Shelley and the masks of Romantic anger

When, in A Vision, Yeats wishes to describe a particular movement up

his byzantine Wheel of Faculties, he looks to Blake and Shelley as his

representative men. Blake, “The Positive Man” of Phase 16, “hates that

which opposes desire,” and his hatred “is always close to madness . . .

There is always an element of frenzy, and almost always a delight in a

certain glowing or shining image of concentrated force: in the smith’s

forge; in the heart; in the human form in its most vigorous develop-

ment.”1 Observing Blake’s wrath, Yeats recognizes it as the fiery furnace

that provides Blake with the energy that is his eternal delight. However, as

the Wheel turns to Shelley (“The Daimonic Man”), this creative anger

falls away. In Yeats’s opinion, Shelley works best when he draws his poetry

from the wellsprings of desire, but produces only “monstrous, meaning-

less images” when he resorts to outrage (A Vision 143). Shelley “can never

see anything that opposes him as it really is,” because “He lacked

the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict,

so, though great poet he certainly was, he was not of the greatest kind”

(143–44).

   Once raised, the charge lingers: does Shelley suffer from a kind of

congenital blindness in his dealings with evil and conflict? Does he lack a

vision of anger? In Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, Gerald McNeice

praises Shelley’s rebellious courage, which he carefully separates from

“Hatred and revenge,” passions with which “true freedom can never

coexist.”2 Donald Reiman has reminded us that Socrates and Jesus were

Shelley’s “ideal figures,” because they “confronted the full power of social

injustice and . . . chose martyrdom over either flight or violent resist-

ance.”3 Challenging this standard image of Shelley as pacifistic humanist,

Steven Jones has argued that, in much of the poetry, “(self ) righteous

anger fueled by personal aggression is often just below the surface” and

that “the basis of Shelley’s satire is in violence rather than laughter.”4 By

approaching Shelley from the vantage of satire, Jones has emphasized asubterranean side of the poet obscured by the assertions of his idealizing

and progressivist imagination. However, only by integrating both of these

aspects of Shelley can we approach the complexities of his artistic and

moral imagination.5 In effect, Shelley was often both angry and deter-

mined not to be so; and this ambivalence can be traced through a large

portion of his work, where it produces a particular trajectory of anger

deployed and retracted. His vision of anger was always double, as he cast a

fierce eye on the object of his rage and a calm one on utopian resolutions

to conflict.

   Always politically minded, Shelley enacts a particularly intense version

of the Romantic struggle with anger. For poets of the period, the trajec-

tory of events in France demonstrated that revolutionary outrage (which

most, to greater or lesser degrees, had imbibed) would not end cycles of

cruelty: anger had promised revolution and revelation, yet had brought

forth reaction and terror instead. As we have seen, negotiations with

anger became central to Romantic conceptions of self and world and

profoundly affected Romantic poetry in ways that I attempt to further

delineate here, in terms of the work of Shelley. The contours of Roman-

ticism emerged also in partial reaction to the bad eminence of eighteenth–

century satire, heightened as it was in this period of English history

(as Habermas has shown) by the emergent importance of public debate

to the political realm.6 Of course, scholarly activity of the last several

decades has gone a long way towards undoing our received story of

verse satire as a genre that disappeared in England after the death of

Pope. I mean to address this question of literary history only partially,

examining the changing fortunes of angry satire, not satire generally, in

Shelley’s imagination. Satire had long been imagined as a weapon

for revelation, and in the apocalyptic dawn of the French Revolution,

anger promised to undermine false structures of power and reveal the

true nature of humanity. Shelley’s poetry has similar promises lying

close to its heart, and he sets about creating a species of anger not

implicated in vengeful cycles of cruelty, a self-consuming rage that does

its work and then burns itself out, making way for the harmonies of the

millennium. He admires anger for its power to unmask figures of decep-

tion and vice and thus far uses anger in a way that resembles satiric

invective in revealing the corruption hiding beneath the mask of virtue.7

Yet angry satire, content with naming and punishing such corruption,

remains only caustic and pessimistic, whereas Shelley’s poetry almost

invariably contravenes its own wrath with more conciliatory and hopeful

imaginings. For Shelley, (satiric) anger always threatens to become another deceptive, or deceived, mask, particularly if indulged too long or

too vehemently.

   As a poet committed to the transformation of the political and social

world, however, Shelley knew that anger was an important tool or

weapon, a needful torch for burning in order that the work of building

utopia might begin. Thus, like Blake, Shelley was attracted to anger

precisely because of its renovating force. Sharing an emphatic desire to

change the world through poetry, Blake and Shelley imagine anger as the

remover of masks and the despoiler of illusions that constitute an un-

acceptable status quo. Masks figure evil’s dependence on disguise, a false

state of affairs foisted on humanity as truth. As Yeats perceived, Shelley

denies any fundamental truth to evil, equating it always with falsity and

error. His poetry therefore presents evil in a series of disguised figures

whose ritualized unmasking prompts the advent of the millennium. Yet

Shelley wants to allow anger only a momentary, functional importance in

his visions of transformation, extinguishing it anxiously with more har-

monious emotions. He presents his displaced outrage as a mask, or

masque, of anger.

   In the spring of 1819, Shelley found himself in Florence, standing before

two statues of Marsyas, the satyr who boasted of his musical virtuosity and

was summarily flayed alive by an enraged Apollo. For Shelley, who

embraced Apollo as an image of the harmonies of the creative imagin-

ation, it was a disturbing moment, emblematic of a larger struggle with

anger. In his notebook, he writes,

This is one of the few abominations of the Greek religion. This is as bad as the

everlasting damnation and hacking and hewing between them of Joshua and

Jehovah. And is it possible that there existed in the same imagination the idea of

that tender and sublime and poetic and life–giving Apollo and of the author

of this deed as the same person?

   Having chosen ancient Greek culture as a refuge from the cruel-

ties he saw in orthodox Christianity, Shelley is brought up short by the

specter of Marsyas suffering under the hand of the Apollonian “author of

this deed.”9 Confronted with an imagination capable of containing

poetic creativity and vengeful rage within the same persona, he implicitly

wonders about the place of anger in his own mind and work: what

does it mean for a poet to put aside his lyre and pick up a knife or a

scourge?

   Figuratively, it means to turn from song to satire, and specifically to a

tradition of invective that aims to anatomize and punish its target.

For example, in his First Satire, Horace remembers the satirist Lucilius, who

“from conscious Villains tore the mask away, / And stripped them naked

to the Glare of Day.”10 Such violent disclosure of hypocrisy remains one

of the cherished powers of angry satire, through Jonson and Pope to

Shelley.11 In a letter to Leigh Hunt written in 1822, Shelley declares,

“I began once a Satire upon Satire, which I meant to be very severe, – it

was full of small knives in the use of which practice would have soon made

me very expert.”12 Apparently, Shelley meant to use these “knives” on

satire itself. However, a glance at the unfinished poem reveals an image of

satiric violence directed at a more human target: “If Satire’s [scourge]

[could wake the slumbering hounds / Of Conscience]”,

At the center of many of Shelley’s narratives is a ritual of unmasking,

usually accomplished by means of defiance and aggression: Prometheus

curses Jupiter, Shelley curses the reviewer of Endymion, the disguised

figures in The Mask of Anarchy are routed, Iona Taurina compels her

enemies to assume their true shapes in Swellfoot the Tyrant. These

moments cannot be fully assimilated to the satiric tradition, however,

because of Shelley’s own palpable ambivalence about his anger. In fact,

scenes of unmasking are not the unique province of satire. The romance

tradition, particularly as read through Spenser and Milton, surely pro-

vided Shelley with another approach to evil disguised.16 Spenser, in the

stripping of the witch Duessa in Book i of The Faerie Queene, and Milton,

in the revelation of the toad as Satan in Book i v of Paradise Lost,

emphasize the inevitability of falsehood’s spectacular revelation when

confronted by truth. In The Faerie Queene, Una (or Truth) directs the

Red Crosse Knight and Arthur to strip Duessa (or Falsehood) naked, “and

let her fly.”17 Once they have revealed Duessa’s deformity and ugliness,

Una proclaims, “Such is the face of falshood, such the sight / Of fowle

Duessa, when her borrowed light / Is laid away, and counterfesaunce

knowne” (i.8.49). Similarly, in Paradise Lost, an angelic patrol finds Satan,

“Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,” in amphibious form that

prefigures his later transformation: “Him thus intent Ithuriel with his

spear / Touched lightly; for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial

temper, but returns / Of force to its own likeness: up he starts / Dis-

covered and surprised . . . So started up in his own shape the fiend.”18

These moments encapsulate the Shelleyan project, particularly in their

rejection of vengeance. Una tells her knights to spare Duessa’s life, and

Ithuriel touches the toad lightly, sparing what presumably he could have

speared. The “celestial temper” of Ithuriel’s weapon matches the angelic

forbearance of its owner, providing a model for Shelley’s own poetic

encounters with evil.

Shelley tests the limits of this generic structure most overtly in The

Mask of Anarchy, inspired by the poet’s openly satiric outrage over the

Peterloo Massacre and by his attempts to transcend that outrage by way of

the masque. A good deal of critical ink has been devoted to the strange

intersection of satire and masque found in The Mask of Anarchy. Most

notably, Stuart Curran, Lisa Vargo, and Steven Jones have all discussed its

various maskings and unmaskings, and all three critics seem quite pre-

pared to read The Mask of Anarchy as following the generic trajectory I

have described: from satiric anger and its unmasking imperative to

millennial, masque-like hope as the end of satire.37 At a relatively high

level, The Mask of Anarchy does conform to this structure. The masked,

allegorical figures of evil are dispersed by a spirit of freedom and the voice

of the earth, thus restoring “Hope” (line 128). However, because the

“indignant earth” gets the last word – and there repeats her first, most

militant advice – we may feel that anger remains dominant at the poem’s

conclusion. Shelley is explicitly concerned here with breaking cycles of

violence and revenge, yet he is unwilling to relinquish the outrage that he

continually defers. He claims to have felt a “torrent of indignation” in

response to Peterloo, but he begins The Mask of Anarchy not as a raging

poet, but as a dreaming one. The poem opens on a cinematic vision that

combines Biblical iconography and English politics with the logic of

nightmare. As a poetic spectacle or masque of evil (Shelley calls it a

“ghastly masquerade” in line 27), the first twenty-five stanzas of the poem

are grim and disturbing, but their tone can hardly be called angry. As

Morton Paley puts it, the speaker “does not seem to comprehend

the meaning of what he relates: extraordinary events are recounted

in a flat, quotidian tone, much as in Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’”

(“Apocapolitics,” 94).