When Shelley Came to Ireland

SO they have discovered in Dublin another copy or two of those wild pamphlets in which Shelley addressed our people!

Curious reading they make to-day, with their moonshine idealism and perfervid eloquence, but with little foreshadowing of the immortal poet who was to weave a new sweetness into the flowerbroidery of green earth, which not all the tramplings of time will destroy. These immaturities are for the book-collectors and searchers after literary rarities, who will rejoice accordingly; but the discovery swings the mind back to that February day in 1812 when the youthful reformer, after a stormy buffeting on the Irish Sea, landed “somewhere to the north of Dublin” and journeyed wearily through a treeless country (had all trees been cut down to make pike-shafts? he wondered) to his lodgings at the house of Mr. Dunne, the woollendraper, in 7 Sackville Street.

Shelley was nineteen and had set out to establish a revolution—a moral revolution, not a physical uprising—in the country which had captured his imagination. Shortly before his departure from England he had been seen at his table poring late into the night over a broadside copy of Robert Emmet’s speech, and soon he was to write, in a metre which suggests that he had been reading Tommy Moore to too good a purpose:

No trump tells thy virtues—the grave where they rest,
With thy dust shall remain unpolluted by fame,
Till thy foes, by the world and by fortune caressed,
Shall pass like a mist from the light of thy name.

He had studied the histories and read the legends of our country. Harriet, his wife—who with her sister, Eliza Westbrook, accompanied him on his mission—had often sung our native airs to his enchanted ears. Ireland had become the land of his dreams, ready and ripe for the reception of his idealistic doctrines. In his pocket he carried a letter of introduction from the egregious Godwin—to Curran the shining advocate and defender of the United men.

TO THE IRISH PEOPLE.

No sooner had he arrived in Dublin than he rushed through the Press his address to the Irish people:—

“The lowest possible price,” he wrote, “is set on this publication, because it is the intention of the author to awaken in the minds of the Irish poor a knowledge of their real state, summarily pointing out the evils of that state and suggesting rational means of remedy—Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union (the latter, the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland).”

When the question of distribution had to be faced, Shelley solved it in his own quaint way:—

“I have,” he says, writing to a friend, “already sent 400 of my Irish Pamphlets into the world, and they have excited a sensation of wonder in Dublin. Copies have been sent to sixty public-houses. I send a man out every day to distribute copies, with instructions where and how to give them. I stand at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man who looks likely. I throw a book to him.”

Harriet, in a letter, adds the necessary and somewhat comical postscript:—

“I am sure you would laugh if you were to see us give out the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window and give them to men that pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood of a cloak. She knew nothing of it.”

As soon as time permitted the poet called upon Curran. But Curran was wary—he was now Master of the Rolls—and it was not until the third visit that he consented to receive the youthful Utopian. Shelley was disappointed. There was no trace of the old fire, and he found a wizened and shrunken old man, whose conversational stock-in-trade consisted of stale repartee and who either knew or cared nothing about the new doctrines of universal benevolence and philanthropy, which were the only subjects which this preternaturally solemn youth wished to discuss.

GOOD PRINCIPLES SCARCE.

So Shelley turned elsewhere. Another pamphlet appeared, this time not addressed to the suffering poor but to the educated classes. He called it Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, and set out its purpose as being “the annihilation or palliation of whatever moral or political evil it may be within the compass of human to assuage or eradiate.” An all-embracing and comprehensive programme surely! In the clubs and coffee-houses men read the pamphlets and smiled. They had heard of “the young gentleman from England” and his wild vapourings. The politicians sneered. The poet himself did not harbour his illusions very long:

“I cannot expect a rapid change. We can but expect little amendment in our time and must be contented to lay the foundations of liberty and happiness by virtue and wisdom. Good principles are scarce here… The remnant of the United Irishmen whose wrongs make them hate England are the only section I have hope of.”

But a further effort was to be made and a bigger ordeal undergone. The friends of Catholic Emancipation had summoned a mass meeting at the Fishamble Street Theatre and the platform was crowded with representatives of the aristocracy from every county in Ireland. The correct and dignified Lord Fingall presided and Counsellor O’Connell, daily growing in power and popularity, addressed the meeting at length. The burly Tribune swayed and moved his audience with an easy ascendancy, compelling them at will to laughter or tears, just as he was able to move and sway a concourse of a quarter million people at Tara thirty years later.

O’CONNELL SPEAKS.

Then someone moved a vote of thanks “to the distinguished Protestants who have this day honoured us by their presence.” It was in reply to this that Shelley rose. One can easily gauge the feelings of the vast audience as they looked and listened in wonderment to “the young gentleman from England,” a nineteen-year-old stripling, who looked no more than sixteen, with his large blue eyes, fair curly hair and delicately-moulded features.

“Mr. Shelley requested a hearing. He was an Englishman, he said, and when he reflected on the crimes committed by his nation on Ireland, he could not but blush for his countrymen, did he not know that arbitrary power never failed to corrupt the heart of man.”

He spoke for an hour, a remarkable achievement, for it was his first and last public speech. The audience heard him patiently and kindly, but of enthusiasm there was probably little or none, for after the rich native eloquence of O’Connell, his calm, unimpassioned words must have fallen like a damp squib.

DUBLIN DISAPPOINTS.

And so Shelley left Ireland, sad and disillusionised. “I am sick of this city,” he wrote, “where the rich grind the poor into abjectness and then complain that they are abject. They goad them into famine and hang them if they steal a loaf.” He had come, a boyish and warm-hearted visionary, to create a Utopia in a country of whose people he really knew nothing. With the planters and the politicians he was familiar enough, and there were few amongst them he did not despise. But of the common people, the “hidden Ireland,” he knew almost nothing. How could it have been otherwise, when half a century later they were still unknown to the Froudes and the Leckys and the rest of the historians?

So, for a few more stormy years, back to England and Italy and the Gulf of Spezzia, where Byron and Trelawny built the funeral pyre for his poor drowned body on the shore. He had many faults and he was surely not of the common manner of men; for his racketting spirit rose and fell with the swiftness of an arrow-flight. But for what he did, or tried to do, Ireland remains grateful.

Across the years we may still catch an echo of the words which he concluded his address to our people: “For a nation to love liberty it is sufficient that she knows it; to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.”