is any mistake with Brookes you will pay it for me, and if you have none of mine in your hands, that you will rely on my sending it you by return of Post.

[Postmark] F. P. O., Se[p.] 1, 1818.

DEAR SIR,--Oblige me by honouring a draft of £20 that will be presented to you signed A. B. If there should be any mistake with the bankers it shall be rectified by return of Post, but I earnestly intreat you to pay the draft.

Of course these letters are put to my account.

Sir, yours very truly,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.

I had just sealed my other letter when I discovered the necessity of writing again.

Probably August 20 to 24, 1819.

DEAR SIR,--Yesterday evening came your parcel, which seems to have been above a year on its voyage. Be good enough to write soon, instantly, about my books, etc., and how the eclogue[10] sells, and whether you wish to continue to publish for me. _I_ have no inclination to change unless you wish it, as your neglect might give me reason to suppose. I have only had time to look at Lamb's works, but _Altham_ and _Endymion_ are both before me.

[10] _Rosalind and Helen._

I have two works of some length, one of a very popular character, ready for the press.

Be good enough to pay for me seven pounds to Mr. Hunt.

With best wishes for your literary and all other success.

I am, yours truly,
P. B. SHELLEY.

Pray send a copy of my Poem or anything which I may hereafter publish to Mr. Keats with my best regards.[11]

[11] Shelley had cancelled here "If I should say when I
have read it that I admire _Endymion_ he probably."

Accept my thanks for _Altham and His Wife_: I have no doubt that the pleasure in store for me this evening will make me desire the company of their cousin _Inesilla_.

Postmark May 30, 1820.

Pray tell me--are there any differences between you and Mr. Hunt, and if so, do they regard the advance either made or proposed to be made to him on my quitting England?

You know I pledged myself to you to see all right [on] that subject, and if any dispute should have arisen without giving me an opportunity of arranging it, I have reason to think myself slighted--I imagine you cannot mistake the motives which suggest this question. Mrs. Shelley is now transcribing for me the little poems to be printed at the end of _Prometheus_; they will be sent in a post or two.

Pisa,
April 30, 1820.

DEAR SIR,--I observe that an edition of _The Cenci_ is advertised as published in Paris by Galignani.[12] This, though a piracy both upon the author and the publisher, is a proof of an expectation of a certain demand for sale that probably will soon exhaust the small edition I sent you. In your reprint you will be guided of course by the apparent demand. I send a list of errata; the incorrectness of the forms of typography, etc., which are considerably numerous, you will be so obliging as to attend to yourself. I cannot describe the trouble I had with the Italian printer.

[12] This edition was never published.

I request you to give me an immediate answer to the questions of my last letters. Reynell the printer has sent in his account for the _Six Weeks' Tour_, which of course I counted upon to pay from the profits--and I therefore suspend my answer until I receive yours and Hookham's accounts. I do not particularly care about an account item by item. I only wish to possess a general idea of our mutual situations in regard to profit and loss--and this will be afforded by your reply to my late letters, which I reiterate my request that you will be good enough to attend to.

Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, my particular friends, are now on the point of leaving Italy; they will call on you; and any politeness in your power to them I shall regard as a particular favour to myself. Be kind enough to present them with copies of whatever I have published. They only propose to stay in England a few weeks.

I beg you to send me all the _abuse_.

Dear Sir,
Your obliged faithful Servt.,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.

Address Pisa.

I have just heard from Mr. Hunt, who tells me that you propose publishing _Peter Bell_. This I have no objection to provided my name is _entirely suppressed_, not that I am not ready to answer to anything that it contains, but that I think it a trifle unworthy of me seriously to acknowledge.

Naples,
February 29, 1818.
Postmark F.P.O., Mr. 20, 1819.

DEAR SIR,--Pray let me hear from you addressed to Rome on the several subjects of my last letter, and especially to inform me of the name of the ship and the mode of address by which my box was sent. As yet I have no tidings of it.

Your obliged servant,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.

N.B.--If you do not write within three months after the receipt of this address as before, Mr. Gisborne, Livorno.

Pisa,
June 16, 1821.

DEAR SIR,--I am requested to propose to you, for publication, a work, of which the accompanying sheets are a specimen, on the terms stated in the enclosed paper; that is that you should defray the expenses of printing, etc., and divide the profits with the author.[13] Should you object to this arrangement, be kind enough to tell me on what terms, short of the author's entire risk, you would be inclined to engage in it.

[13] This work, a commentary by Taafe on Dante, was
printed, like _Adonais_, at Pisa by a printer who used
the types of Didot, the celebrated French typefounder.
Byron interested himself in the book, and it was
subsequently published by John Murray. Professor
Dowden printed the middle paragraph of this letter.

The more considerable portion of this work will consist of the comment. I have read with much attention this portion, as well as the verses, up to the eighth Canto; and I do not hesitate to assure you that the lights which the annotator's labours have thrown on the obscurer parts of the text are such as all foreigners and most Italians would derive an immense additional knowledge of Dante from. They elucidate a great number of the most interesting facts connected with Dante's history of his times; and everywhere bear the mark of a most elegant and accomplished mind. I know you will not take my opinion on Poetry, because I thought my own verses very good, and you find that the public declare them to be unreadable. Show this to Mr. Procter, who is far better qualified to judge than I am. There are certainly passages of great strength and conciseness; indeed the author has sacrificed everything to represent his original truly, in this latter point pray observe the great beauty of the typography; they are the same types as my elegy on Keats is printed from.

You cannot do me a greater favour than in making some satisfactory arrangement with the author. Of course I cannot expect, nor do I wish, that you should undertake any thing that should not fairly promise to promote your own interest. But pray allow my recommendation to overbalance, if your determination should be in equilibrium. I feel persuaded that I am recommending a most excellent work, and one without which the history and the spirit of the age of Dante as relates to him will never be understood by the English students of that astonishing poet.

Dear sir, your obliged and obt. servt.,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Pisa, June 16, 1821.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART

By HOWARD HANNAY

I

Ever since Plato reluctantly condemned art on the ground that it was mere imitation of superficial outward appearances the problem of art has been disputed on this basis. Plato did not allow the artist any initiative except to imitate, and his conception of ideal beauty had no connection with the activities of the poet, painter, and sculptor: it was not concerned with æsthetic beauty, but with intellectual and moral fitness and perfection. Aristotle gave a slightly different interpretation to the work of the artist, defining it as a description of the possible as contrasted with history which determines what has actually happened. Plotinus introduced the element of the ideal: the artist does not so much imitate natural reality as externalise an archetype existing in his mind or soul. Plotinus partly identified art with Plato's ideal beauty.

These three alternative views constitute the starting-point for the three chief divergent explanations of art which have been developed during the last two thousand years. In modern terminology they would be designated as theories of art, respectively as "reproduction," as "imagination," as "idealisation." The extent of their mutual discrepancy varies according to the exact meaning attached to the last two conceptions, imagination and idealisation. For instance, if the latter ultimately amounts to selecting certain particularly attractive real forms and events, it is virtually merely an eclectic process of reproduction. Imagination, again, may be regarded simply as a composite memory. Samuel Butler said, "Imagination is mainly memory, but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing with it." It is only in so far as imagination is creative that it is different in kind from reproduction, from perception and history. And if idealisation is not a selection of given realities but a making articulate of an inner vision it also is a kind of imagination, only it is confined to the pleasantly beautiful, the attractive. The importance of all three definitions tends to be diminished when, as is often the case with modern theories, the chief emphasis is laid on the feeling or emotional element in art. Natural objects and real events can presumably excite emotion as much as imaginative creations, and this fact appears to lend a new value to the act of reproduction. The centre of interest is transferred from the knowledge content to the feeling of the subject and the knowledge content, the consciousness of the object is regarded simply as a cause which brings about that for which art exists, viz., emotion. The aim of reproduction is no longer intrinsic, but falls outside in the resultant subjective feeling. But this means a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the emotion and the representation. In actual concrete experience the two are so closely linked together that they appear almost identical: the emotion inheres in the representation. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as an instance of cause and effect: it is not analogous to the process of a pin and the ensuing prick, where the cause, the pin, is quite distinct from and independent of the feeling of pain. Mere associations of ideas are, on the other hand, nearer to the cause and effect sequence. A certain scent recalls a whole chapter of one's past history. Mr. Bosanquet's portmanteau reminds him of Florence.[14] For this reason a tendency is apparent to connect emotion more definitely with imaginative and idealistic art. Mere reproduction is cold and bald and only evokes an emotion by a fortuitous association of ideas: whereas the genuine product "expresses" or contains the emotion; and in doing so it is thought that it inevitably alters the "natural" or "historical" fact, distorting, transmuting it.

[14] _Three Lectures on Æsthetics_, p. 49.

The applicability of these various theories appears on the surface, at any rate, to differ according to the different arts. No one can be a thorough-going realist with regard to music, which is so indisputably a self-contained independent construction. It may be debatable whether music expresses experiences which are not of music, but music certainly does not imitate or reproduce them unless they are in the first place sounds, and for the most part they are not. The problem, therefore, is not whether music reproduces but whether it "expresses" anything except itself. Literature, again, can only directly imitate conversations between people: for the rest it can only reproduce indirectly either by symbolising or expressing. The symbol is purely arbitrary, it is entirely a referring to something other than itself. Letters of the alphabet have become symbolical. The expression, on the other hand, contains something of the object expressed, it carries a world in itself and of its own. Literature is admittedly expression, and here the problem takes the form of a contrast between history and fiction, whether at bottom literature only expresses historical fact (realism) or imagined fact, the possible.